Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (11 page)

Until 1951, Da Silva (born Silverblatt to immigrant parents in Cleveland) was enjoying stupendous success as an actor. From the 1930s, including a stint with the Federal Theater Project, he appeared frequently on the New York stage—the Butwins saw his magnetic performance as the menacing outsider, Jud Fry, in the original Broadway production of
Oklahoma!
when they came to New York to sign their deal with Crown for
The Old Country
—and by the mid-1940s, he had a thriving career in Hollywood, cast in feature roles in several films a year by the end of the decade. Then the friendly witness Robert Taylor named him before HUAC, declaring Da Silva suspicious because “he always seems to have something to say at the wrong time.” Indeed he did, when he himself was called before HUAC in Los Angeles in March 1951. The moment Da Silva was sworn in, he began lambasting the committee as “a smoke screen” for “forces seeking to drop the atom bomb,” shouting in his sonorous actor’s voice over the chairman’s pounding gavel. For every question about his affiliations, he offered a retort about the committee’s attack on free thought, its labeling as subversive anyone who declares himself for peace, its general illegality. The first uncooperative witness to plead the Fifth Amendment, he would not answer their questions about his Communist activities. And he refused to say whether he would support the United States if it were invaded by Soviet Russia.

Soon after Da Silva’s appearance, RKO Pictures edited him out of the just completed film
Slaughter Trail
, in which he’d played the lead role, and spliced in new footage of a different actor (Brian Donlevy). Da Silva took the hint. Along with some comrades from the Actors Lab—a West Coast offshoot of the Group Theater—Da Silva went to New York to look for work. Unlike the Screen Actors Guild, Actors’ Equity, the union of theater performers, had voted to defy any political blacklist and even included a clause in every hiring contract to that effect.

Arnold Perl was never called before HUAC, though the FBI listed him on its “security index” for years and kept tabs on his participation in meetings, rallies, and workshops, most of them focused on labor rights and racial equality. Raised in a middle-class, liberal home, he turned leftward as a student at City College in the 1930s and stayed active as he pursued a career as a writer. His work took off in the army, of all places, where he was assigned to write anti-Fascist scripts. “I have gotten radio detectives in and out of trouble, scared children and fought straw men on so-called adult programs,” he said of the entertainments he’d scripted professionally, “but it took a draft board to give me my first chance to write something for radio I didn’t mind having my name connected with.”

It was also in the army—specifically when he entered Dachau with his unit at the end of the war—that Perl felt a sudden, shocking surge of connection to the Jewish people. He spoke no Yiddish and never practiced any ritual observance growing up. But he was by nature curious about everything, a nondenominational intellectual who read voraciously for several hours late into every night. When he came back to New York, he started soaking up whatever he could find about Jewish culture. His career was flourishing. He was writing for the new, surprisingly progressive documentary units on the radio networks (his harrowing, detailed account of Nazi crimes in
The Empty Noose
, broadcast on the eve of the executions at Nuremberg, was heard by more than five million Americans); he also started freelancing for
The Eternal Light
. He stretched his script consultations with Rabbi Moshe Davis at the Jewish Theological Seminary (which produced the program) into informal tutorials.

Then, in June 1950—the month that saw the arrest of the Rosenbergs and the outbreak of the Korean War—three retired FBI agents calling themselves American Business Consultants published
Red Channels
, the booklet that listed 151 people working in broadcast and their alleged associations with Communist causes. Little surprise that Perl’s name was among them—and that his commissions dried up. Though he kept banging out scripts on his small manual Royal typewriter and managed to sell them through a front (earning only a fraction of the amount the front took home), he plummeted from a bright career that had enabled him to purchase a home in the swanky Westchester suburb of Mamaroneck and support his wife and three children to a state of economic uncertainty that, within a couple of years, also included alimony and child support payments.

