Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (47 page)

Before assuming his post by the tape recorder in the pit, Piro gave the kids the requisite backstage pep talk: Speak out. Project. You know you can do this. If you mess up, keep going. If all the people out front are making you nervous, imagine them in their underwear. And one more thing: Don’t chew gum.

The show ran without a hitch. Amateur, sure, but honest and felt and according to plan. Teddy may have conveyed disinterest months earlier when Piro had taken the troupe to the Broadway production, but he performed “Rich Man” with confidence and directness and gurgling “daidle daidle dum”s that perfectly copied the expressive, chanting prayer he had heard at the Majestic. Beverly visibly melted—and melted the audience—in “Do You Love Me?,” revealing Golde’s dawning realization that she does, indeed. The song finished with Beverly settling cozily onto Teddy’s tiny lap, the two of them harmonizing through “it’s nice to know” with a charm exceeded only by Teddy’s wide grin and slow, sure wink.

Teddy Smith performs “Rich Man” with confidence and directness.

The company’s emotion gathered as the final number approached. The sadness of the eviction scene contained the sorrow of the parting the students knew they would soon experience as the year—and their own Anatevka—came to an end. As the dirge-like half-note toggle on an accordion introduced the song, Tevye and his family assembled as if posing for a last portrait and were bathed in a sepia light. As the song built, the chorus filed down the steps of the stage into the aisles and quietly invited members of the audiences to join them. “Come on. We have to go,” they said, offering a gentle hand. “It’s time.” Film Birnel had made flashed along the walls of the house: winter landscapes and old black-and-white documentary footage of a pogrom he’d dug up somewhere. Grown-ups cried as they joined the children, walking to the back of the house as the cast sang of their precious hometown. Then silence.

It’s hard to imagine any company that had done more to earn the standing ovation that erupted as the “L’Chaim” music played and the kids bounded back onto the stage for their bows. Beverly and Teddy pulled Piro into their curtain call and the cast wept openly as the audience cheered and stomped.

The memo Piro wrote to the group late that night was properly ecstatic. “The one word which keeps knocking at my brain about you,” he told them, “is ‘respect.’” They had touched the community “not because we delivered a message, but, rather, because we gave them the best show the town has ever seen.” Now, he promised, the people of Eiseman and Brownsville shared their views—“no, not on Jews and Blacks—but our deep belief that the boys and girls of our school are FIRST-CLASS CITIZENS OF THE WORLD AND ARE CAPABLE OF CONTRIBUTING FIRST-CLASS CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIETY.”

He urged them to take in their achievement: “Remember—there are various kinds of poverty and only ONE of them deals with money. The others deal with poverty of the spirit, poverty of ambitions, poverty of good feelings about yourself.” The experiences of Jews and Blacks in America were historically too different for the neat parallels that media coverage—and liberal sentimentality—wanted to draw from the Eiseman production of
Fiddler
. But in unwittingly invoking the romantic old trope of the materially poor but spiritually rich shtetl, Piro was not doing something so facile. For this invited no nostalgic harking back to a vanished, varnished place some ancestors may have come from; it encouraged a frank coming to terms with the place they were living in today, some with stable families, some not. But all of them, now, with an Anatevka of their own making that could be looked to as a source of pride and strength.
Fiddler
, the pop culture icon of Jewishness, had become the vehicle, for a handful of children, for the assertion and agency that community control aspired to give the whole city. It’s not something
Fiddler
could have done by itself, but it’s also not something
Guys and Dolls
could have provided.

Did the Eiseman
Fiddler
change attitudes, as Piro had initially hoped? Looking back after more than four decades, cast members couldn’t speak for the wider population, but they recalled the experience with surging emotion, describing the genuine love for their characters and their world and for one another that sustained them through that tempestuous year. “It helped me to embrace all these different people,” Maritza summed up. “Including myself.”

Piro answered with Tevye-like dialectics. On the one hand, beyond the kids immediately involved in the show, his efforts seemed “all in vain.” But, on the other hand, one shouldn’t expect too much, especially from a play, whose duty, after all, is to be a play, not an act of social work or political activism. “It takes a lot of bricks to build a cathedral,” he said.

Richard Piro directs Sheila Haskins (Chava) and Linus Sellars (Fyedka).

Trouble is, kids in Brownsville were more and more apt to be throwing those bricks. Piro took a semester’s leave the fall after
Fiddler
, and when he returned to Eiseman in February 1970 he found it more chaotic and unruly than ever. Stairwells were filled with litter, graffiti, and kids having sex; a critical mass of students had become hostile and disruptive. Even the drama students lacked drive and discipline. He was finding it impossible to connect with more than a few of the kids. Rubin had transferred to a middle-class white school in Queens, and the following fall Piro followed him there. A year later he left the school system altogether and moved to California.

*   *   *

By then,
Fiddler on the Roof
had opened as a widely distributed movie—one of the last big successful Hollywood musicals. Someone, perhaps fancying that if representational art could divide Blacks and Jews it might also bring them closer together, had the idea that young African Americans might see themselves in the pluck and plight of its characters. A special screening was arranged in Washington, D.C., as a fund-raising benefit for Howard University. A university official on hand said the movie “brings better understanding between Blacks and Jews.” But the students in the audience begged to differ. “Jews are in some position of affluence now and refuse to see themselves as part of Black oppression,” one said. A faculty member, asked if she felt any kinship with the Jews in the film, was blunter: “Jews are white, period.”

