Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (49 page)

Even if Jewison had won the master’s cooperation, it’s difficult to imagine how Chagall’s airy images would have related to the film’s earthy specificity. The stage is a land of metaphor, but narrative movies are, by nature, literal—and Chagall hated realism. With movies, “you’re taking the story out of the theater and putting it in the real world,” Jewison believed, “where there are animals and carts and people.” That’s why he insisted on shooting in Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia was as near as he could come. In the Soviet Union he figured he’d be too prone to unpredictable delays. He also had to give up a location he fell in love with in Romania during a six-week scouting trip because no one would provide insurance—for fear of Soviet invasion. “That’s when I turned to Tito. He had the largest standing army in Europe and he loved movies,” Jewison said. He loved movies “almost as much as he loved hard currency.”

Filming in a country run by an autocrat provided many advantages. If Jewison needed to take down telephone poles to keep such anachronisms out of his shots, no problem. If the local farmers had to shut off their tractor engines when he required quiet on the set, all he had to do was sound a horn to alert them to do so. If the fourteen November days of unseasonably warm and sunny weather put him behind schedule as he waited for snow, he could go ahead and cover the ground with marble dust, never mind what it might do to the farmland. The site comprised two rural villages—Lekenik and Mala Gorica, some forty-five minutes’ drive from Zagreb (where the cast and crew stayed during the four-month shoot), plus an enclosed square within Zagreb where Jewison filmed a scene he added, supposedly set in Kiev: Perchik arrested after stirring up the masses along with his comrades. “The winds of freedom are beginning to blow all over Russia,” Perchik cries as mounted Cossacks close in while John Williams’s underscoring swells with thick Russian chords turning ominously dissonant. (The new song Perchik was given in place of “Now I Have Everything”—a rousing march called “Any Day Now”—reiterated his speech and, though recorded, didn’t make it into the film.)

As for the villages, their wooden, weathered buildings could be used almost just as they were, with their ramshackle shingles, log fences, and crooked arrangement around a curving road (whose tarmac need only be covered in mud). Jewison was instantly smitten with the setting: “I could almost see a Chagall fiddler standing on a roof,” he marveled. “All we had to do was build a synagogue.”

*   *   *

In fact, they had to build a bit more—Tevye’s house and barn, a community well, some other structures. But the two-story wooden synagogue was the most significant addition. Overlooked in the reviews, the synagogue defined the film’s tone as much as—and in tension with—Topol’s toughness. Though the stage
Fiddler
required no synagogue and no scene is set in one, the building plays a crucial role on screen: more than anything else in Jewison’s Anatevka, it represents the “tradition” that distinguishes the lusty Jews (as he portrays them) from the local thugs who hate them. If the “people made the shtetl” for Zborowski and Herzog, (and for the stage), the shul did so for celluloid. Decades before wide interest arose in restoring or documenting these structures, Jewison and his production designer, Robert Boyle, constructed a painted shul in painstaking detail, building it from the timber of old barns to give it a sense of age. It is a stunning, syncretic replica of architecture and decor, forgotten for decades as the beautiful old synagogues of Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the war, had decayed in the absence of caretakers, or been appropriated for use as garages and groceries.

Jewison and Boyle visited whatever standing synagogues they could during their East European scouting trip and were inspired by the ornate Baroque elegance of the Dubrovnik synagogue—the second-oldest in Europe, dating from 1652. In Targu Neamt, in northeastern Romania, they saw an abandoned one that served, in part, as a model for the gold filigreed red velvet panels they placed on either side of Anatevka’s ark. (The design team even tried to purchase the intact prayer stands, Torah scrolls, ark, and “miscellaneous other appurtenances which would be ideal for the Synagogue in our film.” The request was denied.) Following custom, they placed a railed-off
bimah—
the raised platform on which the Torah is read—in the center of the shul and draped the reading table with embroidered red velvet. A heavy curtain of matching fabric covered the holy ark, where the Torah scrolls are kept. Structurally, the building was based on the wooden shuls of eighteenth-century Poland.