He and Da Silva joined forces to create their own theater company, knowing they could be their own bosses. They had encountered each other years before in Popular Front activities—back in 1946 Da Silva had acted in a one-night presentation of a twenty-minute Perl script by the left-wing troupe Stage for Action. Before banding together, each had adapted Sholem-Aleichem on his own—a double coincidence, since both had chosen one of the same stories. Da Silva recorded several tales from the Butwins’
Old Country
on an album for Decca Records of the same name, in 1948. In a slightly nasal, animated voice, he narrates and plays all the roles in “The Fiddle,” “A Yom Kippur Scandal,” and “Dreyfus in Kasrilevka”; intricately scored music by Serge Hovey works almost in dialogue with him. Meanwhile, among his radio dramatizations of Sholem-Aleichem for
The Eternal Light
, Perl also adapted “The Fiddle,” the story of a boy obsessed with learning to play the violin despite being forbidden by his father. When Perl and Da Silva established Rachel Productions (they both had daughters named Rachel) and began to hatch a repertoire, the Butwin volumes and Maurice Samuel were the obvious place to start. The drawing by their comrade Ben Shahn that became their logo—a man in a cap and thick beard playing a violin—added to the association between Sholem-Aleichem and a fiddling Jew. (Shahn’s association with Sholem-Aleichem continued, too, as he went on to illustrate collections of Yiddish stories, including reissues of the Butwin volumes.)

Perl and Da Silva liked to tell people that they were motivated by the “mutual impulse” to share this culture with audiences who might not have been familiar with it and thereby disprove the snub they were tired of hearing—that if they didn’t know Yiddish they couldn’t understand their heritage. But there was more to it than that. As a reporter who interviewed them at the time understood, they wanted to highlight “Sholom-Aleichem’s gentle but firm plea for tolerance and humanism.”

The casting itself made such a plea. Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Sarah Cunningham, Jack Gilford, Gilbert Green, Will Lee, Marjorie Nelson: almost all the actors were blacklisted. More than giving them jobs (which paid barely over minimum wage), the production was displaying the talent America was missing when it shunted good artists aside. (Da Silva was also making an integrationist point by casting Ruby Dee, whom he had met shortly before rehearsals were to begin, at a rally for the Rosenbergs; her husband, Ossie Davis, served as stage manager.)

In putting characters from the Yiddish classics onstage, Perl was “reminding people of where they come from” and also “telling them that people are enormously and richly flexible in the face of difficulties.” He was talking about the resilient residents of the Pale. But he could have been talking about himself and the company presenting
The World of Sholom Aleichem
.

*   *   *

The play opened on May Day of 1953 at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In the theatrical climate of the period, everything about it seemed strange. The Barbizon? Sholem-Aleichem? Was it in Yiddish? The press agent, Merle Debuskey, had to insist that ads and announcements note that it was in English. But Perl and Da Silva had good reasons for their choices. The title might strike a friendly chord with people who remembered Maurice Samuel’s book, which was still in print a decade after its publication and, in any case, it would indicate that the production (like the book) intended to bring to life not just a story but an entire milieu. (Some of the material in the play was also drawn from Mendele Mocher-Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and the folk stories of Chelm.) As for the venue, the thirty-eight-story modern classical hotel that dominated Central Park South between Sixth and Seventh Avenues had been originally designed in the 1920s as a residence for artists and musicians, so it included small halls for recitals and dramatic performances. Despite having changed hands and clientele during the Depression, the building retained a small auditorium with about 500 fixed seats and a small proscenium stage (albeit with no wing space).
The World of Sholom Aleichem
had to play on an irregular schedule, clearing out on nights that conventions were booked. But for the price, Rachel Productions couldn’t do better.

Besides, they wanted an intimate relationship between the actors and the audience and a spareness of style that a small house afforded. Spectacle and razzle-dazzle hardly belonged in the world of Sholem-Aleichem. If not by design, certainly to good effect, the work joined the nascent Off-Broadway challenge to the gimmicky effects of Broadway entertainments (the swimming pool center stage in
Wish You Were Here
being only one much-mocked example of the moment).