Plenty of frustrated African Americans could have said as much when Piro and the Eiseman kids put on their play. Divisions did widen as inner cities continued to decay and movements to redress inequities became more militant still. But the experience of creating a show differs vastly from the experience of watching one; watching a play differs from the more passive, atomized experience of watching a film.

And, to the Howard University audience, at least, the film’s imagery could seem at odds with progressive analyses of American racism. Tevye and his townsfolk seem to live in a vast, gorgeous countryside—big sky, verdant fields, charming river, all brimming with vitality (despite the film being shot with pieces of stocking stretched over the camera lens to produce the “diffuse” look Jewison wanted). And while they may be poor, Golde has her
shabbos
pearls, Motel gets his sewing machine, Tevye owns his house (and even, anachronistically, his land): no resemblance to inner-city squalor. The Anatevkans suffer unaccountable discrimination, but no apparent structural inequality. More than that, the antisemitism is over there, in the old country; Tevye and his family are leaving it behind when they declare they are going to “New York, America,” where they will find religious freedom and opportunity (and escape the genocide that awaits those who do not emigrate, the film blatantly hints). Like a wedding at the end of a comedy, the departure for the United States implies a happily-ever-aftering (as another musical put it) for these Jews—and, presumably, for anyone else who comes and works hard. It supports a by-the-bootstraps narrative of American success that was fast becoming a standard against which African Americans were being unfairly measured and, predictably, found wanting. It’s no wonder savvy Howard students and professors bristled when invited to identify with these soon-to-be model immigrants.

What’s worse, a movie presenting a comic yet noble paterfamilias as a new American folk hero, trying to hold family and community together in the face of enormous pressures, could have felt like one more club with which to bash African Americans for their alleged pathology: the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965 ascribed abiding poverty in Black communities to single-mother households and a culture that emasculated its men. The accusation remained an open wound for years, not least for its status as a government rationale for social policy. William Ryan’s book,
Blaming the Victim
, had come out just months before Jewison’s film and its skewering of Moynihan’s argument was still causing a buzz when gruff but lovable Tevye, feminized on stage but downright macho in Topol’s cinematic performance, trundled in Panavision into the Howard auditorium.

In any event, it was absurd to imagine that screening Jewison’s
Fiddler
would produce warm feelings of identification that would wash away the anger and resentment at injustice. Racial healing was not a function the celluloid
Fiddler
—nor any movie musical—could possibly perform.

CHAPTER
8

A
NATEVKA
IN
T
ECHNICOLOR

I
f it was too much to expect
Fiddler on the Roof
to improve Black-Jewish relations, Norman Jewison was nonetheless on a mission when he made the movie. He regarded it as “the most important film” that would be released in 1971 “and the most important film that perhaps United Artists has ever released.” What, exactly, made it so important Jewison never boiled down to a simple slogan, but a weighty sense of purpose can be felt in every frame of the three-hour epic.

Jewison typically insisted on making pictures that did more than simply entertain—at least, once he was in a position in Hollywood to insist on anything. Having come from Canada to launch a successful career in live American television in the late 1950s—he directed
Your Hit Parade
and
The Andy Williams Show
for CBS, and, among his proudest projects, the first Harry Belafonte special in 1959 (during which twenty CBS affiliates in the South went off the air rather than beam a Black star into local living rooms)—he broke into Hollywood with a Tony Curtis comedy in 1962 and a contract with Universal for seven pictures, including some deft Doris Day fluff. Feeling that “my life was being wasted on these commercial comedies where everyone ended up happy and went to the seashore,” Jewison wiggled out of his contract on a technicality and went on to salvage
The Cincinnati Kid
, replacing the fired Sam Pekinpah after shooting had already begun. That was his real launching pad—“the movie that made me feel I had finally become a filmmaker”—and he signed a two-picture deal with the Mirisch brothers, whose limber independent production company had been feeding hits to United Artists for half a decade. Jewison “wanted to make films about political problems.” He not only got his wish with
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming
(1966), whose slapstick story of a Soviet submarine running aground near the New England coast made a lighthearted hash of Cold War paranoia. He also had a hit, topping the box office that summer and winning a Golden Globe for best picture and several Oscar nominations. That emboldened Jewison to press for
In the Heat of the Night
, the tense crime mystery starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, reluctantly working together to solve a murder in a racist Mississippi town. It won five Oscars for the 1967 season, including for best picture. And it cemented Jewison’s reputation as a strong, multigenre filmmaker with a social conscience.

So he was surprised, at first, when he was summoned to the office of United Artists chairman Arthur Krim and offered the reins of
Fiddler
. (Jerry Robbins never got a hearing; the Mirisch Company had also produced the
West Side Story
movie, and they’d fired Robbins from his post as its codirector.) Jewison had loved the Broadway show, but was “never a big fan” of movie musicals. He could appreciate the confections from the 1930s and 1940s, but “they were fantasies and we don’t make fantasy films in the very realistic world of today’s cinema,” he told a journalist while working on
Fiddler
. “The musical belongs more naturally to the theater from which it derives.” Still, Jewison came to see the Broadway adaptation of Sholem-Aleichem as an excellent candidate for cinematic treatment: “
Fiddler
breaks through in certain areas as there are moments of it which are sheer fantasy, almost magic, and yet the setting and the characters are all real and the historical background of the piece is real,” he explained.