Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

by Alisa Solomon

  Frances Brown had been waiting for his call. Little happened in Brownsville without the Community Council’s knowing about it and Brown, active on the organization’s education committee, had been hearing rumors of the strife over Fiddler. She couldn’t figure it out. “That’s a good show,” she thought. She knew that the Broadway cast had many non-Jewish actors in it and that productions had played without any Jewish actors in Finland and Japan. No one objected. On the contrary. These were proudly advertised examples of the show’s universal appeal. So what was the fuss? Brown could only conclude, she told Piro, that his opponents thought the neighborhood children were not capable enough, or else they had a problem with Blacks and Puerto Ricans participating in the play. Either way, the council could not accept their stance. She promised that the show would go on.

  That left the students in a spot just like the fiddler’s, Teddy told his fellow cast members when Piro decided to resume rehearsals of the musical: they were merely trying to “scratch out a simple tune” without losing their balance.

  Piro kept them teetering as he maneuvered Rubin’s absolute permission for the show like an ace Machiavelli. A few mornings after their first conversation, Frances Brown reported that a letter was on its way to Rubin from the Community Council urging Eiseman to present the play. Right away, Piro posted a notice stating that the spring play would be The Crucible. Rubin caught him in the hall and thanked him for his cooperation. Piro knew exactly what would happen when Rubin opened his mail the next day. “We urgently request that Junior High School 275 be allowed to put on the Fiddler on the Roof play,” the council’s letter read. “The performing arts know no boundary of race. Therefore this play, as an experience dealing with Jewish culture, can be a great enlightenment to the Black and Puerto Rican youth of Brownsville, especially as staged by Black and Puerto Rican students.” Rubin called Piro into his office and all but commanded him to reinstate Fiddler. The school could not cross the will of the community.

  The Maccabees did not give up so easily. They had one last tactic: ratting. Because Fiddler was still running on Broadway, amateur rights were not yet available; it was impossible to license the show and illegal to produce it, even in a junior high auditorium. Schools all over the country flouted such rules frequently, but if they were caught they usually received a cease-and-desist order. Whoever contacted Music Theatre International to expose Piro’s pirated Fiddler was no doubt counting on that ax to fall. When MTI phoned Rubin to warn of legal action, the principal called a faculty meeting and, with fury and dread, said he would have to write to the Community Council to explain why the show was being canceled after all. It was Birnel who suggested he wait a few days while he tried to work some showbiz connections.

  Not that he really had any, but the bluff bought some time—and it worked. Piro reached the lawyer at MTI who had phoned Rubin and won him over with the story of his intent and of his colleagues’ betrayal. The lawyer connected him with Hal Prince’s representatives, who contacted the authors. It took Bock, Harnick, and Stein less than five minutes to decide to get behind the production. (Robbins was away at the time and his assistant didn’t bother him with the kerfuffle.) Harnick found the Jewish objections “embarrassing”; Stein likened them to “saying Hamlet can only be played by a Dane.” He thought, in fact, that it was “quite a marvelous thing for these Black children to be involved in this production in view of what is going on in Ocean Hill and what is going on in the city.” They authorized the production so long as the program would note their granting of special permission. Piro didn’t try hard not to gloat in the faculty lounge.

  By that point, the Broadway production had realized a profit of 1,300 percent on the original $375,000 investment. Prince noted that it would pay more to its investors than all his other shows combined. Meanwhile, currents of Black-Jewish hostility continued gusting through the city. They stormed most ferociously in the cultural realm.

  First, the issue was a poem. Late in December, Julius Lester, the host of a Black radio program on New York’s progressive listener-sponsored station, WBAI, invited onto the air a teacher from Junior High 271, the school at the center of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville experiment, and asked him to share some of the pieces his eighth graders were writing in response to the strife engulfing them. Lester urged the teacher, Leslie Campbell (who later changed his name to Jitu Weusi), to read a particularly belligerent twenty-six-line poem by a girl in his class. The poem was titled “Antisemitism” and dedicated to Albert Shanker. It began, “Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head / You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead,” and it concluded, “Guess you know, Jew boy, there’s only one reason you made it / You had a clean white face, colorless and faded / I hated you Jew boy, because your hangup was the Torah / And my only hangup was my color.”

