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

by Alisa Solomon

  Miklasz knew that Dynów was part of Galicia, once the most diverse region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its multilingual mix of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Roma, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and others. On day trips to nearby Przemysl, a larger town some thirty miles straight east across a narrow, farm-lined road through the San River basin, she and Woźniak noticed how an Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, and the remains of a synagogue (now a library) stood within a stone’s throw of one another. What clearer sign could there be that different peoples mingled in the public square—and, at least in some instances, beyond? They didn’t have to squint hard to envision Tevye pulling his wagon along this lush valley, conjure the Jewish homes where everything came to a tranquil halt for the Sabbath, and see how easily Chava and Fyedka could meet and fall in love.

  In the first two summers that Miklasz put on shows in Dynów, the troupe—incorporating under the town-echoing name De-Novo—presented A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Puss in Boots: ambitious and enjoyable projects that gave the locals as much to gloat about as did their pristine views of the Carpathian foothills. The mayor, Zygmunt Frańczak, held high hopes for De-Novo’s helping to build tourism and thus to boost the depressed economy of the town, where unemployment climbed to 12 percent in 2008. “If people know where Dynów is, it’s because of these performances,” said Mayor Frańczak, who granted 2,000 zlotys (about $550) to the company despite his meager municipal coffers. While the town gets some traffic from travelers on their way to the mountains, Dynów is an international destination only for small bands of Hasidic men who make an annual pilgrimage to the grave site of Rebbe Tzvi Elimelekh Shapiro (1783–1841) and his sons. The rebbe’s acolytes maintain a small tomb in Dynów’s otherwise long-neglected, weed-entangled Jewish cemetery and make a startling spectacle for local residents when they tread through town in their black cloaks and broad hats.

  If the mayor saw De-Novo as an engine of economic development, Miklasz and Woźniak were driven by less measurable but perhaps loftier goals. By mixing professional actors, theater students, and local amateurs (adults as well as children), they wanted to hold up high aesthetic standards based on skill, serious preparation, and an uncompromising work ethic. The payoff was not only a solid production but a profound act of community building: everyone had a stake. The people of Dynów voluntarily fed the troupe during their three-week rehearsal period. The bakery doled out bread, local farmers contributed eggs and cheese for lunches, the nursing home served the company dinner five days a week. Parents of children in the production—De-Novo draws a number of them each year given the absence of any day camps or other summer programs—often showed up at the end of a workday with homemade cakes and sweets for everyone. The actors brought in from out of town slept in the public school.

  In the 1930s, the area had been famous for its community orchestras, singing groups, and theater clubs, but all that was ground out by the upheaval of the war—and later by the arrival of a television in every home. Miklasz wanted to return that source of pleasure and accomplishment to Dynów. “In a small town like this where there’s not much money and not many opportunities, our work shows people how much they can achieve if they have an idea, believe in the idea, and work for it,” she said.

  By the time she returned to theater school in the fall of 2005 and began thinking about the next summer’s project, Miklasz sensed the community was ready to dig deeper. The Memorial Prayer production still gripped her imagination. Meanwhile, she felt an unarticulated but palpable queasiness at the narrow nationalistic rhetoric unleashed in the Polish elections that fall, which brought to power the right-wing Law and Justice Party. Then her “crazy uncle Bogdan”—so regarded by the family because of his frequent off-color, vaguely antisemitic, and otherwise inappropriate quips—suggested that De-Novo put on Fiddler on the Roof because it was one of his favorite movies. If Fiddler could speak to her uncle, Miklasz thought, if it could touch a sensitive place even in him, then it could reach Dynów. All impulses pointed toward Tevye.

  * * *

  Miklasz and Woźniak had seen Fiddler on the Roof on TV as girls. The film is shown on the Polish state channel every now and then. But that was not always the case. Far from it. For all intents and purposes, Fiddler was banned in Poland until the years Miklasz and Woźniak were born, two decades after the play’s New York premiere.