But it was by re-creating pastel murals that Boyle performed the film’s most beautiful act of recovery. Boyle adorned the Anatevka shul with images of a curly-horned ram against a lavender sky, a pair of scales balanced just so, a brown scorpion crawling on a blue field. These are
mazoles
(from
mazel
—luck), Jewish zodiac motifs that once marked the months of the Hebrew calendar on sanctuary walls, especially in Galicia (today’s western Ukraine and southeastern Poland). Beneath them, in panels framed by decorative borders, black Hebrew letters spelled out prayers and psalms, edifying Bible passages—or names of big donors. This enchanting folk art, which mixed images of nature and text, secular hope and sacred prayer, was not widely known among Americans, Jewish or not, in 1971 (though some immigrants had brought the convention to New York’s Lower East Side, where
mazoles
can still be found in a few old synagogues). It made the movie’s shul lovely and strange: an old-world relic of quiet grandeur.

From the very start, Jewison visually presses the point that the synagogue is the locus of all that will be left and lost. The movie opens quietly, with the camera panning over the rooftops, revealing the fiddler, silhouetted against a brightening sky, and then cutting to Tevye, who, speaking right to the camera, leads viewers into Anatevka. “How do we keep our balance?” he asks as he climbs aboard his milk cart. He slaps the reins against his horse as an alarum for his answer: “Tradition!” The orchestra blares in, and keeping time with the big chords, the camera jolts from image to image in the synagogue: a patch of painted mural, the red Torah cover with gold star of David, some Hebrew text on the wall. The technique is repeated in the song’s brief instrumental passages: jump-cuts that flash the core symbols of a civilization—an open Torah scroll, various segments of the
mazoles
, a golden menorah.

Norman Jewison shows Zvee Scooler how to carry the Torah when he departs his shul forever.

These interludes alternate with the song’s verses, in which each part of the community describes its role. No matter that they tell of tradition: their daily lives are not depicted as infused with the sacred. Jewison presents them laboring in rhythm with the music: men stripping animal hides, banging anvils, planing wood; women plucking feathers, punching down dough; girls sewing, churning, pitching hay. Boys, per the song’s verse, go to Hebrew school. These are hearty, self-sufficient people, in harmony with the world and each other. (The film drops the play’s cacophonous section of the song, where the verses overlap, as if competing for dominance.) Although there’s a moment when a shul image illustrates a line of verse, a shot of men wrapped in
tallisim
rocking in prayer, the nine-minute sequence juxtaposes toil and Torah, but doesn’t much connect them. The robust folk who know they belong to the land seem visually and sonically separated from those markers of Judaism. They intersect in the film only in the Sabbath scene, lengthy wedding sequence and, at the end, when Tevye removes the mezuzah from the house he is leaving and pockets it for the journey. As in America, in this Anatevka, it is religious worship, represented by and contained in the synagogue, that marks Jewish difference.

Onstage, Robbins wanted to depict and commemorate a “way of life” and for his cast to express pride in that culture. In making the movie, Jewison was compelled by the example of a people carrying on in the face of bigotry, taking pride in brawny fortitude. The issue for him was persecution. “I wanted audiences to feel the racial hatred,” he said.

The pogrom that interrupts Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding celebration was the obvious opportunity for displaying baseless belligerence. Jewison tightened the tension by bringing the intruders in quietly, brandishing torches. Tevye, in a close-up, is the first to notice and he signals the musicians to stop playing. Quickly the guests stop dancing. Anticipation builds as the two groups stare silently at each other for several seconds, the camera cutting back and forth, first in medium shots that take in the groups, then in tighter ones that linger on faces and on the itchy hands of pogromists clutching their clubs. Silence. A horse neighs, one of the marauders shouts, and what was only hinted at onstage erupts in full fury in the film. Someone snatches the white cloth off a long table; crockery and candlesticks fly. Tables are overturned; bottles crash and splinter. Perchik throws himself at two men who are slashing the goose-down pillows Tevye and Golde just gave to the newlyweds, and he’s clobbered. Only when Tevye runs after him does the constable shout, “That’s enough.” It is perhaps the most chilling moment in the scene, the longtime neighbor standing idly by when he could have prevented the violence. The camera follows the mob outside as they torch shops, break windows, and yank the innards from featherbeds.

