For those that don’t know, Tevye became Fiddler on the Roof. But Fiddler is not quite like Tevye. Tevye is Fiddler without the schmaltz.
Modern reinterpretations are starting to pay greater respect to the source material. Has anyone here seen the new production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish now playing at the 42nd Street Theater?
It’s about as schmaltzless as that musical can get. And it also has some subtle but specific changes to the lyrics that acknowledge the more sophisticated nature of the source material:
If I ask you to sing a Fiddler on the Roof song, which one immediately comes to mind?
In the Yiddish production, the lyric is Ven ikh bin Rothschild -- If I were a Rothschild, vs. if I were a rich man.
Why does this matter? Because Tevye the dairyman, that perseverating bumpkin from the shtetl isn’t a bumpkin at all. He may live in the shtetl, but he is keenly aware of the modern world. He knows who Rothschild is. He is OF the modern world.
He just has a foot in the past – which is why he begins the musical by singing that other song you can’t get out of your head: Tradition!
In the book, Tevye is a literary embodiment of the modern Jew, wrestling with the ideas and rituals of the past and trying to make sense of them in the here and now.
And he is the literary embodiment of his creator: Sholem Aleichem, a Jewish artist giving voice to Jews, speaking of a uniquely Jewish story, steeped in the particularism of the time and the culture and, most notably, the language… and yet, creating a story with universal appeal.
How universal?
Did you know that Fiddler recently celebrated its 50th anniversary in Japan? As the longest running musical in Tokyo’s history?
That’s universal.
My grandmother, who would be 103 today if she were with us, had all of Sholem Alechiem’s stories on her bookshelves. And so did all her friends.
Yet that funeral of 100,000 plus mourners took place three months before my grandmother was even born.
Our literary canon – just one cultural treasure of Jewish creativity -- was something that was passed down through generations. It was the one part of the old life that survived into the new. As the people of the book, we are also the people of books. And through our stories and reflections, through our expression and the sounding of our own horns – whether in the form of ballpoint pens, paint brushes, or clarinets – we define and redefine not just who we are, but who we hope to be.
My grandmother passed on to me the love of literature, but not so much the Jewish literacy. It wasn’t a priority for her. Nor was it a priority for anyone else in my family.
By the standards of the modern Jewish community, I was lost. The checklist had gone unchecked.
No Jewish education.
No bar mitzvah.
No trips to Israel.
No observances of any kind – not on Shabbos, not on the high holidays… bupkes.
More than the absence of “positive identification” with my Jewish identity, I felt a growing antipathy to the measurements by which I was told I was or was not a good Jew: attendance at services I could not understand, remembrance of a Holocaust I could neither forget nor conceive, and passion for a nation state I had never seen.
And yet… I felt undeniably Jewish. Was it the Zabar’s lox my parents fed me as a child? Was it the odd sprinkling of Yiddish that seasoned my childhood? My mother had a t-shirt made when I was young and she wore it all the time. It was red, and it had a single word on the chest: FEH.
My wife and I were married on Martha’s Vineyard in 1998 by a justice of the peace. He had a thick vineyard accent, most notable when he drew the wedding party’s attention to “The Huffa”.
It was a blustery October day and the audio on the video recording of our ceremony is badly muffled by the wind, but if you turn up the volume really loudly you can hear my mother in the background saying HUPPAH! HUPPAH!
My best friend, Pacey, and I had hiked into the woods to find the right branches from which to fashion the poles.
We had no direction or design. We followed no halakhic rules that I am aware of. For all I know, Rabbi Ben is plotzing over there at the terrible abuse of tradition.
But the fact was: we felt a sense of tradition. We felt an attraction to something we had inherited and a desire to pick the parts that seemed relevant: the parts that added beauty and meaning to a moment we valued.
Why are these things – the lox, the FEH and the pupik and schmutz (fragments of a language all but disappeared) the wedding rituals, Fiddler on the Roof, smoked white fish -- why are these the things that make us feel Jewish? Why are these the things that represent the bulk of modern Jewish “observance” today? They are like radio signals traveling across space and time.
They’re not listed on the checklist I mentioned earlier – the one I failed. But they are the ones that stuck.
Why?
Because the flavors and the sounds and the creative expressions unique to a people, our people – form a vivid, brilliant thread that actively binds us to our inheritance, and to one another. The thread that invites reflection, understanding, inspiration, and a sense of celebration of self – something we as American Jews have had trouble with for a long time.
Guilt? We’ve got that.
Neuroses? World champs.
But celebration? That’s been harder to come by.
Beautiful, powerful art that makes us proud of who we are? And the reverence for the artists who create it? Also in short supply today.
But in 1916 and in the 50 years that preceded it — Jewish creativity had flourished like never before: Plays, poems, music, visual arts, graphic design… a brilliant flowering of expression by a people facing radically changing times, innumerable existential threats, and greater opportunities than we had ever known before.
And the enthusiasm within the Jewish community and well beyond the Jewish community, for the soul of our creativity was displayed in myriad ways -- with no greater fanfare than at the funeral of Sholem Aleichem in 1916.
Now, I began with 1916, but I told you at the start that my story begins 100 years ago…
It’s a story I had never heard, until 2001 when, three life-altering events took place for me in the weeks following September 11.
The first was the birth of my first child.
The second was an unexpected request from Aaron Lansky, the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, that I join that organization as its vice president.
Has anyone here been to the Book Center? It’s one of the most beautiful Jewish buildings in America, and it is also one of the most culturally rich archives we have.