Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (13 page)

Promoted as taking the “same care for music and costuming, for staging and design that made
The World of Sholom Aleichem
a memorable theater evening,”
Tevya and His Daughters
broke Off-Broadway records for advance ticket sales. Before the lights went up on Mike Kellin in the title role, appealing to God in an opening monologue, the show had taken in $28,000, well clearing the budgeted production costs of $19,644. Columbia Records had produced an LP version before opening, too—another first for Off-Broadway. Four years after Perl’s and Da Silva’s initial triumph, a Sholem-Aleichem sequel seemed like a sure bet.

Once again Da Silva directed with a homey style, relying on music by Serge Hovey to underscore the action and simple scenery (a painted backdrop by the artist Jack Levine featured rustic thick-brush images of shtetl houses receding into the distance). Kellin’s partner in the role of Golde was Anna Vita Berger, and the two made a quaint, somewhat low-key pair. Berger was determined to avoid any shred of shrewishness, aiming for the hardscrabble practicality that contrasted with Tevye’s spiritual nature. As for Tevye, New York hadn’t seen him onstage since Maurice Schwartz had played him—in Yiddish—as an older, broken man held together and aloft by the wisdom and unyielding practice of Judaism. Now, for the first time in English, newly encountered by myriad audience members, Tevye was younger and lighter—warm, sweet, almost as easygoing as the all-accepting dad of the
Eternal Light
radio version a decade before.

Da Silva coached the actors to avoid exaggeration in their Jewish characterizations: he explicitly wanted the “music” of Jewish inflection without any singsong shtick, that is, the familiar, warm feeling of Jewishness with any traces of nasty old stereotypes washed away. Perl provided some occasional phrasing to help create the effect: he has Tevye saying, “Rich she’ll be” and “Fed she’ll be.” He gave Golde lines like, “My enemies should have such luck.” Drawing language from both the Butwin volume of Tevye stories and Maurice Samuel’s creative portrayal, Perl fashioned Tevye as a kindhearted naif who could be steered away from his hidebound beliefs by sound reasoning and appeals for justice. In each of the three stories he dramatized—Tevye’s rise from drayman to dairyman and the marriage tales of Tsaytl and Hodl—Perl paints Tevye as eager to make his daughters happy as he is receptive to their newfangled values. Often Perl secularizes Tevye’s constant quotations—sometimes they sound more like a rustic’s trite proverbs than a religious man’s inventive references to Scripture. (“A woman is like a melon. Who knows what’s inside?” “Work is noble, but money is more comfortable.”)

In the episode focused on Hodel’s romance with the revolutionary Perchik, Perl’s version of the paterfamilias ends up resembling the protagonist of Bertolt Brecht’s early Leninist play
The Mother
(based on a Gorky story) in which a working-class parent learns to see her personal travails within the larger framework of mass political struggle. Perl doesn’t go nearly as far as Mikhoels did in his Soviet portrayal of Tevye, but he does nudge his Tevye toward revolutionary enlightenment. His guide is Perchik, who challenges Tevye’s fatalism—“this is the way God made the world”—with passionate speeches that need not embellish much on the rhetoric Sholem-Aleichem gave him. (However, Perl does co-opt Theodor Herzl’s famous phrase about the prospect of a Jewish state—“If you will it, it is no dream”—for Perchik’s promise of postczar paradise in Russia.) The difference is his Tevya’s response.

By play’s end, Tevya is encouraging a reluctant Hodel to go join Perchik in Siberia and reassuring her: “He’ll serve his time; you’ll wait. Meanwhile the pot is boiling as they say. Then one day (When? One day)—it happens and the sun will rise and everything will be bright and shining. Then he’ll be free with all the others like him and together you’ll roll up your sleeves and turn the Little Father [the czar] upside down.” Hodel goes off to pack. As soon as that’s settled, Tevya winds up the play with a brief monologue, telling the audience what he has to look forward to now that he has concluded happy marriages for two of his daughters: “My Chava, my next, has begun with a writer: a second Gorki, she tells me. Although who the first Gorki is I never heard. How they live, these writers, I haven’t yet discovered. Maybe they eat pages. The name of this writer is—Fedka Galaghan: not exactly a Jewish name. So what will happen there, I leave to your tender mercies. My little ones are too young to be problems; but they’ll grow into it. (
He laughs
.)”

