Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (56 page)

These are fine, athletic dancers and the performance is meant to be good fun (and, as a video advertisement for the group promises, “You don’t even have to be Jewish to appreciate the humor”). Whether one finds it amusing, affecting, or appalling, or a wacky combination of all three, this twenty-first-century entertainment reveals how deeply and indelibly
Fiddler on the Roof
has saturated Jewish culture in America and how it has gathered authority. The entertainment depends on a telling transmutation: Robbins absorbed some elements of presumed folk culture from weddings he attended as research, and he remade them into an elaborate composition for a work of the theater. Several decades later, his artistic creation came out of the show intact and returned to the realm of ritual celebration to bestow authenticity on the proceedings. In other words, a Broadway showstopper turned into folklore. Just as Sholem-Aleichem’s literary craftsmanship gave way to the idea that he was (in Maurice Samuel’s phrase) the “‘anonymous’ of Jewish self-expression,” Robbins’s calculated choreography became, in the words of the Amazing Bottle Dancers’ promotional video, an “age-old magnificent dance.”

When the troupe performed in 2008 on the annual Chabad telethon—the nationally broadcast fund-raising extravaganza of Lubavitch Hasidim—it opened a return lane on the bridge Robbins had built between Old World practice (as he and his collaborators imagined it) and popular entertainment. The “Bottle Dance” helped the image-savvy Lubavitchers remove the aura of strangeness around them by placing them within a familiar comfort zone. It was as if the two-minute performance, which opened the broadcast, was telling viewers: “Hey, you know us! We might look odd with our cloaks and beards and hats. But you’ve seen us in
Fiddler on the Roof
!”

The show about tradition has become tradition. And in the twenty-first century, that is still a fraught concept even though—or maybe precisely because—in the five decades since
Fiddler
premiered (as long a stretch of time as between Sholem-Aleichem’s original stories and their Broadway incarnation) we have learned that tradition is “invented,” along with other postmodern lessons that can help illuminate why the show can be invoked both to confer Jewish bona fides on bar mitzvahs and to invite American rapport with Hasidim. We know, too, that, in the words of scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, heritage “is a mode of cultural production in the present” and that identity is fluid, fragmented, contingent, “performative”—not an innate given but brought into being through the living of it.
Fiddler
has become part of the material out of which a new generation, applying those lessons, is self-consciously fashioning contemporary Jewish culture and forging a usable past for a new era. The show is never far from arguments, artworks, public proclamations, material objects, communal gatherings, celebrations, and ritual practices through which current debates over Jewish authenticity are joined. Even as old orders explode and the Jewish community fragments, Tevye, along with the imagined world he represents, holds firm as a primary figure to whom artists, ideologues, and folks with products to peddle turn to consider—and often just glibly to indicate—both the unacceptable loss and the irrefutable promise of change. He trudges on within—and as—a storm of contradictions.

Tevye’s twenty-first century began, on the one hand, with the Yiddish literary critic Ruth Wisse’s continuing the scholarly sport of condemning
Fiddler
for degrading Sholem-Aleichem—and, through its positive portrayal of Fyedka, as she sees it, for far worse. “If a Jewish work can only enter American culture by forfeiting its moral authority and its commitment to group survival,” she sneers in
The Modern Jewish Canon
, “one has to wonder about the bargain that destroys the Jews with its applause.” On the other hand, also in 2000, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were honored with a Special Cultural Arts Award by the venerable Yiddish center, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; the fund-raising gala included a “poignant musical tribute that included a medley of their songs.”
Fiddler on the Roof
: cultural
génocidaire
or cultural hero? Nowadays, the Yiddishists themselves are divided.

So are the Israelis. A right-wing ultra-Orthodox settler, Tzvi Fishman, self-published a 580-page novel called
Tevye in the Promised Land
that brings the hero and his family to Palestine after the expulsion from Anatevka and reads like a kosher version of the evangelical Christian
Left Behind
series as it transforms the old dairyman into a swamp-clearing, Turk-battling, messianic Zionist. Meanwhile, Dan Almagor decided that the most fitting way to use royalties on his Hebrew translation of
Fiddler
was to purchase violins for Palestinian children in a music program in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Jenin.

In a video supporting a Rabbis for Human Rights campaign against Israeli displacement of Bedouins in the Negev, Theodore Bikel, a long-beloved Tevye, invokes the character he has played more than two thousand times, to decry the eviction and how “the very people who are telling them to get out are the descendants of the people of Anatevka.” And he dons Tevye’s costume in a magazine advertisement for a Jewish funeral provider, ballyhooing Dignity Memorial for “working for generations to preserve Jewish traditions.” At the same time, the show’s authority can be called on to confront Jewish anxieties: Aron Katz summoned it for his prizewinning entry in the Israeli “Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest,” cheekily launched in the wake of the controversy over Muhammad cartoons in a Danish paper and the subsequent call by an Iranian publication for Holocaust cartoons. In Katz’s image, which referred to conspiracy theories that Jews masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, a silhouetted male figure in caftan and wide-brimmed hat fiddles atop the Brooklyn Bridge while in the distance the World Trade Center towers burn. Nothing so efficiently supplies the means for reassuring and for ruffling Jewish sensibilities as
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Fiddler
as shorthand for the cheeky Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest.

What’s striking about these deployments of
Fiddler
and so many more—a progressive fair-tax lobbying campaign called the “If I Were a Rich Man Tour”; the assertion by disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that he decided to become religiously observant upon watching the
Fiddler
movie; Stephen Colbert’s joking that after Christians properly reclaim Rosh Hashanah they will stage
Fiddler
with Tevye played by Mel Gibson—is their self-conscious sincerity. All take seriously
Fiddler
’s status as a luminous icon capable of projecting echt Jewish luster, even if it’s only a show.