  From shortly after the end of World War II until the openings forced by the Solidarity movement some thirty-five years later, Poland suppressed public discussion and representation of Jewish themes (with the notable exception of the State Yiddish Theater, led by the internationally beloved actor Ida Kaminska). At precisely the moment Fiddler was setting out into the wide world of international productions—even to other Soviet satellites—Poland was ever more aggressively smothering what little breath of Jewish expression the country had left. As early as 1966, the legendary opera director Walter Felsenstein was making arrangements to bring the show to his Komische Oper in East Berlin. (Robbins was to have directed but he bowed out, leaving Felsenstein to direct it himself. The production finally went on in 1971, with just a few adjustments personally recommended by the Soviet ambassador: excising the words “pogrom,” “America,” and “Kiev” and any phrases referring to Jews being forced to leave their homes.) Czechoslovakia opened Fiddler in its capital with the first breezes of the Prague Spring in February 1968. By the time the show went up in the western city of Pilsen eighteen months later, the movement had been crushed and its democratic reforms reversed; audiences booed the Russians who burst violently into the wedding scene at the end of the first act as if they were Soviet occupiers.

  But there could be no Fiddler on the Roof, no Skrzypek na Dachu, while Poland was cracking down on its small remnant of Jews. Following the Six-Day War in the summer of 1967, a battle for control within Poland’s Communist Party expressed itself in virulent anti-Israel rhetoric that cast the country’s 40,000 Jews—in the infamous words of Prime Minister Władysław Gomułka—as a potential “fifth column.” The vast majority of these Jews were highly assimilated and regarded themselves as thoroughly Polish, many of them properly anti-Zionist Party faithful. Nonetheless, they found themselves suddenly suspect. Eight months later, when student protests erupted in Warsaw (triggered by the authorities censoring a play) and then spread through the country, the Party blamed the Jews. Right away, Jews were purged from government, academic, and other posts and from the country itself. Some 20,000 were forced to emigrate. When they departed Poland—most for Scandinavia and Europe, not many for Israel—they were required to denounce their Polish citizenship. Ida Kaminska and most of her troupe were among them. Only a few months before their departure, her husband, the theater’s manager, had written to Joe Stein expressing interest in presenting Fiddler at the State Yiddish Theater. Some of the troupe had seen the Broadway production when they toured the United States in the fall of 1967 with Mother Courage and Mirele Efros, Yankev Gordin’s “Jewish Queen Lear.” Now Kaminska was leaving Poland for good, settling in New York with grand—and, it turned out, vain—hopes of opening a Yiddish theater there.

  For more than a decade after the events of 1968, the subject of Jews was officially closed in Poland, though no pronouncements were necessary to enforce the ban. Theater artists simply understood that they ought not include Fiddler on the Roof on the roster of planned productions that they had to submit for state approval every season. Movie theaters didn’t book the film, either. By the late 1970s, it had been commercially screened in Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey, among many other countries. But not in Poland.

  That didn’t stop the literary critic and translator Antoni Marianowicz from rendering the script and lyrics into Polish. A Jew who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the war years hiding in a glass factory, Marianowicz knew as well as anyone that “staging the play was entirely unthinkable.” But he became enthralled by the show when he saw a performance on a visit to New York in the mid-1960s and he pr
epared the text anyway—for when, he had no idea. It wasn’t just the taboo on Jewish subjects that stood in the way. Poland’s relationship with the United States had curdled so bitterly that pursuing a standard licensing contract was just as hard to conceive of as broaching the topic of exiled Jews. Marianowicz recalled a Polish propaganda campaign that blamed America for the sudden, mysterious death of the country’s chickens during this period and wondered: “How was I supposed to go about getting the rights to stage the play, when telephone calls were being controlled, negotiations with the poultry murderers bordered on treason, and contacting workers from the U.S. Embassy was considered spying?”

