Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (42 page)

Jewison made up his mind the night he saw the show. He wanted Topol. Of course Jewison had thought about Zero Mostel, whose performance he’d seen early in the run a couple of years earlier when he happened to be in New York. Jewison hadn’t liked him. Watching from a cushion in an aisle of the balcony—he wangled the perch from Prince in the sold-out house at the last minute—Jewison felt Mostel lacked reality. He was too big, too American, and he was pulling the viewer out of the play. On film, that hypertheatricality would turn out even worse. At least for the kind of film Jewison wanted to make. From the start, his vision required absolute realism (within the conventions of a musical film, that is). He didn’t want any dancing that wasn’t part of the plot—in the wedding scene or the “L’Chaim” celebration at the inn—so no gamboling down the lane and singing “Tradition.” He didn’t want to shoot in the Kansas or Saskatchewan locations the producers were pushing; he wanted to be as near to Sholem-Aleichem territory as he could get in 1971. (That turned out to be Yugoslavia.) “Everything must be rooted in truth and total cinematic believability,” he insisted. So, he said, his Tevye had to feel like a Russian Jew and he wanted an actor who was no more than a generation away from that experience.

Chaim Topol as the bumbling patriarch Sallah Shabati.

Mostel, in fact, was closer to Eastern European
Yiddishkayt
than Topol: the American actor grew up religiously observant, speaking Yiddish, while Topol was a robust, Hebrew-speaking sabra. But that was precisely the quality that stirred Jewison. His idea of what a Russian Jew feels like was filtered through—even distorted by—the assertion of Israel as the destiny of the Diaspora, and he would read the coming sabra brashness backward into Tevye’s tenacity. “I identified very strongly with Israel and that’s really the reason I hired him,” Jewison later acknowledged.

Topol very well could have nailed the offer in the scene toward the show’s end when the constable issues the eviction and Tevye tells him to “get off my land.” In that moment, Jewison admired how “you could see him stiffen up and stand up as tall as he could.” Sure, Topol was a fine actor. But Jewison responded to something more: “It was the Israeli in him. It was the pride, the pride of being Jewish.” Even as the Jews were forced out of Russia, you could tell, Jewison marveled, that they were a strong people who “would somehow build a country of their own.” Topol connected the same dots: “My grandfather was a sort of Tevye, and my father was a son of Tevye,” he told a journalist. “My grandfather was a Russian Jew and my father was born in Russia, south of Kiev. So I knew of the big disappointment with the Revolution, and the Dreyfus trial in France, and the man with the little mustache on his upper lip, the creation of the State of Israel and ‘Masada will never fall again.’ It’s the grandchildren now who say that. It’s all one line—it comes from Masada 2,000 years ago, and this Teyve of mine already carries in him the chromosomes of those grandchildren.”

In a London theater, in the heady wake of the Six-Day War, Jewison saw Hollywood’s future Tevye: one with whom Ari Ben Canaan had merged.

*   *   *

The Six-Day War galvanized American Jews, too, stirring fears and feelings of attachment that exceeded the surges of support the American community had expressed during Israel’s fight for statehood in 1948 and, again, during the Suez crisis of 1956. Zionism had been growing central to Jewish American life for more than a generation—through synagogue sisterhood projects, children’s summer camps, youth groups, and other programs—but no one could have foreseen the response the 1967 war provoked. Within hours of the outbreak of hostilities, thousands of American Jews volunteered to fly immediately to Tel Aviv to fill in at work for Israelis called to arms; within a day the community raised $430 million for the cause. Even more powerfully, Israel’s victory produced an unprecedented euphoria in Jewish American communities—superseding
Fiddler on the Roof
as a profound, not to mention weightier, source of communal pride—and sealed their identification with the Jewish state for years to come. The historian Howard Sachar characterized the response as nothing less than “the collective incarnation of a new ethnic heroism.” This coalescing around Israel saw parallel changes in mainstream Jewish alliances within the United States as the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power. That Black nationalists, New Leftists, and Third Worldists of various sorts (numerous Jews among them) sided with the Palestinians living in the territories Israel had captured and occupied gave mainstream Jewry an extra shove rightward.

But there was more to it than that. Domestic conditions challenged the liberal consensus so recently celebrated in
Fiddler
. While American Jews would not in large number abandon commitments to a range of liberal stances in spheres like civil liberties, workers’ access to collective bargaining, and women’s rights, their allegiance to Black equality frayed as Blacks themselves challenged the limits of equality as liberalism defined it—which, as they saw it, was not equality at all. By the end of the 1960s, Sachar suggests, Jews not only retreated into parochialism but “wondered if they had not neglected their own interests in championing the cause of other minorities.” A prime force behind that suspicion came in 1968. And with it,
Fiddler
became a battleground.

CHAPTER
7

F
IDDLER
W
HILE
B
ROOKLYN
B
URNS

I
n the spring of 1968,
R
ichard
P
iro wasn’t paying much attention to the winds of controversy gathering around the neighborhood where he worked as a schoolteacher. His hands were full enough as he organized two dozen adolescent performers, as many production technicians, and a student orchestra for a full-scale musical comedy. Piro was about to open
Oliver!
and he was focused on getting the set crew to finish the scenery, the altos to hit their first note in the opening chorus number, and a feisty but talented seventh grader, Teddy Smith, to show up at rehearsal on time and not clown around when he got there. It wasn’t that Piro lacked interest in politics—he occasionally participated in demonstrations against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War (and soon would join the nascent gay liberation movement)—but he held his students to high standards and demanded the same dedication of himself. He and his colleague Bruce Birnel, the music teacher and AV coordinator, may have been working in a junior high school, but as far as Piro was concerned, “We were in show business.”

