Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (44 page)

The students didn’t show much more enthusiasm than the aggrieved teachers for Piro’s choice. When he told his drama class about the show he’d picked—“It’s called
Fiddler on the Roof
and it’s a story about Jews”—they reacted with silence, the most polite response they could muster. He played them the record and told the kids they’d be learning some choreography for the show. Duane took that as a cue to crack up his classmates by jumping out of his seat to dance a mismatched jerk to the music. But this was a teacher who could rouse a few dozen inner-city adolescents to prance around in a minuet (even pretending to powder their seventeenth-century wigs and fluff their imaginary ruffles) and to analyze Brahms. It took a couple of days, but by the end of the week he had the group singing “Tradition” with gusto.

Piro could look at the students and see the roles map onto them almost automatically, but he always held auditions, beginning with a basic pitch-pipe test. Then he listened as they sang tunes of their choice and he cast them in parts like any other director—according to capability, constancy, and chemistry with others. Beverly was a natural for Golde (even though she thought she’d have more fun as Yente and the girl playing Yente, a high achiever named Olga, coveted the role of Golde). At thirteen, Bev was a year younger than Teddy, but she towered over him and gave off a vibe of solidity and good sense. She was active in student government, a natural leader, and, as she understood later, in character and out she would help Teddy “keep it together.” The others fell into place: lanky, self-assured Linus made a defiant Fyedka; Duane had the compact size and, as an athlete, the ability to play physical comedy as a cowering Motel; confident Reginald was testy enough to be the convincing revolutionary, Perchik; and petite Maritza, one of the few Puerto Rican kids in the company, had a sweet voice and a sad tinge of dislocation about her that would tear up the audience when she sang “Far from the Home I Love,” so she was his Hodel. Piro was surprised that quiet Sheila could sing with such charm—he knew she’d help carry “Matchmaker” beautifully and he cast her as Chava—and the seventh grader who belted like Mahalia Jackson would play the grandma who comes from the grave in the dream scene. Some thirty more kids filled in the rest of the roles and the chorus of villagers. When the fall rolled around, Birnel would gather the set and lighting crews—the tech and special effects were his special contribution—and he was already hatching design plans that involved projected film. While the New York City school system as a whole was finishing the year on an ominous note, Piro was filled with excitement—heightened, he could admit later, by the air of controversy.

Over the next couple of months, in his annual summer school drama program, Piro directed Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors
, grooming a new set of incoming chorus kids and refining the actors who had just finished seventh grade and would be playing lead roles in
Fiddler
as well as in a scheduled production of
The Crucible
. While Piro instructed the kids in theater basics—most of all, he never tired of telling them, actors must truly love the characters they play—the dispute between the UFT and the community governing board of Ocean Hill–Brownsville simmered down and returned to full boil several times as various arbitration efforts showed promise and then failed. In general, the country was barely keeping the lid on discord and division that summer, which had seen the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, angry demonstrations at the Oakland murder trial of Black Panther Huey P. Newton in July, and 23,000 police and National Guardsmen violently attacking antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago. When Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff condemned the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” during his nominating speech for George McGovern, Mayor Richard Daley erupted in anger: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch!”

Beverly Cannon and Teddy Smith: “Do You Love Me?”

But it was a new scourge of “black antisemitism,” the UFT’s Shanker insisted, that fueled the fracas in Brooklyn. Only a year earlier, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had issued a report concluding that African Americans were far less likely than white Gentiles to harbor negative attitudes toward Jews. That didn’t stop Shanker from framing the dispute as, at its core, a Black-Jewish battle. And he did everything he could to make others see it that way. The notion seeped deeply enough into the discourse that
Variety
joked in September that, taking a cue from the all-Black
Hello, Dolly!
Hal Prince was “mulling an all-Negro company of
Fiddler on the Roof
.” The producer was not amused.

A few days before the start of the new school year, Rhody McCoy announced that he had hired 350 new teachers (many of them white and Jewish, recruited from progressive college organizations around the country) to replace the UFT members who had walked out the previous May. And on the first day of the semester, the UFT called a citywide strike, closing all the schools for two days with the demand that the ousted teachers be welcomed back to their duties. When they did go back, once again they had to push through protesting crowds, and when they made it inside they found that they were not assigned to classes. Out went the UFT again, this time for more than two weeks. After another brief return, the union called its third citywide strike in mid-October; it lasted until the third week of November.

Over those autumn months, newly recruited teachers crossed picket lines to hold classes, accosted by striking UFT members, who were themselves confronted by local supporters of community control. It got nasty. Working teachers told reporters that picketers not only yelled “Scab!” at them but also called them “Commie fascists,” “Black Nazi lovers,” and “nigger lovers”; strikers, in turn, said they were branded “racist pigs.”

Shanker raised the panic level, wielding a leaflet filled with Jew-hating invective. It was a composite of two flyers: one, he alleged, had been placed in teachers’ mailboxes in two Ocean Hill schools, demanding “absolute” Black control of community schools; the other had been “phoned in to a UFT representative” and decried the “bloodsucking exploiters” and “Middle East murderers of colored people” dominating the public education system. The community governing board swiftly disavowed and denounced the material. The flyer bore the crude letterhead of an organization that did not exist and a phone number that did not operate. Later investigations concluded that the leaflets, in the temperate terms of the ADL, were not the product of any organized effort; in the blunter words of the New York Civil Liberties Union, they were the means by which the UFT had “perpetrated multiple fraud.” In the hot moment, they changed the public terms of the debate. Shanker ran off hundreds of thousands of copies and handed them out widely as “proof” that the movement for community control was driven by hatemongers. Media conversation about the school standoffs shifted from issues of teacher accountability and quality education to the specter of black antisemitism. Mayor Lindsay, a champion of community control, was shocked to find himself jeered at and shouted into silence when he went to speak at a Brooklyn Jewish center in October.

