Joe Stein and Jerry Bock flew over from New York to see the audition along with Pilbrow and his team. When Topol arrived, they wondered if they had contacted the right man. In Sallah, they’d seen a charmingly rumpled, sixty-something patriarch, a little bent but not bowed. Into the Drury Lane, where the tryout was held, strode a tanned and slender thirty-one-year-old sabra. But when he sang “Rich Man” and presented some of Tevye’s monologues, he thoroughly won them over. The audition, Pilbrow gushed, was “far more exciting than we ever dared to hope.” Amid a marvelous week, he continued, “the most marvelous thing is that Topal [sic] is, without a doubt, some sort of special genius. I suppose one should beware of getting too excited, but quite literally, his presence on the stage is like a whirlwind, and a very warm, funny, touching whirlwind at that. I hope I am not exaggerating, but I think he could take the town by storm and make us quite pleased we never had Ustinov, Mostel, McKern or whatever.”
That is, of course, what Topol did. But it took plenty of work, including daily tutorials with an English teacher. (“I have five dah-tohs,” he’d tell Perchik as he introduced his family, providing grist for comic imitators forever after.) Directly from staging the show in Amsterdam, Dick Altman and Tommy Abbott arrived to do the same in London. Altman worried that Topol’s raw vitality would open a wide gulf across from the gentility of the British actors in the rest of the cast (apart from the man playing Perchik, an immigrant from Hungary). And though Prince admitted that he didn’t like many of the actors, the Anatevkans eventually cohered as a plausible community. When Jerry Robbins arrived to see the first preview and polish the show—the only time he stepped in to adjust a new production—he found a company that was “doing everything correct.” By his standards, though, that wasn’t enough. For “Tradition,” he told the cast exactly what he’d told the New York actors two and a half years earlier: “Think of long necks. I want pride—you’re all proud of your tradition.” And in Topol’s estimation, at least, the number instantly changed from a nice opener to a galvanizing one.
The production premiered on February 16, 1967, to critical acclaim—apart from the now standard grumble or two from local protectors of Sholem-Aleichem’s “authenticity.” Houses stayed full; by March the show was fully booked until the following Christmas. Topol moved out of his hotel, rented an apartment, and brought his family from Tel Aviv. He figured he would be staying a good while. In May, Prince’s office released figures reporting that Fiddler worldwide had so far turned a nearly 600 percent profit.
Then came an unlooked-for boost some four months into London’s run: Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. During the tense “waiting period” of late May 1967—after Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, responding to false reports that Israel was mobilizing for war on its border with Syria, massed thousands of troops in the Sinai Peninsula, blockaded Israel’s port to the Red Sea, and signed a defense pact with Jordan—Topol spent all but the three hours he was onstage every night in the same state of anxious preoccupation as his compatriots back home. For more than two weeks, Israeli citizens anticipated national annihilation. Though their generals knew this was not a real danger, civilians hastily prepared shelters and rabbis busily sanctified public parks as cemeteries in case of mass casualties, while the Israeli news media, frequently comparing Nasser to Hitler, broadcast his braggart threats to wipe out their nation. In London, Topol raced from the stage to his dressing room whenever he could, to catch the latest updates on the radio.
When fighting began on June 5—with Israel’s crushing assault on Egypt’s air force—Topol hurried to catch the first available flight home and reported for reserve duty. While his understudy went on at Her Majesty’s, Topol traveled up and down Israel, entertaining the troops as he’d done back in his Nahal days, but this time as a solo act. On June 10, it was all over. Israel had not only defeated Syria, Jordan, and Egypt but conquered swaths of their territory, tripling Israel’s geographical size and putting some one million Arabs under its rule. As Tom Segev observes, the threat of extermination had never been real, but the fear of it was. And the collective, conclusive relief of victory took the form of a communal euphoria that enveloped world Jewry. (Over the following decades, as Israel’s occupation of some of the captured lands persisted, the euphoria gave way to bitter division within Israel and among Jews outside; by the time a generation had come of age in an Israel that had become a regional superpower, a young director would look to Fiddler as a means of evoking sympathy for Palestinians. But in 1967—more than forty years before Moshe Kepten would become the first Israeli to direct the show—such an interpretation, like the unending occupation itself, was unimaginable.)