The sequence seems symbolically to flash forward to the Nazi destruction, evoking the coming slaughter much more explicitly than the play: Jewison closes in on images of burning books and smashed windows, tropes that had become familiar in the years between the Broadway show and the movie, a period in which “the Holocaust” emerged as a distinct entity. Though not so thoroughly ignored in the postwar years as a recurring assertion long held, the Holocaust did become more widely recognized and represented; it was now the subject of an emerging academic discipline. In pop culture terms, the change is starkly denoted by two major movies that referred to the Holocaust between the stage and screen
Fiddler
s: Sidney Lumet’s somber, searing portrait of a traumatized survivor (Rod Steiger) in
The Pawnbroker
(released in 1965) and Mel Brooks’s outrageous satire,
The Producers
(1968, starring Zero Mostel), in which Hitler is hilariously mocked. Jewison needed only to make a few clear gestures to invoke the devastation awaiting those who don’t leave the continent.

The expulsion, when it comes, an hour after the pogrom, draws this association even more directly. Jewison drags out the departure into twenty gloomy minutes as the community sings “Anatevka,” packs up, trudges away, and, in an image inspired by Vishniac, rides huddled on a barge across the river as the sound track reprises the Anatevka dirge.

Within this sequence, the synagogue again plays the central role as the emblem of rupture as Jewison gives the rabbi more than a minute of near-silent action vacating the shul. With no sound other than creaking planks as he ascends the steps to the ark, he takes out a Torah scroll and hands it to his son, who drapes it with the red velvet table cover and exits. Alone, the rabbi picks up the other Torah scroll and cradles it like a baby against his shoulder; with his free hand, he takes a small stack of books by the string that is binding them: This is his luggage. He turns toward the door, pauses. As he looks around for the last time, the camera slowly pans the walls: it inches across the
mazoles
, the Hebrew, the pale painted animals, moving one way, then the other. The camera takes in the whole space in an overhead long-shot, now revealing it as shorn of all decoration, save the wall paintings, those suppliers of beauty and comfort that cannot but stay where they are. As the rabbi shuffles away, muttering a melody to himself, one senses that this could very well be the last time anyone gazes upon them with understanding.

Jewison couldn’t stand that idea, no more in real life than in the fictive frame of the movie. Just as he rescued Tevye’s horse, Shmuel, from the glue factory after the shoot—he sent monthly payments to a local farmer to care for the animal until it died of natural causes—he wanted to save the beautiful shul. As “the only wooden period replica now existing in Europe,” he reasoned, “it seems somehow wrong that it should be destroyed.” Before January 1971, while still working on the film, Jewison was already sending inquiries to scholars in Israel who had helped him with research, offering to donate the structure to the country and make a personal contribution to the dismantling and rebuilding costs of some $30,000. His query made it to the ear of the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. “Seriously, I think Jerusalem has enough sites that are original including Synagogues and does not have to import recently made copies here,” he huffed. But the minister of religion was reported to be “quite fascinated by the idea.” It took a year for the minister to come up with a plan: in March 1972, he suggested placing the structure on the expanding campus of Bar Ilan, the religiously oriented university near Tel Aviv, where he thought it could serve nicely as a study house, a space for learning Talmud and other sacred texts. There was just the matter of raising all the funds for the move. Jewison and Mirisch went to work soliciting donations in the United States while the interested Israelis sought contributions at home.