Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (54 page)

Mounting
Fiddler
became an occasion to delve into the history of a town’s Jews, as Lublin’s theater did when it added the show to its repertoire in 1994 (one of Poland’s last municipal theaters to do so). The elaborate program booklet included an essay on the lost Jews of Lublin, a map and photographs of their long-vanished quarter, sepia portraits of bearded old men, a first-person reminiscence, even recipes for cholent and tzimmes. Elsewhere, the acclaimed opera director Marek Weiss, who staged
Fiddler
several times, found in it “medicine for the special Polish illness” of antisemitism. He directed a production in Wrocław at the 4,000-seat People’s Hall, a building where Hitler and Goebbels conducted infamous meetings when, as Breslau, the city belonged to Germany. Audiences understood, Weiss maintained, that “in the same place where they planned the destruction, we built Anatevka again, speaking against the total war that they made here.”

For more than two decades the show has been presented in a professional production somewhere in Poland every year, and since at least 1988 it has been broadcast on television from time to time. “If I Were a Rich Man” has long held a spot on the standard wedding playlist as a song of good luck, and bands big and small strike it up to welcome a Jewish person or theme to any stage or civic function. A local distillery put out a luxury potato vodka called Fiddler. The milky glass bottle has a black hat for its screw top and features images of dancing men, a violinist on the rooftop above them. A music box that comes with the 40 percent spirit plays a few bars of “If I Were a Rich Man.”

Fiddler
has become a central reference point for Jewishness itself, one piece of
Yiddishkayt
that everyone can be counted on to know. Even Szurmiej bowed to the signifying power of
Fiddler
and allowed it to be added to the Yiddish Theater’s repertoire in 2002, under the deft, straightforward direction of his son Jan. Played on alternate nights in Yiddish and Polish, it sells out the auditorium’s four hundred seats to old and young Poles—and international tourists—paying tribute to the persistent Yiddish landmark.

By 2004, when Magdalena Miklasz and Ewa Woźniak met at theater school, Jewish cultural memory, thanks in part to
Fiddler
, was an institution in Poland—in some places, even an industry. Miklasz grew up aware of it, coming as she did from Kraków. There, the Jewish Cultural Festival rocks the streets of Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter, every June or July with outdoor klezmer concerts and other performances and numerous workshops in Jewish music and history. From a modest start in 1988, the festival has bloomed into a nine-day event featuring international musicians, artists, and scholars and drawing about 20,000 participants, most of them Poles. Though Miklasz never attended the festival—she was always in Dynów in the summer—she couldn’t help knowing about it. And countless times she hung around in Kazimierz. The famous quarter that thrived from the fourteenth century until the Holocaust and then served as Kraków’s garbage dump for years started to see renovation in the late 1980s—and Jewish tourists started to come, most spending an evening in the neighborhood after their grim, obligatory visit to Auschwitz, a ninety-minute drive away. On the surface, the area looks like an Ashkenazi theme park. “Jewish style” restaurants use signage that evokes Hebrew lettering and serve up dishes like matzo ball soup and stuffed cabbage (occasionally containing pork). In some, waiters don caps and vests or babushkas that look like they’ve been pulled from the costume rack of a
Fiddler
production. One of the restaurants on the main square is named after the musical’s setting: “Anatewka.” (At its sister establishment in Łódź, a violinist serenades the patrons from a seat in the rafters.)

For all the apparent kitschiness, the redevelopment of Kazimierz created Jewish public space where exploration was encouraged and more thoughtful enterprises could take root—art exhibitions, historical museums, a cultural center, and indeed the summer festival, among them. Such institutions—and others like them in other cities—served as essential resources for Miklasz and Woźniak when they started to work on
Fiddler
. In a small bookstore in Kazimierz, Woźniak found volumes of Chagall paintings that inspired the dominant blues and greens in her costumes and set.