By June 14, Topol was back at Her Majesty’s. He had left London as a star; he returned as a hero. Fiddler became a site for celebration, drawing Jews as well as Gentiles to the theater—some for repeat viewings—to bask in Jewish perseverance and to pay homage to Jewish survival. The show didn’t change, but the atmosphere around it did. As Tevye, Topol the robust sabra embodied the persecuted Jewish past and the triumphant present moment. His recording of “If I Were a Rich Man” hit number five on the British pop charts.
Before long, Topol also became something of a diva. In the fall, he wrote a lengthy letter to Jerry Robbins complaining about too many weak understudies coming on for absent actors and throwing him off his rhythm and about sloppiness among the tech crew. He suggested that Robbins “should come over for a few days and try to save the show.” Pilbrow quickly followed up with a note assuring Robbins that the show was in “extremely good shape”; Prince told the director not to take Topol at face value “since the rest of his behavior recently has been so screwy, i.e., his willingness to stay with the company an additional year if we close the production when he leaves (he and it being so closely identified).” A couple of weeks later, Bock and Harnick looked in on the production while they were in London working on a project with the playwright John Arden. While overall things looked “damned good,” they reported, “actually the worst offender was Topol, who added about 50 shtick-ad libs, in addition to [playing] heavy handed, almost as if it were about the legend of Topol, not Tevye.” The producers did not agree to the star’s offer to stay another year if they would close the show when he left. And his proposal left Prince wondering if there was something about the role itself that pushed actors into a state of hubris. After Topol left in February 1968 and Alfie Bass took over, the London production continued to flourish—“history repeats itself,” Prince crowed to the show’s creators—running for nearly five years. But it was hardly the end of the confident Israeli’s identification with Tevye.
Shortly before Topol’s last performance, the film director Norman Jewison flew over to catch the show at the urging of his producer, Walter Mirisch. In 1967, the Mirisch Company had tapped Jewison for Fiddler and though shooting was not slated to start until the spring of 1970, the search for the star was already on. When Mirisch saw a notice in the paper saying that Topol would soon be leaving the show, he and Jewison took off for London.
Jewison made up his mind the night he saw the show. He wanted Topol. Of course Jewison had thought about Zero Mostel, whose performance he’d seen early in the run a couple of years earlier when he happened to be in New York. Jewison hadn’t liked him. Watching from a cushion in an aisle of the balcony—he wangled the perch from Prince in the sold-out house at the last minute—Jewison felt Mostel lacked reality. He was too big, too American, and he was pulling the viewer out of the play. On film, that hypertheatricality would turn out even worse. At least for the kind of film Jewison wanted to make. From the start, his vision required absolute realism (within the conventions of a musical film, that is). He didn’t want any dancing that wasn’t part of the plot—in the wedding scene or the “L’Chaim” celebration at the inn—so no gamboling down the lane and singing “Tradition.” He didn’t want to shoot in the Kansas or Saskatchewan locations the producers were pushing; he wanted to be as near to Sholem-Aleic
hem territory as he could get in 1971. (That turned out to be Yugoslavia.) “Everything must be rooted in truth and total cinematic believability,” he insisted. So, he said, his Tevye had to feel like a Russian Jew and he wanted an actor who was no more than a generation away from that experience.
Chaim Topol as the bumbling patriarch Sallah Shabati.
Mostel, in fact, was closer to Eastern European Yiddishkayt than Topol: the American actor grew up religiously observant, speaking Yiddish, while Topol was a robust, Hebrew-speaking sabra. But that was precisely the quality that stirred Jewison. His idea of what a Russian Jew feels like was filtered through—even distorted by—the assertion of Israel as the destiny of the Diaspora, and he would read the coming sabra brashness backward into Tevye’s tenacity. “I identified very strongly with Israel and that’s really the reason I hired him,” Jewison later acknowledged.