The Black and Puerto Rican adolescents who would be learning almost incidentally about Jewish history and ritual practice as they sang “Sabbath Prayer,” put up a chuppah for
Fiddler
’s wedding scene, and contemplated why Tevye and his family were being evicted, for the most part stayed out of the fray. Those with parents involved in community activism may have talked over the issues at home, but unlike kids in the demonstration district whose schools remained open during the strikes, the Eiseman students didn’t walk the gantlet of sniping factions to attend classes. Piro’s students, in fact, got out of the neighborhood. When Piro had voted with his union to strike, he was thinking about the due process question, not plotting to win extra time with his drama kids. But when the teachers stayed out most of the fall, he was delighted to be able to work on what he deemed “a professional theater schedule”: he held daily rehearsals at his Manhattan home.

The principals in the cast—except for Maritza, whose mother would not allow her to go—rode the LL train in to Sixth Avenue and walked the couple of blocks over to Piro’s studio apartment at Seventh Avenue and Sixteenth Street. The subway took less than an hour, but for many of the students the seven-mile journey was as momentous as a trip to the moon. Some seldom went to Manhattan, and none had hung out in a white teacher’s apartment. The tiny place, stuffed with fabrics and trims Piro had scrounged for costume making and with a rented sewing machine stashed in a corner, made him wonder, drolly, whether “it looked like a drag queen lived there.” The dozen kids who crowded into the narrow room didn’t make anything of it. And as blustery as they were about their own bombastic hormones, they expressed no curiosity about Piro’s private life. He was a teacher, after all. The students couldn’t imagine he had one (though a few of the girls admitted to having crushes on him). They arrived midmorning and arrayed themselves on the two daybeds that served as sofas, playfully whacking one another with the covered pillows they shoved aside to make room.

Piro began with discussions about the scenes they’d be rehearsing later. He drilled them on standard actor stuff, which made the kids feel very serious about their labor: Did they grasp each scene’s situation? What their characters wanted? Could they understand it better by relating it to something in their own lives? Sheila found quick identification with Chava. Her own strict parents did not permit her to date boys—and her five brothers kept a close eye on her. Chava’s desire for forbidden Fyedka made good emotional sense to her. When they worked on the edict scene, Olga thought about kids she knew who faced evictions from their homes. Though her own family was solid, many of her classmates lived in precarious households and recognized the feeling of “leaving because you’re thrown out, leaving because you’re not wanted.” Teddy, quietly coping with a fraught homelife in a shabby apartment that stank of urine, where he had to look after young siblings whenever his mother unexpectedly and unaccountably stayed out—liked to put it simply: “Tevye—he’s a poor milkman who lives in a ghetto just like we do.” But these weren’t political claims or arguments for their right to do the play. The students didn’t perceive any irony or incongruity in their efforts—it was cynical grown-ups who imposed that interpretation—and the Black-Jewish conflict raged mostly beyond their radar. They were drawing actors’ parallels. As Olga understood, it was “all about getting into character.”

The afternoon work turned technical. To depict the attraction between Chava and Fyedka, Sheila and Reggie had to stand closer together while trying not to. The girls had to sing “Matchmaker” from their bellies and “feel the joy.” Olga had to make Yente’s speech more spontaneous—less of a prepared shtick—but still get the lines absolutely right. And Teddy, that tough bundle of talent, like all other Tevyes, had to be restrained from hamming. Even at fourteen, he could read an audience’s pulse and play for extra laughs or attention. In Piro’s apartment, the other kids were his audience and he sometimes displayed his dominion by drawing back lazily or provoking a power struggle. “I’m not going to do it like that,” he brashly told Piro from time to time, more for the drama of the altercation than for the sake of any principled interpretive disagreement. The other kids waited out the storm. It wouldn’t take long before Piro yelled. All of the kids had been on the receiving end of his outbursts, though none as often as Teddy, and all of the students understood them as expressions of Piro’s passion and perfectionism. The flare-ups never contained any malice or insult. When Piro raised his voice to say “I
told
you twice to do it like this!” or “
What
could you have been thinking?” the students were motivated by how much he cared that they get it right. Sometimes he just stared at them silently, right in the eye, and they knew they had failed to live up to his expectation.

For extra coaching and to work on the songs, the company bounced a few doors up Sixteenth Street to the apartment of Piro’s friend, the actor Joe Sicari, whose minuscule ground-floor one-bedroom had an upright piano. Sicari was a stickler for expressing character
through
singing, he repeatedly explained to the kids as they worked through the show’s score. It took session after session for Teddy and Bev to find the right dynamic in “Do You Love Me?” For all the maturity of her thirteen years, Bev could not understand why Golde would not admit she loved Tevye unless she really didn’t. Or maybe it was just that Bev didn’t want to encourage Teddy’s blossoming infatuation. Either way, Sicari had to work hard to remove a few layers of Golde’s irritation.

Between the morning conversations and the afternoon scene work, Piro served lunch. Serious lunch. Piro was a good cook, and a proud one, and he prepared meals for the
Fiddler
group as if he were planning a sophisticated dinner party. He fussed over chicken
al forno
and fancy pasta salads; he assembled English muffin pizzas. Sicari sometimes pitched in by baking apple pies. The kids helped clean up.