But availability of information, essential as it is, does not make a scarring or shameful subject any easier to confront emotionally. And especially in small towns that did not participate in the complicated revival of interest in—and even vogue for—Jewish culture, the topic was still sensitive at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Poland had joined the European Union in 2004 and—revisiting on a new platform deep divisions that go back at least as far as the interwar period—the country was starkly split between those who embraced the wider cultural, economic, and social exchange offered by participation in the EU and those who preferred to tighten a nationalistic grip on a narrowly defined Polishness against what they regarded as European encroachment on their values. The klezmer fad among young people and the more general interest in Jewish culture belonged to—and symbolized—the attitudes of the former. For the most part, Dynów lined up on the other side. Three-quarters of its voters chose Lech Kaczyński, the victorious conservative candidate, in the fall 2005 presidential election. Some residents of Dynów warned Miklasz that
Fiddler
would not play in that particular Polish Peoria.

*   *   *

At six on a rainy evening the following July, Miklasz opened the first company meeting for De-Novo’s production of
Fiddler
. Some two dozen community members and out-of-town theater school friends crammed into a room at the Miklasz house that the director’s mother had turned into a gallery. For most of the year, Jolanta Pyś-Miklasz shows her own portraits in oil as well as works by other regional artists in the cool, cement-floor room. But when her daughter arrives in Dynów for the summer, the sculptures are placed in corners, the paintings removed from the brick walls, and the contemplative space metamorphoses into the noisy meeting room, business office, design planning center, and general hangout for everyone involved in the current play.

Sitting side by side, Miklasz and Woźniak looked out at the group, seated around the room’s perimeter on narrow wooden benches. They exchanged a glance and, in unison, took a deep breath. After months of preparation, they were about to launch the real work on
Fiddler
. As in any other show’s first company meeting, much of the discussion addressed logistics: Does anyone have a car for picking up set materials tomorrow? Who volunteers to help in fund-raising? Anybody know anything about sound systems? Hands went up, tasks got assigned. Here’s the rehearsal schedule. Does everyone have the script? The text was a mash-up of Miklasz’s devising, combining elements from the Gorin play with songs and scenes from
Fiddler
.

All through the meeting, the company members tried to outdo one another’s jokes—puns at every opening, witty rejoinders, anecdotes whenever a person could claim the floor long enough to tell one. Miklasz basked in the good humor. First rehearsals are always as much about the group’s bonding as about getting things done. All that laughter promised that the team would cohere nicely.

But an uncharacteristic hush swept over the room when Miklasz came around to the play itself. “This is a very special show,” she told them. “It is about a subject that is difficult for some people around here. It’s about our history. It’s about a family of Jews.” Justyna Pinczer, the Dynów high school student cast as Chava, felt a little shudder, like a cold current of energy, race through her body. She didn’t know anything at all about Jewish culture. The subject excited her. Nobody asked any questions.

The group piled into cars and headed toward the square to Dynów’s only hotel, the Oberja, a four-room, one-star inn whose primary attraction is the town’s largest flat-screen TV. It hangs from the low wooden ceiling over the hotel’s dark lounge, outshining the lit-up Tyskie beer signs and upstaging the vaguely S-and-M oil paintings of women in harnesses that decorate the walls. Miklasz handed the bartender a DVD. Crowded onto leather couches, the troupe sat transfixed through all 181 minutes of Norman Jewison’s
Fiddler
movie. Many had seen it on TV as kids, but now they watched with laser attention. They knew what roles they’d be playing and treated the screening as a chance to measure their ideas of character against another actor’s. More than that, they focused on the actions that marked the family’s Jewishness. Not just the costumes but the way the characters spoke and the mysterious things they did: Golde circling her wrists after lighting the Sabbath candles, Tevye tapping something on the doorpost and then kissing his fingers, Tzeitel walking round and round Motel under the wedding canopy, the rabbi wrapping and cradling the Torah he was taking into exile, and so much more. Jewison had demanded realism—he conducted extensive research, consulted experts, and shot in a location as close to the Ukraine as he could get. Now, just a few hundred miles due west of Sholem-Aleichem’s birthplace, the film from Hollywood served as the authoritative source on Jewish customs and ritual in the Pale.