With some significant differences. In junior high, lead actors don’t always deliver—especially when their voices are cracking. On opening night of
Oliver!
that May, the boy in the title role opened his mouth for his solo in “Food, Glorious Food” and, in place of the sweet countertenor that had landed him the role, out came an uncontrollable caw. He froze, standing silently onstage for what seemed like ages. But in a moment a voice piped up from the chorus and sang the phrases beautifully. It was Teddy Smith, the slight African American boy whose winning smile and innocent-seeming charm often helped him out of mischievous jams. Though academically weak—he couldn’t remember multiplication tables or where to put commas—Teddy had absorbed the play’s lines as he sat at rehearsals, and when his classmate faltered he stepped in and saved the tune, singing Oliver’s lines until the other boy could recover. Piro couldn’t get over the discipline and focus Teddy was capable of when he wasn’t goofing around. That night the teacher determined that this alert boy would play the lead in the following year’s musical.

Piro understood how lucky he was that he could count on there being another musical the next year. His principal, Julius Rubin, sustained an unusual commitment to the arts, all the more rare for his working in one of the poorest districts of the nation’s largest school system. Rubin simply saw no reason his pupils should be denied the activities and special courses that were routine in more affluent areas just because they lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

By the mid-1960s, Brownsville was the kind of place people meant when they spoke about America’s “urban crisis.” And like most other such places, it hadn’t always been that way. At the turn of the twentieth century, Brownsville had beckoned Eastern European Jews from the squalor of the Lower East Side with promises of fresh air and open space. Real estate ads marketed this section of east-central Brooklyn as a community “where Jews can live as in the Old Country.” The bucolic splendor didn’t last long. By 1915—the year Zero Mostel was born there—230,000 Jews had settled in Brownsville, making the area one of the country’s densest concentrations of Jews, who were crowded into tenements and rapidly deteriorating subdivided houses. It was a radical neighborhood, too, producing strong local advocacy organizations and, as a voting district, consistently sending Socialist and American Labor Party representatives to Albany and city hall.

African Americans began trickling into Brownsville and adjoining Ocean Hill in the late 1920s and the flow accelerated as they were pushed out of the South by shifts in agriculture and then pulled to the North by the wartime boom in manufacturing and shipyard jobs. To accommodate the newcomers, local activists—Jewish leftists and their working-class Black neighbors—pressed for public housing to replace the dilapidated homes that blighted the area; they insisted that it maintain the neighborhood’s character by rising no higher than three stories and, most important, that it mix low- and middle-income occupants. But, as the historian Wendell Pritchett has shown, these efforts came to naught as liberal community organizations—churches, the NAACP—refused to join forces with radicals for fear of being tainted as Communists. In any case, they would not have been much of a match for the heedless bulldozing of Robert Moses. Soon, thousands of families displaced by his “urban renewal” programs in Manhattan and elsewhere were relocated to Brownsville’s crumbling tenements. And not long after, the city erected hulking sixteen-story housing projects there, restricted to low-income residents.

From the outset, Brownsville had been a stepping-stone neighborhood—the literary critic Alfred Kazin, also born there in 1915, characterized it as “notoriously, a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.” Jews moved out as they gained solid economic footing, taking their tax dollars with them. But Blacks had few places to go—they were excluded from many of the “nicer” neighborhoods—and anyway, with many occupations still closed to them and blue-collar jobs drying up in the 1950s, they had little chance to amass the nest egg they’d need to move up. Ocean Hill–Brownsville continued to decline. By the mid-1960s, its jobless rate hit 17 percent—five times the city average—and spiked to 36 percent for young men. Three-quarters of the population was receiving some form of public assistance. The schools, more racially segregated in 1964 than they had been in 1954, the year of
Brown v. Board of Education
, were in a shambles. Experienced teachers invoked the privilege of seniority to transfer out of neighborhoods like Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and when community activists tried to persuade the Board of Education to rotate personnel periodically in order to guarantee their children some strong instructors, the teachers’ union balked. Classes were severely overcrowded (even as desks sat open in white neighborhoods) and some 73 percent of the local children had fallen below grade level in reading, a whopping 85 percent in math.

Local Black and Puerto Rican parents, recognizing that their children languished on the losing side of New York’s separate and unequal system, joined the citywide movement to desegregate the schools. For a decade they lobbied, picketed, and met with city and state officials, but plan after plan, promise after promise, met massive resistance. An opposing organization called Parents and Taxpayers, which boasted more than a hundred chapters around the New York boroughs by 1963, eventually totaling some 500,000 members, aggressively challenged any hint that white children might be bused from their own pleasant neighborhoods into dysfunctional ghetto schools.

Julius Rubin’s school—Harry A. Eiseman Junior High School 275—was designed to offer a fresh solution. Situated on the border of the racially divided communities of Canarsie and Brownsville, the three-story building, occupying a full square block of Rockaway Avenue at Linden Boulevard, was meant to be the anchor for a campus that would next add a high school and eventually perhaps even a community college. The idea was that it would draw students from both sides of Linden—the boundary between the white middle-class and the impoverished Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods—relieving the overcrowding and enrolling an integrated student body without any busing or unnatural manipulations. The new school was outfitted with a spacious gym, a 600-seat auditorium with a real stage, and three music classrooms that featured not only raked horseshoe seating ideal for choral singing but also acoustic tiles along their walls.