Topol very well could have nailed the offer in the scene toward the show’s end when the constable issues the eviction and Tevye tells him to “get off my land.” In that moment, Jewison admired how “you could see him stiffen up and stand up as tall as he could.” Sure, Topol was a fine actor. But Jewison responded to something more: “It was the Israeli in him. It was the pride, the pride of being Jewish.” Even as the Jews were forced out of Russia, you could tell, Jewison marveled, that they were a strong people who “would somehow build a country of their own.” Topol connected the same dots: “My grandfather was a sort of Tevye, and my father was a son of Tevye,” he told a journalist. “My grandfather was a Russian Jew and my father was born in Russia, south of Kiev. So I knew of the big disappointment with the Revolution, and the Dreyfus trial in France, and the man with the little mustache on his upper lip, the creation of the State of Israel and ‘Masada will never fall again.’ It’s the grandchildren now who say that. It’s all one line—it comes from Masada 2,000 years ago, and this Teyve of mine already carries in him the chromosomes of those grandchildren.”
In a London theater, in the heady wake of the Six-Day War, Jewison saw Hollywood’s future Tevye: one with whom Ari Ben Canaan had merged.
* * *
The Six-Day War galvanized American Jews, too, stirring fears and feelings of attachment that exceeded the surges of support the American community had expressed during Israel’s fight for statehood in 1948 and, again, during the Suez crisis of 1956. Zionism had been growing central to Jewish American life for more than a generation—through synagogue sisterhood projects, children’s summer camps, youth groups, and other programs—but no one could have foreseen the response the 1967 war provoked. Within hours of the outbreak of hostilities, thousands of American Jews volunteered to fly immediately to Tel Aviv to fill in at work for Israelis called to arms; within a day the community raised $430 million for the cause. Even more powerfully, Israel’s victory produced an unprecedented euphoria in Jewish American communities—superseding Fiddler on the Roof as a profound, not to mention weightier, source of communal pride—and sealed their identification with the Jewish state for years to come. The historian Howard Sachar characterized the response as nothing less than “the collective incarnation of a new ethnic heroism.” This coalescing around Israel saw parallel changes in mainstream Jewish alliances within the United States as the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power. That Black nationalists, New Leftists, and Third Worldists of various sorts (numerous Jews among them) sided with the Palestinians living in the territories Israel had captured and occupied gave mainstream Jewry an extra shove rightward.
But there was more to it than that. Domestic conditions challenged the liberal consensus so recently celebrated in Fiddler. While American Jews would not in large number abandon commitments to a range of liberal stances in spheres like civil liberties, workers’ access to collective bargaining, and women’s rights, their allegiance to Black equality frayed as Blacks themselves challenged the limits of equality as liberalism defined it—which, as they saw it, was not equality at all. By the end of the 1960s, Sachar suggests, Jews not only retreated into parochialism but “wondered if they had not neglected their own interests in championing the cause of other minorities.” A prime force behind that suspicion came in 1968. And with it, Fiddler became a battleground.
CHAPTER 7
FIDDLER WHILE BROOKLYN BURNS
In the spring of 1968, Richard Piro wasn’t paying much attention to the winds of controversy gathering around the neighborhood where he worked as a schoolteacher. His hands were full enough as he organized two dozen adolescent performers, as many production technicians, and a student orchestra for a full-scale musical comedy. Piro was about to open Oliver! and he was focused on getting the set crew to finish the scenery, the altos to hit their first note in the opening chorus number, and a feisty but talented seventh grader, Teddy Smith, to show up at rehearsal on time and not clown around when he got there. It wasn’t that Piro lacked interest in politics—he occasionally participated in demonstrations against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War (and soon would join the nascent gay liberation movement)—but he held his students to high standards and demanded the same dedication of himself. He and his colleague Bruce Birnel, the music teacher and AV coordinator, may have been working in a junior high school, but as far as Piro was concerned, “We were in show business.”
