Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (45 page)

Piro took the students to see
Fiddler
on Broadway—balcony seats were still cheap in those days. He and Birnel shepherded the group to the Majestic Theater (the 1,600-seat house into which the show had moved in February 1967) for a matinee. Harry Goz—the fourth Broadway Tevye—led the cast. A more measured performer than Mostel or even Herschel Bernardi, whom he replaced, Goz let emotion build gradually over the course of the show, and he was the best singer of the bunch. Rae Allen played a wry, pleasant Golde. Piro enjoined the kids both to get involved in the show
and
to keep an analytical eye on the choices the actors made. He invited them to see themselves commanding the same power that could have an audience “living and breathing your words.” Most of the children were riveted. Teddy and a couple of the other boys, though, hung out in the men’s room smoking past the intermission break; Piro nearly dragged them back to the theater.

Through the trips to Manhattan, the focused labor, the lunches, the goofing around, the dribbled-out sharing of details about home, and the joint struggle to create something, the children bonded—like all other kids in all other school musicals everywhere for all eternity. But seldom are the attachments as tight and indelible as they became for Piro’s
Fiddler
, or as meshed with the play’s themes. These kids, as they wistfully described it, grew into a family. In trying times, they established their own secure communal circle—the image so central to Jerry Robbins’s conception of the show—and soon, like Anatevka itself, it would be assailed by nefarious outside forces.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, the UFT settled with the Board of Education—the ousted teachers would return to their Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools (the plummeting number who still wanted to, that is) and the experimental governing board would be temporarily suspended—and the schools reopened. In the meantime, Richard M. Nixon had been elected president. (Shifting alliances in New York City notwithstanding, national electoral politics were still an arena in which Jews remained closer to Blacks than to whites: Nixon garnered 17 percent of Jewish votes and less than 5 percent of African American—he won 43 percent overall.) But the animosity incited on the picket lines and in the press hardly abated. Jewish hackles stayed raised; Black resentment redoubled. The Eiseman teachers who had objected to
Fiddler
when it was first announced stepped up their campaign to close it down. They called themselves the Maccabees, emboldened, perhaps by the recent emergence of the Jewish Defense League, the far-right organization pledging to protect New York’s Jews from the genocidal peril it saw everywhere; the JDL took some rhetorical cues from the Black Panthers (“Every Jew, a .22” became its notorious slogan) and had sprung into being just in time to rally behind the UFT. Though small in number, its members managed to splash plenty of gasoline on the controversy long past the end of the strike.

The Maccabees returned to Eiseman fired by new grievances against the musical. In addition to taking exception to the “defilement” of sacred garb—boys in the cast putting on yarmulkes and prayer shawls—they decried the way the show depicted Jews as weak and docile. Brownsville, they maintained, needed to know that Jews could not be pushed around. One fellow teacher told Piro that if he didn’t cancel the show he’d find his personal secrets blazoned in the newspaper—an only slightly indirect threat to “out” him. Another teacher threatened to kill him.

Piro could think of only one answer: the show itself. He offered to present the opening number and first scenes at the school’s upcoming Friday assembly. The opposition would see how honorable the students and his intentions were, he was certain. The kids had been taking great leaps in their roles now that they could move around on the school’s stage, whose thirty-five-foot-wide proscenium opening and twenty-five-foot depth made it seem like it could contain Piro’s and Sicari’s apartments several times over. Maritza and the other children who hadn’t trekked to Manhattan had been slotted into their parts and were working hard to catch up. Maritza had to stop waving her arms and hyperventilating through her lines like the divas in the telenovelas her mother watched. Piro urged her to feel what Hodel was going through and to forget that she was acting. Piro leveled with the cast, telling them bluntly that the show’s future depended on how well they would perform at the assembly.

Two days before their presentation, Rubin called Piro into a meeting. After the turmoil of the fall, the principal had become warier than ever. More than about how the parents would react to Jewish material, he worried about the trust that had been broken between the community and the teachers: the UFT had denied the children almost a whole semester of school. It was necessary to tread lightly, Rubin warned. He was canceling
Fiddler
and wouldn’t even consider reinstating it without a written letter of support from the Brownsville Community Council, the elected neighborhood body that had started under the Johnson administration’s Model Cities program.

