Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (55 page)

In the afternoon, families went home, only to be torn from their holiday meals by trucks roaring through the streets and soldiers bursting into houses demanding that Jewish men assemble in the schoolyard. There, they were frisked for watches and other valuables, then packed into the trucks and driven half a mile to the edge of town. Soldiers gave about a hundred men shovels and orders; machine-gun fire catapulted them into the fresh ditches they’d dug. Another half mile away, at Zurawiec forest, the same fate befell another two hundred men. Back in town, the soldiers returned to the synagogue where the fifty refugees sought sanctuary. They doused it with gasoline and set it aflame; everyone inside perished.

The work was not done. About two weeks later, all the remaining Jews—1,500 or so women, children, and elderly men—were ordered to the square with whatever they could carry. A brass band accompanied their forced march to the banks of the San. The soldiers offered two options: cross the river into Soviet territory or be shot. Many drowned.

By the first of October, Polish residents awoke to a Dynów stripped of half its population. Quickly and irredeemably, the Jews were dead or gone.

Whether—or how—their possessions ended up in the hands of the Poles left behind, Woźniak didn’t inquire. That was not the point. Rather, she wanted to evoke absence in the installation she created from the objects she’d gathered. She called it “People of Dynów’s Past”; the “people” appeared only, but powerfully, by implication.

The designer created and furnished a couple of rooms inside an abandoned shed near the old train station. Stepping into the warehouselike space was like entering a home in 1939, with its lace tablecloth, silk lampshade, and wooden wardrobe. Framed family photos hung on the wall—lent by Dynów’s one-man historical society, Grzegorz Szajnik, who has amassed a collection of more than a thousand. A half-filled bound journal lay open on a writing table, along with letters and postcards from the period and a handsome art deco radio. Woźniak wanted visitors simultaneously to “touch history” and to feel a sense of immediacy. In one room she placed on a very old table a bowl of very fresh fruit; on another, in a seventy-five-year-old cup, coffee recently enough poured to give off an alluring smell. This was a lived-in space whose residents had left in a hurry, leaving an open book, an unfinished drink. Woźniak often thought about the rich Jewish culture wiped out in the Nazi genocide. In Dynów, she wanted to imagine individual people in the concrete detail of their ordinariness and to create a space where others might do so, too.

*   *   *

The warnings murmured to Miklasz when she had announced
Fiddler
as De-Novo’s 2006 show were not materializing into real opposition as the three-week rehearsal period raced by. Now and then, someone would privately mention that some
other
people might not appreciate De-Novo’s dredging up the past, but no one tried to get in the way. The outpouring of communal support was as generous as ever. That didn’t mean there wasn’t some anxiety passing occasionally like the summer rain clouds over the valley. But Miklasz and Woźniak knew that whatever justification the project had was in the doing of it and, through the doing of it, the community’s taking ownership of it. A professional tour of
Fiddler
stopping in Dynów might not have sold a lot of tickets. Who could say? But De-Novo was not simply presenting a ready-made spectacle to an anonymous audience.

“This is it!” Miklasz told the company backstage on opening night. She wasn’t inclined to say more. And anyway, she didn’t have time. Playing the role of the fiddler—she’s a first-rate violinist—she had to assume her position atop the high station house roof, where she would remain for the entire show. Everyone understood this was their only chance to make Anatevka come alive. The entire run was just the one night.

The train bearing the band, a group called Membra Solo from the nearby larger city of Rzeszów, chugged in right on schedule. They had played a klezmer concert as a preview at the other end of the ten-minute train ride. As the musicians debarked and found their places, spectators scrambled for seats. In a town with a population of 6,200, about 2,500 people had come to the show.

Justyna paced behind the shed, repeating her lines to herself; Mateusz Mikoś, the student playing Motel, felt his mind go blank, as if someone had unscrewed his personal hard drive. The stage manager signaled Miklasz, who adjusted the bowler hat on her head and drew out those two notes that begin the opening theme.

