Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (14 page)

Even if Weinstein had considered asking Da Silva to re-create the part of Mendele, the actor would have had to decline; Da Silva was tied up on Broadway, having just opened in a costarring role as the political machine boss Ben Marino in
Fiorello!
, a musical by a young songwriting duo making a splashy showing: Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.

Richardson rehearsed the company for catch-as-catch-can chunks of time over two weeks in a grotty room of the Polish National Hall on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Enthusiastic as he was about working with Mostel, Richardson soon excluded his former student from rehearsals—Mostel kept changing his blocking, timing, and even his lines, throwing the rest of the cast off-balance. Even without rehearsing, Mostel would deliver when it came time to tape, Richardson felt sure, despite his having to shoot in long takes, as in a live show with no stops, because the new type of tape they were using was too difficult and expensive to edit. In a tiny studio, Richardson manned a camera and called the shots; he put the program in the can in two days.

Richardson was right about Mostel: he performed brilliantly.
Variety
called him the “highlight of the show” and singled out his “remarkable pantomime talents,” especially in the twinkle-toed dance he performed as the Melamed, pulled from village to village by the invisible goat, his wrists twirling upward and his bulky body circling after, light as a balloon. In general, critics lauded the “stunning production” of “three one-acters of beauty, compassion and protest.” Not a single review mentioned that the broadcast occasioned the return to the airwaves of artists who’d been banned for years. Even to some of the actors, the small-scale event didn’t seem momentous. Lee Grant, for one, allowing that it was “a victory just to get something on in that period,” remembered the production merely as “one of those things that snuck by” without having much of an impact. After all, despite all the affiliated stations around the country, early public television drew small audiences. Nonetheless, a taboo had been broken and any first breach makes the next one easier. Perl credited
World
’s success on
Play of the Week
with opening the way, at least for him, back to regular employment in television. (By 1963, he was a lead writer for
East Side, West Side
, the high-quality weekly series about a New York City social worker played by George C. Scott; taking on urban issues like prostitution and poverty from a decidedly liberal point of view, it was produced by David Susskind.)

Perl’s
The World of Sholom Aleichem
helps break the blacklist on TV with Zero Mostel, Morris Carnovsky, and Nancy Walker.

The first air date of December 14, 1959, preceded by a couple of weeks an event often credited as a fatal blow to the blacklist: the director Otto Preminger’s announcement that he was engaging Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, as the screenwriter for his adaptation of Leon Uris’s blockbuster novel
Exodus
. Trumbo had been writing under a pseudonym for some time, as
Counterattack
had repeatedly reported—aghast, as usual—but now Preminger insisted on trumpeting his name in the credit roll.

By the time
Exodus
debuted on December 15, 1960—almost exactly a year to the day of the broadcast of
The World of Sholom Aleichem
—America was entering a new phase. The Cold War still raged, but the domestic Red hunt had finally ended. A young, appealing new president was about to take office (thanks, in part, to television’s new role in electoral politics). The Federal Drug Administration had approved the Pill in the spring of that year and nearly 2.5 million women were taking it. African American students had begun sitting in at segregated lunch counters in the South, escalating the direct action of the civil rights movement. “The sixties” hadn’t quite started, but they were coming.

For Jews—who had voted for John F. Kennedy by a greater margin than Irish Catholic Americans—the new decade opened on enormous changes. Antisemitism was evaporating into the atmosphere of postwar sympathy for Jews and of national optimism. Where one American in five told pollsters in 1948 they wouldn’t want a Jew as a neighbor, by 1959 such antipathy was expressed by only one in fifty. The new problem preoccupying Jewish organizations was assimilation: now that a majority of Jews had moved out of urban enclaves into the suburbs, where they built and joined synagogues in droves but rarely attended worship services, what would make them—and keep them—Jewish? In the generation since the war, in the historian Arthur A. Goren’s words, “the transcendent place of the ‘destruction and renewal’ theme in the group consciousness of American Jews” was set. Jews, as all-American exemplars of a shmattes-to-riches trajectory, were themselves part of the regeneration. And so, increasingly, was Israel.

Exodus
played no small part in building and shaping Jewish America’s self-image and politics and the culture Jews would embrace in the new era. Published in 1958, Uris’s potboiler, loosely based on the shipload of Holocaust survivors turned away from Palestine in 1947, stayed on the best-seller list for more than a year, holding the number-one spot for nineteen weeks. When the film opened, it boasted an advance sale of $1.6 million—the largest of any movie to date. Paul Newman starred as the brave and sexy sabra Ari Ben Canaan, “the fighting Jew who won’t take shit from nobody,” as Uris characterized him. Infusing Jews with a strong dose of empowerment, the movie borrowed the sweeping visuals and providential sensibility of popular biblical epics like Cecil B. DeMille’s
Ten Commandments
(1956) and
Ben Hur
(1959). It echoed, too, the morally unambiguous, adventuresome arrogance of the Western, with Arabs figured as Indians, unaccountably hostile enemies who must be driven from the land. Before
Exodus
, postwar pop culture versions of recent Jewish experience presented victims who simply couldn’t stay hidden forever—
The Diary of Anne Frank
was published in the United States in 1952, played on Broadway from 1955 to 1957, and was released as a film just five months before
Exodus
—or heroes, like those of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who went down fighting valiantly, as commemorated in John Hersey’s popular novel
The Wall
(adapted by Millard Lampell for a modest Broadway run in 1960). But now, here were Jews taking up arms and winning. Even
Jewish Currents
—the left-wing magazine that was Communist until its 1956 break with the Party—couldn’t contain its excitement over
Exodus
’s plucky personae: “They are Jews who fight, who die, who live and who triumph,” it gushed. Historians of Jewish America writing about the period point repeatedly to
Exodus
as the cultural phenomenon that, more than any other, produced Israel as an answer to the Holocaust. With these heroics, the invented memory of the shtetl brought forth by Maurice Samuel’s
World of Sholom Aleichem
,
Life Is with People
, Chagall’s paintings, and representations of Sholem-Aleichem’s works in the late 1940s and 1950s became one endpoint of a teleological arc that bent toward Israel. And that gave depictions of the people of the shtetl a newly, and nostalgically, noble purpose—not as passive victims but as preservers of a great culture that would be redeemed.