With some significant differences. In junior high, lead actors don’t always deliver—especially when their voices are cracking. On opening night of Oliver! that May, the boy in the title role opened his mouth for his solo in “Food, Glorious Food” and, in place of the sweet countertenor that had landed him the role, out came an uncontrollable caw. He froze, standing silently onstage for what seemed like ages. But in a moment a voice piped up from the chorus and sang the phrases beautifully. It was Teddy Smith, the slight African American boy whose winning smile and innocent-seeming charm often helped him out of mischievous jams. Though academically weak—he couldn’t remember multiplication tables or where to put commas—Teddy had absorbed the play’s lines as he sat at rehearsals, and when his classmate faltered he stepped in and saved the tune, singing Oliver’s lines until the other boy could recover. Piro couldn’t get over the discipline and focus Teddy was capable of when he wasn’t goofing around. That night the teacher determined that this alert boy would play the lead in the following year’s musical.
Piro understood how lucky he was that he could count on there being another musical the next year. His principal, Julius Rubin, sustained an unusual commitment to the arts, all the more rare for his working in one of the poorest districts of the nation’s largest school system. Rubin simply saw no reason his pupils should be denied the activities and special courses that were routine in more affluent areas just because they lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
By the mid-1960s, Brownsville was the kind of place people meant when they spoke about America’s “urban crisis.” And like most other such places, it hadn’t always been that way. At the turn of the twentieth century, Brownsville had beckoned Eastern European Jews from the squalor of the Lower East Side with promises of fresh air and open space. Real estate ads marketed this section of east-central Brooklyn as a community “where Jews can live as in the Old Country.” The bucolic splendor didn’t last long. By 1915—the year Zero Mostel was born there—230,000 Jews had settled in Brownsville, making the area one of the country’s densest concentrations of Jews, who were crowded into tenements and rapidly deteriorating subdivided houses. It was a radical neighborhood, too, producing strong local advocacy organizations and, as a voting district, consistently sending Socialist and American Labor Party representatives to Albany and city hall.
African Americans began trickling into Brownsville and adjoining Ocean Hill in the late 1920s and the flow accelerated as they were pushed out of the South by shifts in agriculture and then pulled to the North by the wartime boom in manufacturing and shipyard jobs. To accommodate the newcomers, local activists—Jewish leftists and their working-class Black neighbors—pressed for public housing to rep
lace the dilapidated homes that blighted the area; they insisted that it maintain the neighborhood’s character by rising no higher than three stories and, most important, that it mix low- and middle-income occupants. But, as the historian Wendell Pritchett has shown, these efforts came to naught as liberal community organizations—churches, the NAACP—refused to join forces with radicals for fear of being tainted as Communists. In any case, they would not have been much of a match for the heedless bulldozing of Robert Moses. Soon, thousands of families displaced by his “urban renewal” programs in Manhattan and elsewhere were relocated to Brownsville’s crumbling tenements. And not long after, the city erected hulking sixteen-story housing projects there, restricted to low-income residents.
From the outset, Brownsville had been a stepping-stone neighborhood—the literary critic Alfred Kazin, also born there in 1915, characterized it as “notoriously, a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.” Jews moved out as they gained solid economic footing, taking their tax dollars with them. But Blacks had few places to go—they were excluded from many of the “nicer” neighborhoods—and anyway, with many occupations still closed to them and blue-collar jobs drying up in the 1950s, they had little chance to amass the nest egg they’d need to move up. Ocean Hill–Brownsville continued to decline. By the mid-1960s, its jobless rate hit 17 percent—five times the city average—and spiked to 36 percent for young men. Three-quarters of the population was receiving some form of public assistance. The schools, more racially segregated in 1964 than they had been in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, were in a shambles. Experienced teachers invoked the privilege of seniority to transfer out of neighborhoods like Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and when community activists tried to persuade the Board of Education to rotate personnel periodically in order to guarantee their children some strong instructors, the teachers’ union balked. Classes were severely overcrowded (even as desks sat open in white neighborhoods) and some 73 percent of the local children had fallen below grade level in reading, a whopping 85 percent in math.
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