Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (5 page)

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Sholem-Aleichem returned to Geneva, overjoyed to reunite with his family but still uncertain of how he’d keep afloat. Some income trickled in from two Yiddish newspapers in America, where, before leaving, he had begun two serial novels, and he kept sending them installments:
Motl peysi dem khazns
(
Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son
), a bildungsroman told by a boy who moves from a shtetl to New York after his father dies, a masterpiece of comic irony, and
Der mabl
(
The Flood
), a melodrama set in Russia against the failed revolution of 1905 and the subsequent pogroms, a critical failure to this day. Because these serials were written for an audience of immigrants, the emphasis on the precariousness of the Jewish future in the Old Country comes as no surprise, but more generally Sholem-Aleichem’s work was striking a tone of dejection.

A new Tevye story written shortly after his return to Europe reflected a profound sinking of spirit—a story much too sad (and at odds with the theme of generational conflict) to make its way into a Broadway musical some sixty years later, the only one of the Tevye tales in which the dairyman explicitly compares himself to Job: Shprintze, daughter number four, faces trouble with her suitor, like her sisters before her. But unlike her older siblings, she does not defy her father’s wishes. The man she falls for, the son of a wealthy customer of Tevye’s, enters her orbit when Tevye invites him home for blintzes, and the handsome, blithely idealistic and spoiled youth keeps coming back to see the girl whose name rhymes with the holiday dish. The romance ends abruptly when his family hastily moves to a faraway town, separating the boy from this beloved beneath his station. “Do you think she complained? Do you think she cried even once?” Tevye asks. “If you do, you don’t know Tevye’s daughters! She just flickered out like a candle.” And then Shprintze drowns herself in the river. Tevye inches toward the recognition of his own culpability in promoting the doomed affair but stops just short of tragic self-knowledge, making his resolve to get on with life all the more agonizing to witness.

Meanwhile, amazingly, Sholem-Aleichem did not give up on the New York theater. He had parted from Adler and Thomashefsky on cordial terms, the actor-managers seeming to have responded with a them’s-the-breaks shrug at enduring one more failure on their stages. (Indeed, the entire 1906–07 season bombed at the People’s and Kalish theaters; only Adler’s Grand scored some hits that year.) As for his own plays’ shortcomings, Sholem-Aleichem quickly shook off any responsibility he may have felt and placed all the blame on the low level of the Yiddish theater and its ill-trained audience. As far as he was concerned, the New York stage had done him a terrible injustice, and he would have to rectify it.

Within months of returning to Europe, Sholem-Aleichem was writing a new script,
Der oytser
(
The Treasure
), in which he pits American opportunity against the backwardness of the shtetl—and neither world comes off well. The plot follows Benny, a self-made American, on a visit back to the shtetl where he was born. His symbolic—but statistically unlikely—occupation as a farmer highlights the contrast between his productive labor in the new land and the pie-in-the-sky dreaming of the
luftmentshn
in his hometown, who believe that if only they could locate a legendary buried fortune all their problems would be solved. The cost of Benny’s success is his Jewish connection: he lacks all knowledge of the texts, customs, and commitments that bind the members of the community to one another and to Jewish history. In this play, and in other works written after his first, frustrating efforts in New York, Sholem-Aleichem figures the journey to America as a process of dissolution. (He strikes the same note in
Wandering Stars
, his sprawling, satirical 1909 novel about a Yiddish theater troupe that eventually makes its way to New York.) The author, still not reading the American scene accurately, reckoned that
The Treasure
, a “genuinely Jewish comedy,” as he described it, would hit home with an immigrant audience still adjusting to their breach with their old homes. In February 1908, he sent
The Treasure
to Berkowitz, who was then living in New York, and instructed him to take it to Adler right away. “Watch the impression it makes on him,” he told his son-in-law. “If it is very good, request an immediate advance of $2,000. If it is more moderate (which I doubt), take $1,500. Obviously, it would be better to leave with the play and wait a few days for him to come begging. But alas, we sit here with hardly a penny—God should have pity—so don’t leave empty-handed.” For good measure, Sholom-Aleichem included a letter for Berkowitz to deliver with the play: “My good friend and great artist Adler! I give you my most recent work,
The Treasure
…”

Though Berkowitz thought the reading had made a good enough impression, Adler complained that the play piled up speeches in place of a plot and offered a meager two hundred dollars for it. Berkowitz recounts that he dutifully tried shopping it to Thomashefsky and to the third great actor-manager in the New York triumvirate, David Kessler. Those negotiations did not go anywhere, either.