  The media firestorm that ensued was not a literary debate over the merits of the final couplet’s use of forced rhyme. Some of the reports got the facts wrong, crediting Campbell as the author of the hateful work. Shanker filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. The JDL organized protests at the radio station. Julius Lester began receiving anonymous threats on his life. The door to Leslie Campbell’s home was doused with gasoline and set alight.

  At the same time, the most venerable art institution in the city was trying to tamp down a Black-Jewish conflagration of its own. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was just opening a show called Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, its first exhibition featuring African Americans. Black artists and their supporters protested the Met’s uncharacteristic ethnographic approach to its subject: organized by Jewish curators, the exhibit presented a photographic display chronicling the neighborhood over seven decades, but no paintings or prints, as if to declare that no Harlem-based artists had ever produced work worthy of the Met. Picketers outside the museum carried signs asking “Harlem on whose mind?” and claiming that they were, metaphorically, “On the auction block again.” Then Random House published the Met’s catalog for the show, which included an essay by a recent high school graduate from Harlem proclaiming that “anti-Jewish feeling is a natural result of the Black Northern migration.… Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump stands a white Jew who has already cleared it.” The essay added that Jewish shopkeepers exploited Blacks and that “our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice.” Mayor Lindsay called the essay racist; the ADL’s president pronounced it “akin to the worst hatred ever spewed out by Nazis.” The city threatened to revoke the Met’s funding if the museum did not cease selling the catalog. The museum complied (though bookstores continued to carry it).

  In the roiling controversies, arguments about representation subsumed the issues behind the community control experiment—distribution of power, equal opportunity, self-determination, the needs of minority schoolchildren. Now the front pages were filled with Black-Jewish disputes over images and words, what could be shown and what could be said. In this context, Piro’s Fiddler made for a great news story. A local CBS correspondent, Jeanne Parr, brought cameras to Eiseman to shoot a seven-minute segment for the six o’clock news in late January, featuring rehearsal clips and interviews with oppositional teachers who smugly insisted they had no objection to the children playing the roles but simply thought such students should be working on a play more culturally “appropriate” to their “Afro-Caribbean” experience. A documentary filmmaker named Howard Enders had caught wind of the production much earlier and had been gathering his own footage for an ABC special. CBS’s 60 Minutes called Piro and eventually produced a segment. Rubin hated the publicity, but the children were electrified by it. Largely oblivious to the allegory the media were making of them, they basked in the cameras like stars.

  Enders’s hour-long film, Black Fiddler: Prejudice and the Negro, framed the Eiseman production as an emblem of Black-Jewish discord, using high-flown language to describe (in the sonorous timbre of F
rank Reynolds’s narration) “the world’s most oppressed peoples alienated from each other.” Though it didn’t air until August, well after the school year had ended, the process of making the movie churned up the issue that had originally worried Rubin as Enders went around the area interviewing people. He filmed Leslie Campbell. “Kids in that play don’t know their own origins,” Campbell told Enders. He thought it would be better if they were “secure in their own culture” before being steeped in someone else’s “for the sake of integration.” Enders didn’t include—maybe didn’t find out—that Campbell’s cultural nationalism had been fostered, in part, by the Jewish left’s harnessing of Yiddish culture for group solidarity and activism. In the mid-1950s, Campbell was one of a handful of African American kids who attended left-wing Camp Kinderland in New York’s Hudson Valley. At fourteen, he was a counselor in training, participating in the Yiddish singing and folk dancing led by Edith Segal (founder and choreographer of the aptly named Red Dancers of the 1930s). Campbell came to love the stories of Sholem-Aleichem. He appreciated the folkshrayber as “the equivalent of an African griot, who has the history of his people, recounts their epic times, and, by recounting them, strengthens the people’s resolve and struggle.” If Black kids wanted to take a cue from Fiddler, he thought, it should be in discovering their own storytellers.