  Around the same time, the highly successful Polish TV director Jerzy Gruza made a trip to New York and watched an interview with Zero Mostel on his hotel room TV. Gruza laughed so hard he worried that the people in the next room would complain. He didn’t have a chance to see Mostel onstage, but the televised bits from the show planted in him the desire to direct the musical someday. He knew exactly who should play Tevye in a Polish Fiddler: the Jewish actor Juliusz Berger, whom Gruza had seen in the 1950s as Perchik in Sholom-Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker at the Polish State Yiddish Theater. (The production toured to London in 1957 and again in the summer of 1964, just as Fiddler was on its way to Detroit.) Gruza filed the idea in the back of his mind.

  Poles had a lot of practice in the Communist era at quietly filing away officially disavowed knowledge—most famously, the knowledge that Soviets had massacred Polish officers at Katyn in 1940, though the official version blamed the Nazis. In 1980, when the Solidarity movement triumphed in Gdańsk, the strikers met to assess their victory and discuss how to organize their new union. Top on their agenda was how to produce a new, truthful history. As Robert Darnton reported in a New York Review of Books essay at the time, “The hunger for history, ‘true history’ as opposed to the official version, stands out as clearly as the bread lines in Poland today.” The main newspaper in Kraków started a daily column called “Blank Spaces in the History of Poland.” The editor explained to Darnton that Poles needed to repossess their past in order—as the Solidarity slogan demanded—for Poland to be Poland. They needed to know what “actually happened.”

  Coming to terms with what actually happened to Poland’s Jews—in the Holocaust as well as in 1968—was not the immediate concern of the Solidarity movement, which was heavily connected to the Church and its imagery. But Poles did start to look into Jewish history. A core of the few thousand Jews who remained in Poland started organizing so as to study their heritage—people like the mathematician and philosopher Stanisław Krajewski, whose parents were kicked out of the Party in 1968, while he was in college and active in the student movement. The expulsions had a strange effect: “they reminded us we were Jewish.” Krajewski and some colleagues created underground avenues for learning about what that abandoned identity might mean—a “flying university” of study groups, as well as projects to locate and mark traces of Jewish existence. Monika Krajewska, an artist (and Stanisław’s wife), began to document Jewish tombstones with photographs. In 1982, she published an album of the pictures, one of the first postwar Jewish books in Poland. Tentatively, Jewishness was moving out of the closet into public discourse. Fiddler on the Roof would become a major vehicle.

  By the time Krajewska’s book was in the works, martial law was attempting to stamp out Solidarity and other opposition movements. But there was no way to put the lid back on popular discussion. On the contrary, Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime needed to persuade the West that it was not crushing democracy with its repressive actions but simply restoring order; one way to do so was by pointing to its easing of the old censorship measures. That’s why—both Marianowicz and Gruza surmised—Fiddler was approved for production while Poland was still under martial law.

  But mounting a production of Fiddler would take more than a little sudden state leniency. For several years, Poland had lacked hard cash. The economy was in a chronic state of collapse and the weakness of the zloty proved as censorious as state power in restricting the musical repertoire. How could a Polish theater possibly afford America’s licensing fees? And even if the fees were waived, converting the royalties to dollars would have required mountains of money, and even if such money miraculously could have been found, the government would not allow any cash to leave the country.

  Marianowicz came up with a plan. In the spring of 1981, he proposed it to Joe Stein. “As you probably know, we in Poland are now involved in a struggle against all forms of political and moral oppression,” he explained in a letter. “One of them is antisemitism, and one of the reasons it may still exist is a total ignorance of Jewish history and culture.” Fiddler would be an important political and artistic intervention, he argued, but the lack of Western currency made normal arrangements impossible. “This is the reason I allow myself to suggest a payment in Polish zlotys, with an appointment to Jewish philanthropic purposes—e.g. to a committee, raising funds for the reconstruction and renovation of famous Jewish cemeteries in Poland.”

