Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (3 page)

Addressing Mendele as the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Sholem-Aleichem explained that what distinguished a Jewish novel was its expression of the national characteristics of Jews, which differed from those of other people and, in fact, could not be conveyed in a standard romance. In a Jewish novel, the thwarted lovers had to put their values above their happiness, or, rather, find their happiness in the fulfillment of their values. As in Jewish life, he argued, in a Jewish novel duty should prevail—and pay off. Rokhele does fall in love with Stempenyu—his sublime fiddle playing transports her, his mystifying musician’s slang excites her (Sholem-Aleichem included a glossary), and he is gorgeous and solicitous, to boot. She sneaks away from home, heart aflutter, to meet him for walks and conversations. In the end, however, she not only stays faithful to her husband but awakens his devotion and lives happily ever after. Stempenyu gets his just deserts: he is left pining for Rokhele in his miserable marriage.

When he thought of adapting
Stempenyu
for the Yiddish stage some half a dozen years after its publication, Sholem-Aleichem expected it to offer the same chastening lessons to the theater that it had tendered to Yiddish fiction. Besides, the main characters seemed made to order for a dashing male actor and a pretty ingenue. And music was absolutely essential to the plot, so songs wouldn’t have to be interspersed at random, as was so common on the Yiddish stage; they could be fully integrated in an artistic way.

Thus, with great self-assurance, in that fall of 1905, he sent the script from Kiev to an acquaintance in New York, a physician and anthropologist named Morris Fishberg, who had offered to represent him when they’d met in Warsaw some six months earlier at the rapturously received premiere of
Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt
. He asked Fishberg to bring this surefire hit to America’s two leading actor-managers of the Yiddish theater, the grand and graceful impresario Jacob P. Adler and the heartthrob of the ghetto Boris Thomashefsky. Having received no reply after a few weeks and ever more eager for a cash advance, Sholem-Aleichem followed up with a second letter on October 8. He reminded Fishberg that he should already have received
Stempenyu, or the Jewish Paganini
, and told him that a second script was on its way. He added a portentous postscript. Admitting he “should have told you this before,” he noted that his work possessed no spectacular effects. “I will never permit myself to give in to American taste and lower the standards of art,” Sholem-Aleichem vowed.

Then his world turned upside down. Reactionary resistance to Russia’s October Manifesto took the violent form of attacks on students, workers, and Jews. Some five hundred Jews were murdered by mobs in Odessa as police stood by. And in Kiev, Sholem-Aleichem and his family had to flee their apartment in a building most of whose occupants were Jewish—a likely target—and take shelter in the Imperial Hotel.

From there, Sholem-Aleichem wrote to Fishberg “with trembling hands.” At first he took heart in seeing armed soldiers on the streets, who would surely help. “And they really did help,” he reported, “but not us. They helped loot, beat, plunder, steal. Before our eyes, before the whole world’s eyes, they helped smash windows, crash through doors, and break locks, and they lined their own pockets. In front of our children, they beat Jews to death—women and children—and shouted, ‘Money! Give us your money!’” He decided he should come immediately to America with his family to “sit out these evil times.”

Two days later, still holed up in the Imperial Hotel, he wrote to Fishberg once more. “I send you the fifth act of
Stempenyu
,” he said. “A new act instead of the earlier one.” In the rewrite, Sholem-Aleichem made a drastic change: he killed off his protagonist, even though, he told Fishberg, “a Jewish heroine seldom poisons herself on account of love.” But what choice did he have if he wanted to satisfy American tastes? From the confines of a hotel room in a city full of shattered glass, its streets strewn with a hundred dead bodies, the lofty standards of art seemed a lot less urgent than only three weeks before. “What can one do,” Sholem-Aleichem asked Fishberg, “when America commands?” It wouldn’t be the last time that the works of Sholem-Aleichem were adapted with an eye toward New York showbiz.

Willing as Sholem-Aleichem was to “give in to American taste” after all, there wasn’t any follow-up from the impresarios in New York. Fishberg managed to secure a commission for him from the daily paper the
Yidishes tageblat
for a series of dispatches on the situation in Russia—some forty “pogrom letters” that ran between November 1905 and January 1906—but Fishberg sent not a word about the prospects for Sholem-Aleichem’s scripts.