But it meant they’d garner little attention from the press. Weekly magazines covered only Broadway in those years, and the major daily papers, which had at least noticed the excitement over Geraldine Page’s performance in
Summer and Smoke
at the newly founded Circle in the Square, saw no compelling reason to spend any of the precious real estate in their arts pages on a show by an untested playwright based on quaint ethnic folk stories and performed in a bizarre location. Nonetheless, audiences came—hordes of them. At first, fellow progressives and liberal artists (some of them too fearful of guilt by association to go backstage to greet the company after the show). Then, responding to word of mouth, a wider audience. After forty sold-out performances,
The World
had to relinquish the Barbizon for events already scheduled there over the summer. When it reopened in September—for what turned out to be nine more months, making it the longest-running play of the season—it was a phenomenon. The producers marked the occasion by selling a fifteen-page souvenir booklet featuring drawings by Ben Shahn inspired by the show: in quick, sputtering lines—a seemingly naive style in keeping with the play’s—some twenty figures populate the pamphlet, among them a wide-eyed fellow cradling a goat, a man with a trim beard reclining on his side, holding his head in his hand, a woman with a handbag staring out from the page.

Now all the mainstream reviewers clamored for seats. The
New York Times
critic, Brooks Atkinson, threw his support behind the production (after some cajoling by Debuskey), first acclaiming it as “fine theater and splendid humanity” in his review, then piling on more accolades in a Sunday essay: “It is pure art with no shortcomings.” The other dailies followed suit: “Human warmth, generosity and affecting simplicity have carried the day,” “shows how theater-wise imagination with long experience can make so much out of so little.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt weighed in, praising the production in her syndicated newspaper column and assuring readers, “Don’t think because it’s about Jews you won’t like it.”

In large measure, audiences responded to the novelty—and aptness—of the bare-bones, congenial style. Hokey as it may seem today, the opening scene was received in 1953 as a charming innovation: Mendele the Bookseller (played by Da Silva, who also directed the show) entered through the house, maneuvering a battered baby carriage bulging with books as he made his way to the stage. He spoke directly to the audience, familiarly: “I apologize. I don’t mean to stare. Just looking, trying to figure what in all these treasures would interest you the most.” He rummaged through the carriage and pulled out “The Enchanted Tailor” by Sholem-Aleichem and introduced the first of the three playlets. Presented as a folk tale from Chelm, the fictional town of fools (though Perl also used elements from Sholem-Aleichem’s own treatment of the story), it follows the
melamed
(it means “teacher”) as he goes to a nearby town to buy a milk goat but is tricked into bringing home a male goat—and tricked again when he takes it back to complain. The drama captivated audiences with its rustic appeal to the imagination: the
melamed
(Will Lee) danced in skipping steps from town to town, the goat—whether male or female—indicated merely by the stiff rope leash he carried. Music by Serge Hovey and simple lighting established scene and mood: distinct pools delineated the
melamed
’s home, the goat seller’s, and the inn between them where the goat was switched. A wash of light tinged with green created the forest the
melamed
scampered through from one locale to another.

In contrast, act 2, “Bontche Schweig” (“Bontche the Silent”) projected a tattered majesty, underscored by the ethereal pomp of music by a composer who went uncredited (because as a visiting Israeli he was not authorized to work in the United States). It was based on the story by I. L. Peretz (featured in Maurice Samuel’s
Prince of the Ghetto
). Bontche (Jack Gilford) is a humble, life-worn man who arrives in heaven—the stage bathed in pale lavender light. Dressed in rags and burlap assembled from fabric the designer, Aline Bernstein, had torn from a packing crate, he is judged to be worthy of great reward and is invited to name his grandest wish. All he can think to ask for—and that, meekly—is a hot roll with butter. The angels turn away in shame. Da Silva arrayed the actors in formal groupings, and while their performances did not cross over into abstraction, he insisted that they avoid “over-detailed naturalism.”

The evening closed with an adaptation of a Sholem-Aleichem work, “The High School” (“Gymnasia”), the piece in the collection
Railroad Stories
that chronicles a talented boy’s effort to gain admittance to a school closed to Jews—and that coincided with abiding quotas for Jews in some universities and with debates in the press and the courts over racial segregation in America’s public schools. (The Supreme Court had heard a first round of arguments in
Brown v
.
Board of Education
some five months earlier, though its ruling was still a year away.) This act presented yet another theatrical style: fourth-wall realism with characters in period dress but, still, minimal scenery—some bare tables and chairs—and no special effects. Robert de Cormier—a highly sought-after arranger who had worked with Paul Robeson and was directing the left-wing Young Jewish Folksingers (the first group to record “We Shall Overcome”)—fashioned the traditionally Ashkenazi score, working from the doleful Yiddish folk song “The Golden Peacock.”