Mike Kellin and Anna Vita Berger in Perl’s
Tevya and His Daughters

In short, Perl’s was a Tevya without tension. Nothing was at stake for him or the play because he made no effort to hold fast to his religious practice in the face of change. That was a dramaturgical problem the mainstream reviewers could not excuse—despite charm and humor, “it is theater that is missing,” Brooks Atkinson summed up in the
New York Times
—and it also was the reason the show found no traction with Jewish audiences. As a total pushover, Tevya had little to say to them about the preciousness of the lost world or the confrontation of their forebears with modernity. He was pleasant enough but hollow. The
Forverts
was not being academic or snobbish when it declared, simply, “This is not
our
Tevya.”

As a good Marxist (who had left the Party by this point), Perl engaged in some public self-criticism, writing to the letters section of the
New York Times
drama pages to promise that the “cast, director, playwright, composer and producers have used the period since ‘Tevya’s’ opening to assess our mutual weaknesses and to seek solutions in the light of published reviews. Audience response during the past few days has been our barometer. We have been led to believe that some of the failings of opening night have been overcome.”

But not enough to keep the show going. It closed in mid-November, after a six-week run. A touring version for half a dozen actors in a van once again set out for some JCCs, but
Tevya and His Daughters
did not thrill the provinces, as
The World of Sholom Aleichem
had done. When the hero shrugged everything off, he gave spectators little reason to care about his fate.

Besides, artistic taste among theatergoers was challenged and was changing in the four short years since
The World
had charmed spectators with its storybook simplicity. Off-Broadway was exploding. Jean Genet’s
The Maids
had its shattering New York debut in a rinky-dink space in the neighborhood not yet known as the East Village; Joseph Papp was directing modern-dress Shakespeare with young, multiracial casts; the Living Theatre had already been kicked out of two buildings by city authorities; and a blacklisted fat comedian named Zero Mostel was about to astonish the theater community with his shaded portrayal of Leopold Bloom in
Ulysses in Nighttown
. Broadway, too, was finding new forms that made Perl’s plays seem quaint in more than subject matter.
Waiting for Godot
held out on West Forty-fifth Street for two months in the spring of 1956. And not even two weeks after
Tevya and His Daughters
opened at the Carnegie, two rival groups of hoodlums burst onto the stage at the Winter Garden and changed the Broadway musical forever:
West Side Story
—“conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jerome Robbins,” as he insisted his credits read—was an operatic tragedy in the idiom of a musical, mixing vernacular movement and ballet, Latin-inflected jazz and twentieth-century classical music, street slang and lyrical dialogue. The modernist, urban, liberal sensibility of its four Jewish and gay creators was expressed most of all in the “plea for racial tolerance” that the story, in the composer Leonard Bernstein’s phrase, could make. And in contrast to “Sholom Aleichem’s gentle but firm plea for tolerance and humanism” in
The World
,
West Side Story
was making it through an edgy contemporary story in a groundbreaking form devised by some of the greatest talents the American theater has known.