On the day of the assembly, the children gathered quietly backstage. The boys put on the black overcoats Piro had rescued from discard bins and they donned the yarmulkes Stephan and a Jewish boy on crew had scrounged up. The girls draped shawls over their shoulders and head scarves over their hair. There was no teasing or fooling around, not even as the adolescents changed clothes in full view of one another. When showtime came, Piro pressed the play button on the reel-to-reel tape of the “Music Minus One” karaoke-style LP Birnel had recorded, and Teddy walked onto the stage, paste-on beard cascading down his chin, to begin Tevye’s monologue. When the chorus came on—two halves from opposite wings—bopping in a line and singing “Tradition,” they radiated excitement and joy. True, Teddy didn’t sustain good, direct contact with the audience and Olga’s Yente went a bit overboard, but in general Piro knew they had nailed it. The audience of their eighth-grade peers hooted and clapped in appreciation. The Maccabees, however, had stayed in the faculty lounge drinking coffee. The cast returned backstage high on how well everything had clicked and by how much fun they’d had making it happen. Bev, for one, was in a state of amazement. For the first time, she had fully entered the play’s world, suddenly feeling like “it wasn’t make-believe anymore. It was real.”

Piro showered the kids with the praise they deserved, and then dropped the bomb of Rubin’s ultimatum: “This show has been canceled.” Some actors burst into tears; some shrugged with studied nonchalance; Duane cursed “those fucking Jews.” None understood why anyone could object to the project they were so earnestly pouring their hearts into. Sheila plunged into sadness over the prospect that she would no longer get to play Chava: “The girl giving me freedom was being taken away.” Piro announced that they would pick up
The Crucible
again. Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunts was now acquiring its own unwelcome relevance, he thought.

That night, Olga’s mother, Lillian Carter, called Piro at his apartment. His show’s Yente had arrived home heartbroken and Carter needed to know why. The teacher’s detailed explanation of events hardly satisfied her. Why, she wondered, could the principal accept this project for the two months her child was traveling into Manhattan and then suddenly withdraw his approval? And why had it been all right for Al Jolson to “black up” for minstrelsy or for whites to assume the voices of Amos ’n’ Andy on the radio, and for it not to be all right for Black and Puerto Rican children to play Jews, sincerely, in a play? A member of the school board for Eiseman’s district, she pledged her support. And she gave Piro the phone number of a mover and shaker on the Brownsville Community Council.

Frances Brown had been waiting for his call. Little happened in Brownsville without the Community Council’s knowing about it and Brown, active on the organization’s education committee, had been hearing rumors of the strife over
Fiddler
. She couldn’t figure it out. “That’s a good show,” she thought. She knew that the Broadway cast had many non-Jewish actors in it and that productions had played without any Jewish actors in Finland and Japan. No one objected. On the contrary. These were proudly advertised examples of the show’s universal appeal. So what was the fuss? Brown could only conclude, she told Piro, that his opponents thought the neighborhood children were not capable enough, or else they had a problem with Blacks and Puerto Ricans participating in the play. Either way, the council could not accept their stance. She promised that the show would go on.

That left the students in a spot just like the fiddler’s, Teddy told his fellow cast members when Piro decided to resume rehearsals of the musical: they were merely trying to “scratch out a simple tune” without losing their balance.

Piro kept them teetering as he maneuvered Rubin’s absolute permission for the show like an ace Machiavelli. A few mornings after their first conversation, Frances Brown reported that a letter was on its way to Rubin from the Community Council urging Eiseman to present the play. Right away, Piro posted a notice stating that the spring play would be
The Crucible
. Rubin caught him in the hall and thanked him for his cooperation. Piro knew exactly what would happen when Rubin opened his mail the next day. “We urgently request that Junior High School 275 be allowed to put on the
Fiddler on the Roof
play,” the council’s letter read. “The performing arts know no boundary of race. Therefore this play, as an experience dealing with Jewish culture, can be a great enlightenment to the Black and Puerto Rican youth of Brownsville, especially as staged by Black and Puerto Rican students.” Rubin called Piro into his office and all but commanded him to reinstate
Fiddler
. The school could not cross the will of the community.