  The Fiddler team accepted the proposition—though Robbins would have preferred the proceeds to go to living Jews rather than to cemeteries—and Stein replied to Marianowicz two weeks later: “If our show can have some small effect in helping the Polish people in their struggle for political liberty and against antisemitism, we will be most gratified.”

  Thus Fiddler entered the Polish repertoire as a document of Jewish history, bound up with the emerging project of commemoration. As in Jaffa and in Brooklyn, but in yet a different way, Fiddler in Poland would be more than just another show. In generating funds for the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries, the Broadway musical would stand in for the slaughtered generations unable to perform the ritual of geyn af keyver oves—visiting the ancestral graves. It would also stand in for the ancestors, offering the postwar generation its first contact with a Jewish world and, as Marianowicz observed, reminding older Poles of “the people who once lived in our land” but “after whom nothing remains, like Atlantis after the ocean swallowed it up.”

  Marianowicz well knew that the swallowed Atlantis was more varied than the one Fiddler represented. He himself came from a highly assimilated bourgeois family in Warsaw, which had been a vibrant center of urban Jewish life for more than half a century. It’s where Sholem-Aleichem’s Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt met with success in the spring of 1905, sparking his dreams of the American theater. Soon after, when the czarist ban on Yiddish was lifted, it’s where “modern mass Jewish culture,” as the scholar Michael Steinlauf has written, “sprang into being virtually overnight.” That culture flourished through the interwar years as Jews (and Poles) became increasingly urbanized. On the eve of Hitler’s invasion, a majority of Poland’s Jews lived in cities. That still left more than a million residing in shtetls, but they were not the norm. Marianowicz could see how the musicalized mythic shtetl might serve as a point of entry for Polish audiences of the 1980s, gently inviting a peek into a distant past that was removed from more raw and recent trauma.

  The first production opened at the Musical Theater of Łódź in May 1983. The theater’s artistic director had come to love the music after a student of his from America had brought the original cast album with her to Poland in the late 1970s. He was lucky that the local Party dignitary in charge of approving the repertoire had seen the show on a trip to New York and, as Marianowicz put it, “made it his point of honor to bring it to the Łódź stage.” By all accounts, this premiere was weak—badly sung, clumsily staged, barely coherent. But it did break the ice—deep, long-frozen ice. Such was the case, too, with Poland’s second production, eight months later, at the Grand Theater in Poznań, where the staging was stiffly operatic. Jerzy Gruza’s production in November 1984—the biggest hit the Musical Theater of Gdynia had ever seen—shook the state. The opening-night ovation lasted twenty minutes.

  Gdynia is the sister city to Gdańsk in the northern port area of the country, and it shared in the role as epi
center of Solidarity activism. The tenacious spirit of resistance that charged the local air energized audiences, who received Fiddler and its brave new subject as a continuation of the democracy movement in a highly entertaining form. Gruza was an exuberant showman—“The social task of musical theater is to give entertainment to tired, overworked people,” he mischievously maintained—and he made extravagant use of the Communist-style arts subsidies his theater enjoyed, even in tight times. To this day, Gruza boasts of the sheer size and lavishness of the production: a hundred people in the company, another hundred in the orchestra.

  Juliusz Berger, veteran of the Yiddish stage, did play the role of Tevye, with warmth and soft-edged stoicism. Gruza’s assistant director was Jan Szurmiej—the son of Golda Tencer and Szymon Szurmiej, members of the Yiddish theater who had taken over Ida Kaminska’s post. Gruza counted on Berger and Szurmiej to bring “authenticity” to the production by telling the cast about Jewish culture and customs. The subject, for all of them, was a vast blank.

  Gruza watched spectators sobbing at the show night after night. “The production raised in them a strong sense of tolerance,” he concluded. His good friend Marianowicz couldn’t help but hear how “the final scenes of the musical, when the exiled Jews leave Anatevka, resounded in our country.” No one could say what happened to emotion spilled in the theater once the curtain came down. But whether roused or stunned or safely and briefly entertained, spectators encountered language and imagery that had been closed to them for decades.