Back in Geneva, Sholem-Aleichem despaired of his son-in-law’s reports and with no income in sight, set out one more time on a reading tour of the Pale; there, at least, he was still a superstar. He sold out one of the biggest halls in Warsaw for five nights running. As the grueling weeks of one-night stands in towns large and small wore on, Sholem-Aleichem wore out; in August, in a town called Baronovici, he collapsed with acute pulmonary tuberculosis and spent the next several months recuperating.

New York’s Yiddish theater hadn’t been faring much better. In a dismal season, no play was going to gain the attention of the theater managers unless it could promise a treasure calculable in box office receipts. If Sholem-Aleichem had ventured naively into the New York theater scene on the downward side of its peak in 1906–07, he was clueless that by the following year the playhouses were hurtling ever faster down that slope. The stock market crashed in the fall of 1907, kicking off a yearlong depression that threw more than a quarter of the Lower East Side’s labor force out of work. Community organizations such as hometown societies (
landsmanshaftn
) pitched in to help, thus emptying their coffers of the monies they might have put up for their usual theater benefits: the ticket base collapsed. More and more, cheap and escapist moving pictures—shown in storefront movie houses that were sprouting up all over the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods—siphoned spectators away from theaters and even supplanted most music halls; a seat at the movies cost only one-fifth the price of a gallery seat in the theater and they quickly became the preferred amusement of the strapped Yiddish masses.

In the fall of 1908, when Sholem-Aleichem had hoped
The Treasure
would premiere on Adler’s stage, the impresario leased the Grand Theater to an English-language producer who brought in American blood-and-thunder melodramas during the week (with ten-cent seats in the gallery). Reserving only Sundays for himself, Adler presented “serious” plays in afternoon and evening performances, but by March he gave up and set out on a tour of the provinces.

The two other Yiddish theaters in the neighborhood tried to outdo their newfangled competitors with spectacle and shmaltz. They mounted mawkish musical melodramas that took up the same dilemmas as Sholem-Aleichem’s
Treasure
, but from an entirely opposite point of view: they assured audiences, in song and with lavish staging, of their Jewish integrity. Joseph Lateiner’s
Dos yidishe harts
(
The Jewish Heart
)—whose convoluted plot involves a Jewish man finding his long-lost mother and feuding with her antisemitic Christian son—broke box office records at Kessler’s Thalia Theater, running thirty-two weeks in 1908–09. Thomashefsky took the cue and quickly put on
Di yidishe neshome
(
The Jewish Soul
), whose young heroes also stand up against antisemitism and assimilation—and also announce they will be moving to America.

Thomashefsky kept a good thing going by opening the fall 1909 season with another nationalistic melodrama,
Dos pintele yid
, typically translated with the far less pithy or pungent phrase
The Quintessence of Jewishness
or
The Essential Spark of Jewishness
(a
pintele
being a tiny point or speck). It, too, features the repentance of a parent—this time, an antisemitic father—confronted by his proud (and illegitimate) Jewish son.

These runaway hits allayed the anxieties of their audiences—while
The Treasure
would have stoked them—at a time when the children of the first big wave of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were coming of age. In these plays, the young heroes not only lay claim to their quintessential spark and reignite it in a fallen elder; they also extol America as the place it will have enough oxygen to stay lit. Sholem-Aleichem would never succeed on the American stage until his work acknowledged that point.