The “narrator”—an elder from the Dynów community—walked out and welcomed the crowd with the introduction to Gorin’s
Memorial Prayer
(assigned in his script to Tevye). “In Anatevka, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews lived together since the beginning of time,” the speech begins, as apt for Dynów as for the fictional shtetl. “They lived together, worked together, and only died separately in their respective cemeteries. That was the tradition.” Unlike
Fiddler
, which built on the postwar American desire to remember the shtetl as an all-Jewish idyll, the perestroika-era
Memorial Prayer
had an interest in restoring Jewish presence to the multiculti mix of the Soviet republics. More than that, it propounds the closeness of the communities, seeking to minimize (rather than celebrate) ethnic difference. Gorin’s Tevye—and De-Novo’s—comes on pulling his cart and presenting himself to the audience: “Jewish people call me Tevye; Russians, Tevel. I have five daughters, two cows, and one horse so old it can only take the wagon downhill. When the road goes uphill, I take it myself, and then I take off my hat so it won’t stick to my head. And then nobody can tell if I’m a Russian or a Jew. And honestly, what’s the difference?”

The play goes on to show how little difference there is. Yes, he celebrates the Sabbath in a particular manner and sees his daughter married under a chuppah, but the beleaguered Tevye of Gorin’s play struggles entirely against poverty and antisemitism (which is forthrightly addressed in the text, with the constable, for example, accusing Tevye of a blood libel, a slander still granted great credence in a region to the north of Dynów). The internal challenges to Tevye’s faith don’t much register in Gorin. Thus, there’s no dramaturgical reason to take pains to establish his piety and devout practice. Those exotic behaviors the De-Novo company observed in the Jewison film at the Oberja aren’t significant in Gorin and were not employed in Dynów (though the company was treated to a presentation about the Jews of Dynów by Szajnik). If Jerry Robbins had been hounding Gorin to tell him what his play was about, the Russian would not have put “the breakdown of tradition” on his list of answers; he might have said, “the barbarity of narrow nationalism.”

But “tradition” still mattered to Miklasz, as a concept and as a musical number. While the attenuation of the daughters’ (and, presumably, grandchildren’s) ties to Tevye’s observance had little resonance in Dynów, that he stood for something did. With only three weeks of rehearsal and only three professionals among a cast of fifty, Miklasz selected only a few
Fiddler
songs for her show—“If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Anatevka,” and, most powerfully, “Tradition.” (In place of “Sabbath Prayer,” the vocalist for Membra Solo hauntingly sang, as actors lit candles, the Hebrew hymn “
Shalom aleichem, malachei ha-sharet
,” which ritually welcomes the Sabbath.)

As in
Fiddler
, the chorus came on singing “Tradition” at the end of Tevye’s self-introduction. At first they could be heard in the distance, but not seen, as they intoned the melody with “boy-boy-boy” syllables in place of the lyrics. The sound grew closer and fuller, and the company began to come into partial view behind the buildings, like fragments of a dream rising into consciousness. Soon, they filed into the playing area and, with their transformation from invisible specters into flesh-and-blood presences, they converted the very ground into the shtetl of old. The Jews had returned. No matter how well anyone acted or sang (it varied) or whether tech ran smoothly (it didn’t), this moment of theatrical alchemy could not be reversed.

Anatevka materializes in Dynów: “Tradition.”

At the show’s end, the chorus dematerialized as they went off singing “Anatevka,” as if going back to a shadowy realm where they had been hidden for decades. The audience applauded for fifteen minutes and showered the company with flowers.

Miklasz and Woźniak decided to do
Fiddler
again for 2007, this time for two nights. It wasn’t just that Miklasz was disappointed by a brief microphone malfunction during “Rich Man” (with a Tevye played by an admired professional, Maciej Ferlak). She also wanted more music and a longer rehearsal schedule. This time the company would sing “Sabbath Prayer,” as she had hoped to have them do the first time. And she felt they could go still deeper with the material. Playing over two consecutive evenings in 2007, the show drew audiences of nearly 2,000 each night.