To some degree, that’s simply a function of pop culture’s reign and reach in general. But the frequency and undiminished pungency of
Fiddler
references after all these years speak to the unusually abundant and various entry points the show continues to provide for people of all persuasions. Today, it plays an even larger role in the new Jewish cultural sphere, where it has been embraced by artists who once disparaged it. The klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals remembers heading to gigs in the 1980s dreading that someone might ask her to play “Sunrise, Sunset.” But by the turn of the new century, some of the most serious klezmer players happily took part in the pathbreaking (if highly uneven) album
Knitting on the Roof
, produced by the label attached to the original Knitting Factory venue in Manhattan, which specialized in musical experiment and was a deliberate breeding ground for “new Jewish culture.” The album features a range of contemporary musicians, each interpreting—or deconstructing—a song from the show. A similar framework organized the kickoff for the Oy!hoo Festival at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y in 2007: each performer in a lineup of leading Jewish music makers covered one of the Bock and Harnick tunes, responding to them with hip-hop, Sephardic, indie rock, klezmer, and other soulful styles.

Projects like these served to lift the curse of kitsch off
Fiddler
. They could do so for two reasons. First, the musicians’ own work over the years: artists like Svigals joined the nascent klezmer revival movement in the 1980s shortly after it was earnestly under way, and they began learning from old LPs and from aging Yiddish musicians who still played for weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs. What they picked up about tough, complex rhythms they did not discern in the Broadway show; in place of sophisticated approaches to the phrasing they were studying, they heard in
Fiddler
glissandos and vibrato—“all that slipping, sliding stuff,” Svigals calls it—that does not properly belong to the genre. But as the wave of klezmer and of other new Jewish sounds rose, the Bock and Harnick score was swept from its unsought place as prime exemplar of Jewish music. Svigals and her colleagues began to see that dismissing those songs from the klezmer canon was like complaining that Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” is lousy Turkish music.
Fiddler
never intended to be there in the first place. Svigals could finally recognize the score for what it is—great show tunes—and even publicly admit to having played the original cast album to death in her adolescence. More than that, the score introduced the wider culture to some Jewish sounds—passages in the
freylekhs
mode, melodic reliance on the all-important interval of the fourth—effectively keeping a foot in the door that the new generation could come along and kick open. And as the foil to the seekers of counternostalgic “authentic” Yiddish music, it could even be said that it made the klezmer explosion possible.

Second, by the twenty-first century, when the generation after Svigals was expanding the repertoire of new Jewish music, culture was coming to the fore as a primary means of Jewish expression and identity making. In contrast to the Broadway songsmiths who happily “just happened to be Jewish,” the younger artists needed to make their Jewishness happen publicly. They were inventing new ways of proclaiming their belonging and determining its meaning. More dissociated from Jewish institutions than any generation yet, they have been coming of age in the “postidentity” era, when affiliation and self-naming still matter but have become more playful and open, less bound to politics, and less deferential to policing authorities. A “Heebster” or “New Jew” or “post-Halakhic Jew”—as younger Jews have been called—might in a single gesture reject and assert Jewish connection: violating Jewish law against bodily desecration by tattooing a Jewish star on her or his body.

In a pop culture landscape in which Jon Stewart’s bemusement and Sarah Silverman’s sassiness have supplanted Woody Allen’s angst and Gilda Radner’s send-up of stereotypes, Jewish outsiderness is no longer an issue—and thus, Jewish striving to fit into the mainstream no longer defines the community. Hardly exiled to the margins of power, American Jews boast high rates of academic achievement (55 percent of Jews graduate from college, compared with 28 percent of the general population), economic success (the median income of a Jewish household is $54,000—compared with $42,000 in general), and political muscle (12 percent of the current U.S. Senate is Jewish, compared with some 2 percent of the population). They take aim at Jewish insiderness by restoring a countercultural flicker of Jewish difference to their self-making. And they share it with the tools of that project—including
Fiddler
.

Projects like the Oy!hoo concert or the album of
Fiddler
songs by the Australian punk band Yidcore,
Fiddlin’ on Ya Roof
, with its snarled delivery, racing tempos, and assaulting guitar chords, neither reject
Fiddler
nor make fun of it; they
incorporate
it into their own, larger cultural enterprise. Remaking the work in their own idiom, they put a generational stamp on it that oddly Judaizes it. Theirs is the opposite of the universalizing gesture of albums like Joe Quijano’s
“Fiddler on the Roof” Goes Latin
or Cannonball Adderley’s jazz covers of the score of the 1960s. Suspicious of claims of universalism, the current generation of artists gleefully adds to, and takes from, a multiculti smorgasbord of raw materials but keeps the identifying tags on the items that they own and those that they borrow. In this view,
Fiddler
’s Jewishness does not dissolve by virtue of its being absorbed into someone else’s work. In place of the satisfied marvel that attended the Japanese embrace of
Fiddler
in the late 1960s, reactions today to non-Western productions, especially, express amusement. A link to a YouTube video of a Japanese troupe rehearsing the “Tradition” number—“Shikitari” in Japanese—made e-mail rounds in 2006, introduced by remarks about how “hilarious” and “unbelievable” it was. A 2008 production of
Fiddler
in Hindi translation in Delhi merited a report in the
Forward
as a man-bites-dog sort of story. These productions differed little from foreign versions in the 1970s, but the Jewish American discourse around them had changed.