  Similar sentiments began to buzz among some Eiseman parents, though Frances Brown’s enthusiasm never wavered. She didn’t see why kids couldn’t have Black history and the musical—in fact, the Community Council had been making inroads in the Brownsville curriculum over the last couple of years. Besides, she wondered, how many appropriate Black musicals were there to choose from?

  To fortify the parents’ support, Piro decided to offer a preview of the first act at the next monthly PTA meeting, an affair that usually drew a couple dozen participants. The program would also include the choir’s presentation of Testament of Freedom—a means of drawing a greater number of parents to the event. More than five hundred showed up.

  By now Birnel had completed the lighting and all the kids had costumes and makeup. The night of the preview, they got something else: laughs and real emotional engagement from an audience. The response lifted them to new discoveries. Beverly and Olga played the encounter between Golde and Yente with well-timed business; Duane found a hilarious way of freezing in fright when Motel can’t quite summon the courage to ask Tevye for Tzeitel’s hand, and Teddy instantly recognized what Duane was doing and didn’t step on his lines. Piro beamed as he watched “ensemble playing in the finest sense.” That night he wrote the cast one of his periodic memos. They were masterworks of encouragement, good humor, and specific, constructive criticism. Students looked forward to them as if they were cash in the mail. He addressed this one to “The Beautiful People of Anatevka” from “Your Czar.” “Boy, oh boy, oh boy!” it began. “This was some evening.” The nearly 1,000-word note singled out some of the highlights of the presentation—Maritza’s acting from the inside out instead of all on the outside, the warmth of Sheila’s singing, the chorus’s precision in “Tradition.” And it told kids exactly what else they had to work on: Duane was speaking too fast; the “Matchmaker” girls shouldn’t smile out at the audience; Teddy had to stop mugging in “If I Were a Rich Man,” which made the number into “a stand-up comedian’s bit instead of a real indication of Tevye’s way of making up dreams.” Piro was quick to add, “I’m not criticizing you in any way. I am proud that you had the guts to try it that way. If all of it doesn’t work, we just search for what does and insert it in between all that WAS excellent about the number. This is why we rehearse.”

  Birnel was galvanizing his tech crew, too. Some of the boys took foraging trips along Pitkin and Belmont Avenues looking for props. They shot 16mm film for the special effects—birch trees to project onto the curtain during the overture, flames to lick the scrim in the pogrom scene. At last, the show was coming together.

  But the city’s schools were coming ever more unglued. Legitimate student protests over moribund curriculum, overcrowding, and proposed budget cuts for the City University system so many of them planned to enroll in sometimes included violent factions, who smashed windows and ignited gasoline bombs. Police responses more often escalated the violence than quelled it. Frequently, the unrest closed schools for whole afternoons or even for several days in a row. In mid-March, Mayor Lindsay assembled a special committee for the purpose of coordinating systemwide efforts to stanch school violence. But, as the press reported, “demonstrations, rampages in the streets, and the setting of fires continued to plague the city’s public schools.”

  Eiseman’s district was hardly immune. Canarsie High—the predominantly white Italian school where Eiseman’s graduates became racial minorities when they matriculated into its student body of 4,000—often saw whites ganging up on Black and Puerto Rican students in its schoolyard. In the climate of heightened mayhem, end-of-class bells seemed more like boxing ring signals to resume tribal brawling.