Where
The Treasure
laments Benny’s neglect of Judaism and his loss of connection, the
shund
sensations reflect and celebrate a new, still vibrant Jewish identity, commensurate with American success. For the young adults attending movies and popular English-language entertainments that played cheek by jowl with the Yiddish theaters, the
harts
,
neshome
, and
pintele
plays presented no rebuke. And for their parents, the plays offered reassurance that the age-old question gaining new urgency in America—what does it mean to be Jewish here?—could find a satisfactory answer. (Outside the cultural realm, this question was being taken up by Jewish activists building a communal political muscle: they were pressing to have “Hebrew” removed as a racial category from the upcoming 1910 U.S. Census.) The notion of a Jewish ethnicity was beginning to emerge in the streets, sweatshops, and schoolrooms of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Brownsville. The Yiddish theater was giving it form—and, thanks to Thomashefsky (and the playwright Moyshe Zeifert), who revivified an old phrase, a name: the
pintele
—that inexplicable, irrepressible nugget of identity.

At the same moment, on the English-language stage some three and a half miles away, a popular melodrama posed an audacious new question: Why should that nugget last? The play was Israel Zangwill’s
The Melting Pot
—the title popularized the phrase for decades to come—and it made its New York debut at the Comedy Theater on West Forty-first Street on September 6, 1909, just two weeks before
Dos pintele yid
opened. The plot hinges on the romance between David, a Russian Jewish émigré, and Vera, a non-Jewish social worker, also from Russia, and on David’s grand plans for composing a musical work that will exalt America as the “great new continent that could melt up all race differences and vendettas, that could purge and re-create.” All his hopes nearly crumble when he learns that Vera’s father was the czarist officer back home who ordered the pogrom in which David lost his family and was forever traumatized. But the couple overcomes this contrived catastrophe through faith in their new country, where they can create a baggage-free future. Making heavy use of alchemy metaphors, the play suggests, happily, that ethnic identities—including, presumably, a Jew’s defining
pintele
—can dissolve into “the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!” The play had premiered in Washington, D.C., a year earlier (with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance) and then moved to Chicago, where it unleashed a national debate on the question of intermarriage (which occurred at the negligible rate of a few percent at the time). In New York, it enjoyed a modest success, running for about four months.

If English-speaking audiences (many Jews among them) were applauding David’s curtain speech in midtown, heartened perhaps by the ideal of harmonious homogeneity in which they all could participate regardless of background, the mass Yiddish-speaking audience streaming in to see
Dos pintele yid
downtown were cheering for a different vision of Americanization: one that did not cost their distinctiveness.

Despite the record ticket sales—the
Forverts
estimated that some 55,000 people saw
Dos pintele yid
—the show could not pull Thomashefsky’s theater out of the red. As for Adler, with no similar extravaganza to offer he didn’t have a chance of surviving the 1909 season. That fall, he infamously sold his lease for the Grand Theater to the budding movie moguls Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. (Thomashefsky and Kessler participated behind the scenes, each paying Adler $5,000 to abandon New York for the year and ease up the competition.)

Back in Europe, Sholem-Aleichem remained thoroughly ignorant of the economic distress of New York’s Yiddish theater, and almost as ignorant of the mind-set of its audience. But for a time, at least, he could stop chasing after Adler and Thomashefsky. If he still dreamed of conquering the American stage, his survival no longer depended on it: a Russian-language edition of his works, as well as a settlement on proper royalties for his Yiddish publications (secured by Olga), finally provided a comfortable income. For the next several years, Sholem-Aleichem and his family moved according to the climate best for his health: winters on the northwest coast of Italy, springs on a Swiss lake, summers in the Black Forest resorts of Germany. While Adler and Thomashefsky were scrambling in New York, Sholem-Aleichem, despite weakness from the TB and other ailments, was entering one of the most productive periods of his writing life.

In addition to work on
Wandering Stars
, 1909–10 saw the publication of his
Railroad Stories
, a series of twenty dark monologues—tales told to a traveling salesman (who in turn tells them to the reader) by a wide range of Jews riding in a third-class train car as it trundles through Russia. Both contained by the train’s compartment and set loose into the modern world by its speed and reach, the passengers occupy a spate of contradictions: a father with a gravely ill son is the happiest in his town because he persuades a renowned medical professor to examine the child; a husband goes along with his wife’s strenuous efforts to get their son into a Russian high school only to see the son join a student strike; a pimp from Argentina makes a rare trip back to his shtetl to grab himself, so he claims, a “hometown girl” for a wife.