For what, after all, made Ari Ben Canaan, the very negation of the Diaspora Yid, a Jew? In part, self-assertion. In the climactic moment of
Exodus
’s central romance—the affair between Ari and Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), the Gentile nurse from Indiana (and surrogate for American viewers)—Ari looks over the Jezreel Valley and reminds her, “I just wanted you to know that I’m a Jew. This is my country.” But when Kitty objects (“All these differences between people are made up. People are the same, no matter what they’re called.”), Ari makes a speech that goes further, happily rejecting the long-held ground rule of American assimilation: “Don’t ever believe it. People are different. They have a right to be different. They like to be different. It’s no good pretending the differences don’t exist. They do. They have to be recognized and respected.”

This was a stunning statement of Jewish uniqueness at the height of Jewish absorption into the American middle class—made by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, hunky movie star, in the name of the “normalization” of the Zionist project. So what, exactly, was the difference—for thoroughly secular Ari Ben Canaan and for those who eagerly watched and cheered him on in suburban movie theaters? There was only one answer: the past. The culture they came from and the catastrophe it suffered. America’s new Jewish utopianism, Zionism, unlike the Israeli version, gave Jewish history in Europe a meaningful role as glorious legacy. Brave and brawny Ari Ben Canaan made mainstream culture safe for Tevye the Dairyman.

That the TV broadcast of
The World of Sholom Aleichem
and the movie version of
Exodus
played such significant roles in signaling the end of the blacklist spoke not only to the immense impact the Red hunting had had on Jewish artists (as well as teachers, union activists, and others). The two works, coming from such contrasting points of view and telling such disparate stories, also pointed the way toward popular Jewish culture that could incorporate both the trope of an idealized vanished world and the assertion of Jewish particularism, of both an empathy for other oppressed groups and an unabashed pride in Jewish achievement.

Reviewing
Tevya and His Daughters
in 1957 for the
New York Times
, Brooks Atkinson took pity on Sholem-Aleichem’s genial hero. “Since Tevya had the worst of everything in Old Russia,” Atkinson wrote, “he deserves the best of Broadway now.” In a new period of Jewish communal optimism and liberal consensus—and with the right team of artists coming along—Broadway could soon give Sholem-Aleichem’s milkman a proper welcome.

PART
II

T
EVYE
S
TRIKES
I
T
R
ICH

CHAPTER
3

T
EVYE
L
EAVES
FOR
THE
L
AND
OF
B
ROADWAY

I
n the summer and fall of 1959, while blacklisted
A
rnold
P
erl was preparing
The World of Sholom Aleichem
for television, Jerome Robbins was traveling the world with his troupe, Ballets: USA, on an official tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
West Side Story
was just completing a game-changing two-and-a-half-year Broadway run and the next show he directed and choreographed,
Gypsy
, had just opened to ecstatic reviews. Six years after his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Robbins had been selected to represent his country in its Cold War project of cultural diplomacy. At a cost of nearly $250,000 (some of the bill footed by the hosting countries), the program sent Robbins’s ethnically diverse company of twenty young dancers to perform, over nearly five months, in eighteen cities, among them Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Reykjavik, Istanbul, Belgrade, and even Soviet-dominated Warsaw.

The government could not have been more pleased with the result. In one city after another, the company triumphed with its ambitious and varied program. They presented Robbins’s contemporary version of
Afternoon of a Faun
, his satiric ballet
The Concert
, the cool sensation
N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz
, and a brand-new piece,
Moves
, in which dancers confronted audiences without music, scenery, or costumes. Their bodies in relationship to one another—whether in dances for the full company, a harsh pas de deux, a combative quintet for men, or a languid quartet for women—were all that Robbins needed to stir emotion and create a sense of unfolding drama. “There have been brilliant successes before and since—symphony orchestras, choral groups, jazz ensembles, other dance companies and so on,” wrote the anonymous reporter providing the official “tour analysis” for the program’s administrators. “But only ‘Ballets: USA’ was hailed everywhere as something new, fresh, original, and inherently American, growing out of and depicting the vitality of American life and art, and more, acclaim for an American creative genius.”

From Robbins’s explosive debut as a choreographer in 1944 with
Fancy Free
(the playful ballet following three sailors on shore leave in New York, with music by Leonard Bernstein),
American
was the word critics most commonly used to describe his innovative choreography, heralding its urban themes, high and tense energies, and admixture of the vernacular and balletic—combining homegrown invention with European patrimony, jitterbug with grand jeté. And American is what Robbins himself wanted his dances to be. “Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for its [
sic
] American quality particularly,” he told HUAC chair Clyde Doyle in 1953, after explaining that he had lost all romance with Communism when a comrade asked him to comment on the role dialectical materialism played in his creation of
Fancy Free
. Artists require freedom, he explained. “The minute they become subject to any dictums they’re being false.” And without a trace of irony, but with a good dose of condescension, Doyle urged him “to even put more” of that American quality into his work.