In this fraught period—the rhetorical pogrom letters reveal the author as bitter and traumatized—he wrote a fifth Tevye story, as if the hopeful hero’s confrontation with the harrowing world were now necessary, a compressed means of chronicling a foreboding new chapter in the history of the Jewish Pale. In “Khave,” published in the spring of 1906, Tevye is as chatty as ever, but the story of the apostate daughter who abandons her home, her faith, and her people to marry the Ukrainian, Fyedka, adds a new, almost overwhelming current of anguish. Sholem-Aleichem shows Tevye heartbroken, bewildered, and at loose ends; he follows the precepts of his faith but finds no solace in them. By story’s end, he wants to make himself disappear. He implores Sholem-Aleichem, “Don’t make a book out of this, and if it should happen that you do, write like it’s someone else, not me.”

The
Yidishes tageblat
had promised Sholem-Aleichem $600 for the pogrom reports but turned over only $250, so Sholem-Aleichem embarked on yet another reading tour to make ends meet. The highlight of the trip was a stop in London in July 1906, not only because of the ardor of the fans who greeted him but also because he had a chance to see Jacob Adler onstage and even to meet “the king of the Yiddish actors,” as he put it, when Adler called on him “to pay his respects” and to ask whether Sholem-Aleichem “with his golden pen would write for the Yiddish stage in New York.”

Adler was performing in Yankev Gordin’s
Der meturef
(
The Madman
), a four-act drama about a man with noble ideals—that factory workers should labor in decent conditions, that wives should not be beaten by husbands—that make him an outcast from a cynical, hidebound community. According to Adler, Gordin, the literary “reformer” held up by the champions of a “higher” Yiddish theater for such plays as his versions of
King Lear
and
Faust
(
Got, mentsh, un tayvl
), was no longer writing for him, and he invited Sholem-Aleichem to turn out several plays he could star in. The author did some quick calculations: “Reb Yankev Gordin, he who translates and improves Shakespeare and Goethe earned in one year, for two original dramas and for two improved dramas by others, not less and not more than five thousand dollars,” he recounted to his son-in-law the aspiring writer Y. D. Berkowitz, hastening to explain that that was “around ten thousand rubles to us.” So he asked Adler: “How many plays do you need?”

“Not fewer than ten dramas,” the impresario answered. “Five original and five improved from others.”

“Well, then,” Sholem-Aleichem told Berkowitz, “I instantly rolled up my sleeves.”

In his letters to Berkowitz and when he described the meeting further after returning to his family, now in Geneva, Sholem-Aleichem sounded giddy, as if he’d fallen under the actor’s spell. His “new hopes and high spirits” were in no way dampened by Adler’s suggestion that he learn a little about constructing dramatic action by studying plays by none other than Gordin himself. And if he was troubled by Adler’s failure even to acknowledge the plays he had sent to him the previous autumn, he made no mention of it.

Back home in Geneva, he drafted
David ben David
within three weeks. The hero, a gentle millionaire whose parents have died, fixes on the idea for a Jewish national homeland in historic Palestine, which serves as an excuse for his uncle to declare him mentally unstable and thus seize the inheritance due to him. Sholem-Aleichem was so sure of the script’s prospects he went out and bought a hectograph machine so that he and Berkowitz could print up some thirty copies. How much better it was than Gordin’s work, Sholem-Aleichem thought. He had despised
Der meturef
in London. Adler dazzled, of course, but the script enraged him. He regarded the whole thing as a lie. No real Jews speak or act as Gordin depicted them, Sholem-Aleichem railed. His writing was “imitative of the great
goyim
[Gentiles].” Sholem-Aleichem condemned the play in terms that have long since been used by one Jew to discredit the work of another—including versions of his own: he challenged its authenticity. “It is false,” Sholem-Aleichem insisted, “through and through false.” With Berkowitz’s assistance, he bound all thirty copies of
David ben David
in thick red covers. He planned to take them to America.