Spectators of all stripes embraced
West Side Story
, of course, but for Jews—who still made up some 70 percent of Broadway audiences by some counts—the show spoke especially to a growing postwar objection to bigotry, which was starting to project outward now that Jews themselves were no longer primary victims of intolerance (this is why the original concept for the show, pitting Jews against Catholics, couldn’t work). In his influential and best-selling 1955 book,
Protestant, Catholic, Jew
, the sociologist Will Herberg had declared that American Jews were no longer a fringe, foreign-seeming minority but regular citizens who simply practiced one of the three religions that expressed the American way of life: they were as normal as their Gentile neighbors. As the 1950s drew to a close—at least according to the organizations that claimed to represent them—Jews worried less and less about antisemitism and extended their sympathy to the current victims of racial and ethnic prejudice. In addition to being no match for the thrilling experiments taking place on New York’s not-for-profit and commercial stages,
Tevya and His Daughters
—“all syrup,” “too sweet,” and “languid” as reviews put it—was not balanced by any moral seriousness that midcentury American Jews could grab hold of.

And at last, between
The World of Sholom Aleichem
and
Tevya
, the blacklist started to fade. Perl, ever optimistic, was feeling “a beginning of a thaw” in the summer of 1955—some six months after the Senate had voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy—and he was hired to write for what he deemed a “worthless” television program. He even began to hope that his passport might be restored and he would be able to travel to Europe. Even as what he called the “assault on the theater”—HUAC’s Foley Square hearings investigating Broadway—opened that same summer, Perl saw better times on the near horizon. “And yet, my friend, the world grows ever more hopeful,” he wrote to Jacob Ben-Ami, then on tour with
The World of Sholom Aleichem
in Buenos Aires. “I think we may all still be allowed to work to the best of our ability—some day and soon.”

Perl’s comrade in the left-wing faction of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the radio host John Henry Faulk, had filed suit against AWARE (a private organization that monitored the industry for subversives, cofounded by the author of
Red Channels
). Roy Cohn and the other lawyers defending the publishers of
Counterattack
and
Red Channels
managed to drag the case out for several years, but in the meantime—before 1962, when a jury would award Faulk the largest sum in a libel judgment to date—Hollywood had started to crack open the door to artists it had recently shunned. As Tevye trod the boards in New York, on the West Coast Alfred Hitchcock hired the blacklisted actor Norman Lloyd as associate producer for his new TV series. Bit by bit, others would be finding work again.

Once again, Sholem-Aleichem helped. In 1959, the producers of the acclaimed new television program
Play of the Week
, airing in syndication on New York’s independent Channel 13 (later to become part of the public broadcasting network) and on some one hundred affiliated stations around the country, decided to present Perl’s
World of Sholom Aleichem
among its offerings of videotaped stage dramas drawn from the canonical and contemporary repertory. It was the program’s tenth show, following plays by Euripides, Turgenev, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Langston Hughes, among others. The producer Henry Weinstein, who had loved the play and thought it deserved a wider audience, pushed the production forward over the objections of his bosses, executive producer David Susskind and station owner Ely Landau, who derided the work as “too Jewish.” To direct, Weinstein hired an experienced television man, Don Richardson (born Melvin Schwartz), and he insisted on casting many of the original blacklisted actors and a few more, despite Susskind’s anxiety. If he’d get in any kind of trouble for hiring one shunned actor, he figured, how much more trouble could he attract for hiring a bunch? Enfeebled
Counterattack
threatened a campaign against the program, but the independent station did not rely on sponsors, so there was no target for their attacks.

Morris Carnovsky (who had already appeared in a
Play of the Week
show) reprised his role as the father in “The High School,” and Jack Gilford returned as Bontche; new additions from the rolls of the spurned included Lee Grant (Defending Angel) and Sam Levene (Mendele, the bookseller). The leading roles were completed with Nancy Walker (the Melamed’s wife) and Gertrude Berg (the mother in “The High School”), plus one more actor, Zero Mostel, who had once been Richardson’s acting student and whose stage career was taking off, even as he was barred from the movies. Some months earlier, he’d won an Off-Broadway Obie Award for his lead performance in
Ulysses in Nighttown
. He was the only actor cast in all three of the playlets that make up
The World of Sholom Aleichem
, playing the Melamed in “A Tale from Chelm,” an angel in “Bontche Schweig,” and a relative (with a spry dance at the celebration of the boy’s admission) in “The High School.”