The Maccabees did not give up so easily. They had one last tactic: ratting. Because
Fiddler
was still running on Broadway, amateur rights were not yet available; it was impossible to license the show and illegal to produce it, even in a junior high auditorium. Schools all over the country flouted such rules frequently, but if they were caught they usually received a cease-and-desist order. Whoever contacted Music Theatre International to expose Piro’s pirated
Fiddler
was no doubt counting on that ax to fall. When MTI phoned Rubin to warn of legal action, the principal called a faculty meeting and, with fury and dread, said he would have to write to the Community Council to explain why the show was being canceled after all. It was Birnel who suggested he wait a few days while he tried to work some showbiz connections.

Not that he really had any, but the bluff bought some time—and it worked. Piro reached the lawyer at MTI who had phoned Rubin and won him over with the story of his intent and of his colleagues’ betrayal. The lawyer connected him with Hal Prince’s representatives, who contacted the authors. It took Bock, Harnick, and Stein less than five minutes to decide to get behind the production. (Robbins was away at the time and his assistant didn’t bother him with the kerfuffle.) Harnick found the Jewish objections “embarrassing”; Stein likened them to “saying Hamlet can only be played by a Dane.” He thought, in fact, that it was “quite a marvelous thing for these Black children to be involved in this production in view of what is going on in Ocean Hill and what is going on in the city.” They authorized the production so long as the program would note their granting of special permission. Piro didn’t try hard not to gloat in the faculty lounge.

By that point, the Broadway production had realized a profit of 1,300 percent on the original $375,000 investment. Prince noted that it would pay more to its investors than all his other shows combined. Meanwhile, currents of Black-Jewish hostility continued gusting through the city. They stormed most ferociously in the cultural realm.

First, the issue was a poem. Late in December, Julius Lester, the host of a Black radio program on New York’s progressive listener-sponsored station, WBAI, invited onto the air a teacher from Junior High 271, the school at the center of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville experiment, and asked him to share some of the pieces his eighth graders were writing in response to the strife engulfing them. Lester urged the teacher, Leslie Campbell (who later changed his name to Jitu Weusi), to read a particularly belligerent twenty-six-line poem by a girl in his class. The poem was titled “Antisemitism” and dedicated to Albert Shanker. It began, “Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head / You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead,” and it concluded, “Guess you know, Jew boy, there’s only one reason you made it / You had a clean white face, colorless and faded / I hated you Jew boy, because your hangup was the Torah / And my only hangup was my color.”

The media firestorm that ensued was not a literary debate over the merits of the final couplet’s use of forced rhyme. Some of the reports got the facts wrong, crediting Campbell as the author of the hateful work. Shanker filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. The JDL organized protests at the radio station. Julius Lester began receiving anonymous threats on his life. The door to Leslie Campbell’s home was doused with gasoline and set alight.

At the same time, the most venerable art institution in the city was trying to tamp down a Black-Jewish conflagration of its own. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was just opening a show called
Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968
, its first exhibition featuring African Americans. Black artists and their supporters protested the Met’s uncharacteristic ethnographic approach to its subject: organized by Jewish curators, the exhibit presented a photographic display chronicling the neighborhood over seven decades, but no paintings or prints, as if to declare that no Harlem-based artists had ever produced work worthy of the Met. Picketers outside the museum carried signs asking “Harlem on whose mind?” and claiming that they were, metaphorically, “On the auction block again.” Then Random House published the Met’s catalog for the show, which included an essay by a recent high school graduate from Harlem proclaiming that “anti-Jewish feeling is a natural result of the Black Northern migration.… Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump stands a white Jew who has already cleared it.” The essay added that Jewish shopkeepers exploited Blacks and that “our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice.” Mayor Lindsay called the essay racist; the ADL’s president pronounced it “akin to the worst hatred ever spewed out by Nazis.” The city threatened to revoke the Met’s funding if the museum did not cease selling the catalog. The museum complied (though bookstores continued to carry it).