Could Miklasz and Woźniak determine their show’s cumulative effect? They hadn’t expected
Fiddler
to change anything, not in any conventionally understood didactic way. That kind of thinking had disappeared, they were happy to note, with the demise of the People’s Republic of Poland, whose artists were always too unruly and disgruntled for the cheery heroics the Soviets prescribed, anyway. If De-Novo’s work was affecting people in any deep sense, Miklasz and Woźniak understood the impact phenomenologically: it had meaning not by virtue of
referring
to something else but by
being
something else, something the spectators were part of making.

That involvement far exceeded the usual imaginative participation theater demands of an audience. De-Novo’s public recognized pieces of their own lives in the show—their household wares, their neighbors, their children—and watched from a space barely separated from the playing area in the open air. There were few boundaries between themselves and the world of Anatevka. They understood it was a fiction; that’s why it could be so true. And Tevye’s cart left real track marks in the ground.

But for all its evocation of the Jews who once shared their town, De-Novo’s
Fiddler
was not primarily salvage work that looked back for the sake of nostalgia or to fulfill the duty that propelled so many in the generation that preceded them—to fill in the huge gaps in the historical record. That work was being ably done all over the country by scholars, curators, and artists. Miklasz and Woźniak were—and are—looking behind in order to look ahead. Miklasz said that in working on
Fiddler
she sometimes felt like she was raising up ghosts. She was. Because her generation needs them to point the way forward.

EPILOGUE

F
IDDLING
WITH
T
RADITION

I
n the middle of a fashionable
L
os
A
ngeles bar mitzvah luncheon, a man bursts into the hall. Dressed in a long black caftan and wide-brimmed hat and sporting a beard that straggles onto his sternum, he looks around, bewildered. Clearly, this is not the Orthodox or Hasidic milieu in which his garb would not stand out. At this party, few of the men wear yarmulkes. They sit comfortably with women whose skirts barely brush their knees. The interloper stumbles around, poking his nose into the group at one table, then another, asking for particular people. Finally, he addresses the whole room, loudly. “This isn’t the Shapiro-Goldfarb wedding?” he asks, acting as confused as Lieutenant Columbo. “It’s Jonathan’s bar mitzvah? Oh my goodness, what a coincidence! This is my kinda people, I gotta tell ya! Where’s Aunt Frieda?” He names a few more of the family and honored guests and then calls for Jonathan to make his entrance: “Shmuley, Nachum, Avrum, Moyshe, bring him in!”

Half a dozen men in similar Hasidic dress bear the bar mitzvah boy on their shoulders while the band strikes up
Fiddler
’s opening number, “Tradition.” These are the Amazing Bottle Dancers, a performance troupe of fake Hasidim for hire. More borscht belt than Borough Park, they also entertain at weddings, birthday parties, and other events all over the country, including the Jewish Heritage Celebration produced each year at a Philadelphia Phillies game.

With their paste-on
payess
bouncing in time to the music, the men deliver the bar mitzvah boy to a seat at the central table. Then the tune shifts and the men perform their showy number: a section of Jerry Robbins’s “Bottle Dance” from the wedding scene in
Fiddler
, shatterproof bottles nestled securely into holes cut into the tops of their hats. (The original Broadway dancers enjoyed no such assistance.) In a line facing the honored family, they clasp hands at shoulder height and take a step leftward with the left foot, then cross the right foot in front of the left. Off they go, executing the moves of Robbins’s exacting choreography, including the climactic knee slides. Finally, rising to a standing position, they let the bottles drop into their hands, then swerve and bend to the music, eventually forming a circle and inviting all the bar mitzvah guests to join in a mass hora. The routine, according to Michael Pasternak, a Los Angeles–based actor and the founder of the Amazing Bottle Dancers, offers “a way of adding a touch of tradition into the event.” As if the bar mitzvah itself were not sufficient to the purpose.