{"id":1427,"date":"2018-07-17T13:13:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T18:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/?p=1427"},"modified":"2023-05-15T13:23:58","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T18:23:58","slug":"a-fidler-afn-dakh-fiddler-on-the-roof-in-yiddish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/a-fidler-afn-dakh-fiddler-on-the-roof-in-yiddish\/","title":{"rendered":"A fidler afn dakh: Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WHEN STEVEN SKYBELL stepped out on the stage of the Museum of Jewish Heritage<\/a> in New York on July 4, and proclaimed, \u201ca fidler afn dakh, arop fun zinen, ha?<\/em>\u201d (A fiddler on the roof\u2014sounds crazy, no?\u201d), he initiated the first, full professional production<\/a> of Fiddler on the Roof<\/em> in Yiddish on this continent. But, of course, it was not the first time Tevye uttered his lines in Yiddish on an American stage. Before he spoke in English, first on radio (on the program \u201cThe Eternal Light,\u201d 1945), then in a play (Arnold Perl\u2019s Tevya <\/em>and His Daughters<\/em>, 1957), and then, in 1964, even sang<\/a><\/a> (1964), the iconic dairyman had trod the Yiddish-American boards for several decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little surprise that the play Tevye der milkhiker<\/em>, first staged by the great actor-manager Maurice Schwartz<\/a> in 1919 and long sustained in his repertoire both in New York and on global tour, bears little resemblance to the mid-century American musical, though both draw from Sholem Aleichem\u2019s masterful Tevye stories, written over two decades, beginning in 1894. (It\u2019s possible, though, that Fiddler<\/em>\u2019s original director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins, applied a few pointers he gleaned from Schwartz; in 1937, Robbins made his stage debut at age 18 <\/strong>at Schwartz\u2019s Yiddish Art Theatre as a supernumerary in a stage version of I.J. Singer\u2019s Di brider ashkenazi <\/em>(The Brothers Ashkenazi<\/em>), which included a lavish wedding scene.) Just like the creators of every musical, from Showboat <\/em>to Hamilton<\/em>, that\u2019s based on existing source material, Fiddler<\/em>\u2019s authors made significant changes when transforming Sholem Aleichem\u2019s stories into a Broadway show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surprise, rather, is that the Yiddish stage version differs even more radically from the original short stories than the musical does\u2014even though its adaptor was Sholem Aleichem himself (with some later tweaking by his son-in-law, Y.D. Berkowitz). And more: writing the play inspired Sholem Aleichem to go back to what seemed like the finished cycle of stories that he had published in a single volume in 1911, and write one more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as the volume of Tevye stories was coming out, a Ukrainian boy was killed in Kiev and soon, authorities invoked the notorious blood libel to charge a factory clerk, Menachem Mendel Beilis<\/a>, with ritual murder. Sholem Aleichem was riveted\u2014and revolted\u2014by the case, which wended its way to trial in 1913. As Sholem Aleichem brooded over Beilis\u2019s plight, his thoughts turned back to Tevye. The author had left his popular hero heading to the Land of Israel in what was meant to have been the final Tevye story, written in 1909. But now Sholem Aleichem needed his Yiddish Everyman to respond to the geyser of antisemitism that was erupting from the Russian empire\u2019s foul groundwater. First, Sholem Aleichem wrote two screenplays, employing the innovations of cinema\u2014showing Tevye\u2019s fantasies in a script based on the early story in which he is rewarded for returning some lost ladies to their dacha, and employing flashbacks to show Tevye\u2019s memories of Khave in a script based on the story of her elopement with the Ukrainian, Fedya. When Sholem Aleichem failed to interest any filmmakers in his scripts, he turned to the theatre. He developed his play entirely around the Khave story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike in\u00a0Fiddler<\/em>, the tales of Tsaytl choosing Motl the tailor as a husband and of Hodl following Perchik to Siberia are nowhere to be found. Nor\u2014in this case, just like the musical\u2014did Sholem Aleichem include the stories of Shprintse, who drowns herself after her beau\u2019s relatives nix their betrothal, or of Beylke, who marries the nouveau riche boor her father touted, and who endures a miserable life. On the other hand, Sholem Aleichem added characters and scenes to the play that don\u2019t feature significantly\u2014or sometimes at all\u2014in his Tevye stories: Golde opens the play churning butter and complaining about the effort; Tsatyl\u2019s children play with a cat; Fedya\u2019s father and his friends discuss the upcoming marriage between Fedya and Khave; Tevye and Golde make\u00a0havdole\u00a0<\/em>at the end of\u00a0shabbes<\/em>; the two of them sit\u00a0shiva<\/em>\u00a0after Khave\u2019s elopement.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Image of the first page of Sholem Aleichem\u2019s script, which describes Tevye\u2019s home (including a portrait of Tolstoy on the wall) and opens with Golde complaining about churning butter.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The biggest alteration, perhaps, comes at the end, set some years after the earlier scenes. Golde and Motl have died and authorities have issued an edict expelling Jews \u2013 like those that followed the Beilis affair. As Tevye prepares to travel to Palestine, along with Tsaytl and her children, Khave, having heard about the eviction, suddenly returns, declaring that she\u2019d always remained a Jew in her heart, fasting on Yom Kippur and visiting Golde\u2019s grave on her yortsayt<\/em>. What\u2019s more, she pledges to return to her family and her people. Tevye ponders his conflicting duties as a pious man and loving father, opens his arms wide and, in the play\u2019s closing lines, proclaims, \u201cCome to me, Khavele. You are my child!