  The fighting flowed down to the junior high, where the ethnic imbalance tilted the opposite way. A Jewish eighth grader was beaten unconscious by an adolescent mob while scores of other students stood by silently. (The following fall, Stephan Hirsch, a gung ho Russian in Fiddler, was set upon and suffered a broken nose and arm; he suspected that the attack stemmed in part from the admittedly racist remarks he felt Enders had goaded him into making in his documentary.) On days Canarsie High closed, its students from Brownsville hung around Eiseman egging on their younger siblings to organize their own demonstrations. For their safety, white kids had to be barred from the raucous cafeteria at lunchtime and picked up by their parents at the end of the day. The drama students mostly ducked the disorder—if for no other reason than expulsion would mean their having to leave the play—though as a student leader, Beverly tried to organize a calm grievance session with the principal. More militant peers hijacked the effort.

  Piro kept after-school rehearsals going in a locked auditorium in what felt like “a battle-zone atmosphere.” One day he entered this haven to find the set trashed by vandals: the scenery splattered with paint, Tevye’s cart shoved into the orchestra pit, the piano’s hammers ripped out. He and Birnel had only a few weeks to fix everything up.

  As the performance date approached, agitation increased. Canarsie High had been closing early again and teenagers let loose were stopping by Eiseman to hurl bricks and stones at the building. The district superintendent determined for the first time that the junior high should close early, too, with all extracurricular activities canceled, lest the kids cowering in classrooms be harmed by shattering glass and missiles. Not to mention the bomb scares. Fiddler was now missing out on all-important rehearsal time, especially for the tech crew. The day before opening arrived without their ever having worked a run-through. That day, some two hundred high school kids broke twenty-five of Eiseman’s windows.

  The next morning, May 1, Piro tried to keep his mind off all that could go wrong by reading the New York Times on his way to Brownsville. Bitter conflict at schools of all levels made headlines that day. The paper reported on a number of cases of scholastic unrest. One described parents pulling their children out of an elementary school in Harlem where they didn’t approve of some teachers. Another detailed how student activists had seized two buildings at Columbia University. A third recounted how more than 150 Brooklyn College students had broken into and torn up the office of the college president, smashing a lamp, setting his mail on fire, and ripping out telephone wires as part of their protests against tuition for Black and Puerto Rican students. Meanwhile, at Queens College, protesting students had been occupying the thirteen-story administration building for three days; a two-day occupation of a Manhattan Community College midtown campus was just ending after a seven-and-a-half-hour meeting where faculty considered student demands for a program in third-world studies; and the entire campus of City College had closed down in the face of student demonstrations and was l
ikely to stay shut for at least the rest of the week.

  A piece on page 49 especially caught Piro’s eye, “School Battered by Band of Youths,” the story about the damage at Eiseman. “That’s some way to attract an audience,” he joked to himself. He knew full well that the show was sold out.

  Piro grazed past another story in the Times that day that had just as much to do with the travails he and his drama kids had endured over the last nine months. Carrying an Albany dateline, it was front-page news: the state legislature had just passed—and Governor Nelson Rockefeller had signed—a law that restructured public school governance in New York City, decentralizing some aspects of the system but essentially killing the experiment in community control. At the end of a tumultuous school year, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville governing board was finished; the UFT had prevailed.

  The process shifted Jewish New York’s position as a local political faction. Scholars who have studied this pivotal year—and it is one of the most written-about periods in the city’s history—describe it as a defining station on the Jews’ long, zigzagging path to whiteness. The journalist Jonathan Kaufman shows in his book, Broken Alliance, how 1968–69 betokens the moment Jews begin to vote less with Blacks and more with ethnic white Catholics, emphasizing issues of security and fiscal restraint over civil rights and antipoverty programs. Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist, sees Ocean Hill–Brownsville turning outer-borough Jews from “optimistic universalism” toward “nervous provincialism,” aligning them with most of the rest of the city’s white population. And that, says Jerald Podair, in his book The Strike That Changed New York, marked “the Jewish passage from racial ambivalence to unmistakable white identity.” Thus, he argues, Jews helped to reify the “white” and “Black” New Yorks that had gestated over three decades and to cement the shift of New York City’s central dramatic agon from worker versus boss to Black versus white.