Golde and her daughters in Dynów.

The usually voluble group watched silently, except when shouts and applause burst out of them after the dance scenes at the inn and at the wedding and when sobs escaped from a few as the film turned bleaker and bleaker. Justyna bawled when Tevye disowned Chava. She wondered how she would get through such an emotional scene as an actor.

As the company began the scene work the next day, Ewa Woźniak continued to assemble materials for the set. Collecting them from the residents of Dynów became part of the process of conjuring the town’s history and of involving the community in the work. Woźniak walked from house to house, knocking on doors. At the first, a thin old woman answered. “Hello, I’m Ewa. If I’m not interrupting anything, I’d like to talk with you.” The woman invited her in—she hadn’t had a visitor in ages—and Woźniak blinked as she left the blazing July sun for the curtained living room. The woman put out plates of bread and butter. “Do you know the story of
Fiddler on the Roof
?” The woman shook her head. Woźniak gave her a summary—the Jewish milkman with three daughters that are old enough to marry—and explained she was looking for objects for Tevye’s house, the inn, and other parts of the set as well as for an exhibition that would be an adjunct to the production, an exhibition that would recall the Jewish life that had once permeated Dynów. “I think that objects have souls,” the designer said. “They contain stories.”

The woman stood up. “I have something to show you.” She disappeared into another room and returned with a small wooden suitcase. “My father made it for me because when I was very, very young I went to school on the other side of the river. I went there with other children from Dynów, including Jewish children and Ukrainian children.”

“Was that normal? For Poles, Jews, and Ukrainian kids to be together?”

“Oh, yes. Of course. We were all friends. We had loads of fun together. We were children. Maybe someone’s mother might say, ‘Don’t play with that one, she’s Ukrainian,’ but children don’t care about things like that. Let me show you something else.”

Now she brought out an album from the 1930s, brittle pages of faded pastel drawings she’d made as a girl: primitive landscapes of the river and fields.

Album under her arm, Woźniak knocked at the next house. Another woman in her seventies showed off her first communion certificate. At another, a man recalled climbing up into a plum tree as a boy to watch a Jewish wedding. “I could see everything,” he recounted. “A Jewish man asked me what I was doing. ‘Just looking,’ I told him. So he said, ‘Well, come on, then. Join us on the men’s side. And I went there and danced.” Woźniak based the chuppah she made for Tzeitel and Motel’s marriage on his recollection of a white canopy painted with bright designs.

And so Woźniak went for about a week, visiting about ten houses each day. Baby cradle, clothes cabinet, linens, rakes, tables, milk cans, even Tevye’s wagon: the pieces emerged from the attics and sheds of Dynów. It wasn’t always easy. In one house Woźniak related the story of
Fiddler
to the old woman who invited her in. Then she said, “You live in a place where Jewish culture once thrived. What do you remember?”

“Yes. We lived with these people, I know, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything. I was very young. There was the war. The shooting. The fire.” She broke off, crying. “Maybe I don’t want to remember.”

Jews were preparing for Rosh Hashanah when the Nazis occupied Dynów on September 13, 1939. The holiday was to begin that evening. The SS troops, which arrived from the north, had no plans to deport the Jews. They would simply kill them.

Accounts differ on whether it was on the first or second of the High Holy Days, but either way the Jews gathered at the synagogue, a two-story brick building with large windows, built in the eighteenth century after the community had outgrown the old wooden shul, which still stood nearby. Inside, the synagogue was painted with frescoes: a series of animals represented the Talmudic passage “Be strong as a tiger, light as an eagle, fast as a deer, and heroic as a lion in fulfillment of the commandments”; a rendering of the ancient Temple’s stone eastern wall shone under a blue Jerusalem sky. A zodiac circled the ceiling. The ranks of the worshippers were swollen by scores of people who had streamed into town from the west a week earlier, fleeing the Nazi invasion. Through the morning service, soldiers stood at the door.