\u201d The curtain falls slowly. This is the plot development that required Sholem Aleichem to write a new short story so that the prose Tevye would mesh with the dramatic one; the result was \u201cLekh Lekho<\/em>\u201d (\u201cGet Thee Out\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite that tear-jerking finale, Sholem Aleichem hawked his\u00a0Tevye<\/em>\u00a0as superior in every way to the\u00a0shund<\/em>\u00a0that, in his estimation, befouled the Yiddish stage in America. Half a dozen years earlier, Sholem Aleichem had flopped colossally in the American Yiddish theatre, where he had hoped to strike it rich. Two of his plays opened on the same winter night in 1907, produced by and starring competing actor-managers\u2014one by Boris Thomashefsky, and the other by Jacob Adler\u2014and both were popular and critical disasters. After the double failure, Sholem Aleichem returned to Europe, broke and dejected.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Zero Mostel in the 1964 stage production of\u00a0Fiddler on the Roof\u00a0<\/em>as Tevye (pulling cart with family behind him), Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library,\u00a0http:\/\/digitalcollections.nypl.org\/items\/57e3d280-\u2026<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Nonetheless, he asked his friend in America, Dovid Pinski<\/a>, to serve as broker and pitch the Tevye <\/em>play to Adler. \u201cYou won\u2019t find astounding effects, burlesques, patriotic songs, dead children and the like in my play,\u201d he wrote. \u201cRather, it has tragic and comic situations, songs, and breathtaking scenes. But most important is that from the first act to the final curtain, Tevye goes all out. The audience laughs and loves him more and more; if someone like Adler plays him, the role will become his crowning glory and make him public\u2019s most-beloved favorite in his older years.\u201d (Sholem Aleichem elaborated on these points in a fawning letter he wrote to Adler, but apparently never sent, addressing him as \u201cgreat master of the stage.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adler did not take up the offer in 1914\u2014the theatre community had no faith in Sholem Aleichem as a playwright, his son-in-law reported (though later, Adler\u2019s daughter Celia played Khave in Schwartz\u2019s production, and his son Luther replaced Zero Mostel in Fiddler<\/em>). Sholem Aleichem died in 1916 without seeing his Tevye realized in the flesh. But as immigrants in New York absorbed the devastation of their communities in Eastern Europe during the First World War, audiences were ready, after his death, to embrace their folkshrayber<\/em> and his iconic dairyman. Tevye der milkhiker<\/em> opened Schwartz\u2019s 1919\u20131920 season at the Irving Place Theater and sold out for sixteen straight weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schwartz had won rights for the play from Sholem Aleichem\u2019s widow, Olga Rabinowitz, on the condition that he allow Berkowitz, the son-in-law, to supervise the text, and Berkowitz interpreted \u201csupervise\u201d broadly, dramatizing interactions between Tevye and the priest that, in Sholem Aleichem\u2019s script, Tevye had simply recounted in exposition. In one added scene, the priest dines at Tevye\u2019s home and asks him what he\u2019d do if one of his daughters married a Gentile. When Tevye answers that he\u2019d rather she died, Khave faints. In a scene toward the end, he tells Tevye he could avoid the expulsion edict if only he converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While some reviews of the production (anticipating some later critics of Fiddler<\/em>) complained that the dramatic version of Tevye simplified the intricate literary strategies of Sholem Aleichem\u2019s stories, they universally praised Schwartz\u2019s acting, which represented a new realism that toned down the bombastic stage-stomping that had become common on Second Avenue (as well as in the English-language theater.) Over many years, Schwartz toured his Tevye<\/em> to Boston, London, Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. In 1929, he played in Los Angeles, where the LA Times<\/em> critic extolled his \u201cunstrained style which approaches suaveness itself\u201d and his limber ability to glide \u201cfrom stark tragedy to downright slapstick.\u201d A decade further on, as Hitler and Stalin signed their infamous non-aggression pact, Schwartz was making a movie version<\/a><\/a> of Tevye<\/em>, filming in the potato fields of Long Island. Pumping up the antisemitism of Fedya\u2019s friends, the movie adaptation made the story of Tevye\u2019s perseverance and Khave\u2019s return to her people a powerful touchstone of communal fears and steadfastness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berkowitz translated the play into Hebrew, and it entered the repertoire at Habima in 1943, enjoying periodic revivals even as evolving modern Hebrew outpaced Berkowitz\u2019s stilted language. At Habima, the malign priest was played by Shmuel Rudensky. Half-a-dozen years later, also in Israel, he became the first Israeli actor\u00a0to play Tevye<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Fidler afn dakh\u2014<\/em>the first to wonder, \u201ca fidler afn dakh, arop fun zinen, ha?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read more from the DYTP about\u00a0Fidler afn dakh:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n