He would not, however, take his whole family. Short of funds for the fares, he and his wife would bring their youngest child, Numa, then five, and leave the older children behind. First, he’d tour England again to make some money, and then the three would sail from Southampton. Adler was still performing at the Pavilion Theatre in London, and on the afternoon of August 14, Sholem-Aleichem assembled a few friends in his room at the Three Nuns Hotel to listen along as he read his new play for the impresario. The small audience followed the tragic action with tension, which was relieved now and then by humor, according to the writer Israel Cohen, who was in attendance. The author gestured and altered the inflections of his voice to bring the characters to life. As for Adler, he “fidgeted and nodded his head occasionally, and when the reading was over he made some criticism, which the author readily agreed to consider.” After that August day, there’s no record that Sholem-Aleichem ever said a word about
David ben David
again. Adler certainly never produced it. All but one of the thirty bound copies—the one Berkowitz had kept—disappeared, presumably burned by their author.

Two months later, on October 13, in a grim mood, Sholem-Aleichem boarded the American Line’s SS
St. Louis
, along with Olga and Numa and some 3,500 other passengers. Happy as he was to leave London, where he had few friends and everything felt cold and foreign, he was losing confidence in his prospects overseas. The
Yidishes tageblat
, still owing him money for his pogrom reports, paid even less for some short stories he’d sent on ahead. Why, they insisted, should a New York publication pay him anything at all when the pieces had already been published in Russia and could easily be reprinted for nothing? Abandoning faith in the Yiddish press as his savior, Sholem-Aleichem decided that everything would depend on the theater. But Adler’s indifferent response to
David ben David
—not to mention his silence on the earlier scripts—dulled those prospects, too. Like the vast majority of the other travelers, Sholem-Aleichem was headed to America without really knowing what he would do once he got there. From his second-class cabin, as the voyage neared its end, he heard choral singing from the deck below. But, he wrote to his family, “nothing can dispel the despondency and the gnawing in the heart. Like a fog settling upon the soul.”

Arriving in New York Harbor on the gray and rainy afternoon of October 20 brightened his outlook. A telegram announcing the birth of his first grandchild, a girl, greeted him at the pier, along with his brother, Bernard Roberts (born Baruch Rabinowitz), who had immigrated years earlier and done well as a luggage manufacturer. The crowd of some two hundred well-wishers who shouted “hurrah” and threw their hats in the air for Sholem-Aleichem had been organized by fledgling local Zionist groups; they sang “Hatikvah” as their most earnest gesture of welcome. Fishberg was there. So was the editor of the
Yidishes tageblat
(despite the quarrel Sholem-Aleichem had with him) as well as the editor of the other major Orthodox paper, the
Morgn zhurnal
. Fans hoisted the writer onto their shoulders and carried him around, cheering (which made Numa burst into tears). Jacob Adler, accompanied by his wife, the actor Sara Adler, and their children, presented him with a bouquet of flowers. “The occasion could not be more exultant,” Sholem-Aleichem wrote home. The next day found him no less buoyant: everyone was promising business deals and mountains of gold. Never mind that he still had no clue “from where the gold will pour”; on his first day in America, “it seems a new era is dawning on our horizon, full of success, luck, and happiness.”

As he held court at his brother’s apartment in the Bronx, surrounded by flowers sent by admirers, Sholem-Aleichem told interviewers from both the Yiddish- and English-language press that, among other things, he planned to write for the Yiddish stage—after studying it for a while. One magazine—the
Menorah
, an English-language Jewish monthly—had announced in its September issue that Adler had acquired some of his plays for the coming season; they’d have to rely on their humor, it predicted, to “make up for [Sholem-Aleichem’s] lack of ability as a dramatist.”

Adler had expressed the same anxiety and perhaps Thomashefsky hesitated to put on the plays he’d received earlier, for similar reasons. But at the same time, these consummate theater men understood the commodity value of Sholem-Aleichem’s very name. He was widely beloved by readers in America who had enjoyed his stories in newspapers back home as well as in New York. Recreational amateur groups put on his one-act plays in private little productions; social groups across the political spectrum read his stories aloud together, as did individual families. He was, the actor-managers figured, a bankable icon of the old home. And their theaters were hurting. Nickelodeons were springing up downtown, luring audiences away with their five-cent miracles of moving pictures. Meanwhile, the music halls—popular in both Yiddish and English on the Lower East Side—offered spectators a variety of entertainments that also competed with the theaters. Not for the last time, theater producers figured they could rely on Sholem-Aleichem to draw a warm bath of nostalgia for their audiences. His plays might not be so great, but his brand seemed like a sure bet.