Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (7 page)

When they pulled into the harbor at Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 2, the greeting for the author was more modest than it had been eight years earlier: just a couple of friends and some Hebrew school kids waving blue-and-white flags—no prominent Jews or Yiddish writers. The journalists who showed up peddled the same old story about the Jewish Mark Twain who called himself “Peace be with you.” Sholem-Aleichem burst out with a bitter laugh the next day when he saw that one paper referred to him as “Sholem Yankev Abramovitch”—the given name of another author altogether, his literary “grandfather,” Mendele. Astonished by how much New York had grown and speeded up since he’d left, and by how strong and self-assured the new generation of Jewish Americans seemed, Sholem-Aleichem felt more alienated than ever, as though he’d arrived too late into a world that had created itself without him and then flown off, far beyond his orbit.

For all the changes Sholem-Aleichem noticed in the city, one thing remained constant: it would not cut him a break. The Yiddish daily,
Der tog
, had contracted with him to write two pieces a week for $100, but he complained that the editors lacked enthusiasm for his work. Weaker than ever, he once again embarked on provincial reading tours to pump up his bank account and his ego—with mixed success on both counts. And he tried, yet again, to write for the stage. Over the summer of 1915, he worked on
Dos groyse gevins
(
The Grand Prize
), a jolly four-act comedy about a tailor whose simple happiness is spoiled when he wins a fortune in a lottery, and he felt certain that this time he himself would win big. In a July letter to his children Misha and Emma, who had stayed in Copenhagen (Emma looking after her ailing brother), he wrote with no diminishment of his stagestruck enthusiasm: “I hope to have it produced in the fall by Adler or Thomashefsky. I think its success is a sure thing.” Or maybe he knew better and was putting on a cheery front for his children.

Either way,
The Grand Prize
was not even produced. Thomashefsky told him the play was weak. Sholem-Aleichem turned to David Kessler with yet one more new play. When he read it for the esteemed actor, Kessler nodded off.

That insult was nothing compared with the horrendous news that was to come: in September Misha died. Word arrived by telegram the day after Yom Kippur, and in that instant Berkowitz saw his father-in-law disintegrate before his eyes. Soon thereafter,
Der tog
—operating at a loss—told Sholem-Aleichem they would not be renewing his contract for a second year. All he could do to console himself, as he told his older daughter in a letter to Odessa, was to remember that in Europe things were even worse.

Sholem-Aleichem picked up a regular assignment from another daily newspaper, the
Varhayt
, but by January he took to his bed with influenza and was too sick to enjoy the splashy debut of his Motl stories in English in the Sunday magazine of the
New York World
. Ever more frail, he continued to write and to give readings through the spring, but his fire had gone out. On May 13, 1916, at the age of fifty-seven, surrounded by his family and some friends, Sholem-Aleichem died.

*   *   *

In this single sad instance, Sholem-Aleichem’s theatrical timing was superb. His funeral—including a stately procession from his home in the Bronx through the full length of Manhattan, across the Lower East Side, and into the cemetery in Brooklyn—brought out as many as 250,000 mourners (nearly a sixth of New York’s 1.5 million Jews) and involved dignitaries from every faction of New York Jewish life.

As New York’s Yiddish press had been reporting, and as high-profile relief benefits in Manhattan had been emphasizing, among the vast destruction in the region for all residents, the war brought violent upheaval to the more than four million Jews of the Russian Pale and Habsburg Poland, who lived right in the pathways of the armies traipsing over the eastern front. More than half a million had been driven from their homes by czarist edict. Tens of thousands starved to death. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands more, who were not forcibly expelled, fled the fighting in their towns and teemed into cities like Warsaw and Vilna. In response to the catastrophe, American Jews came together in an unprecedented union—not only Orthodox and socialists but also the uptown German elite linking up with representatives of the Yiddish-speaking masses—to form the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which raised funds for war refugees. So, too, they united in grieving the death of Sholem-Aleichem, the icon of that ravaged world, the self-styled Jewish
folkshrayber
. His funeral gave stage to the community’s need for collective mourning.

Public funerals for prominent figures had taken place from time to time before on the Lower East Side, but none had been so big or covered as much territory as Sholem-Aleichem’s. And none had been so brilliantly orchestrated to address all the factions of Jewish New York, employing the traditional rituals of Jewish burial to make an emphatic assertion of Jewish unity.

Those who “guarded” the body before burial by staying close by and reciting psalms, as Jewish law requires, comprised more than a hundred Yiddish writers, arriving in shifts at Sholem-Aleichem’s home—among them young modernist poets, Zionist orators, and socialist journalists. (One was Joel Entin, the critic who had slammed
Pasternak
as “a broken piece of calamity” less than a decade earlier.) The procession on the day of the funeral, a Monday, paused at religious, secular, German, and Eastern European institutions, acknowledging the communal role of all. The memorial prayer, “
El mole rakhamim
,” was sung along the way by a Reform cantor and by the Orthodox superstar Yossele Rosenblatt. A dozen eulogists—and the men flanking them on the dais—represented the gamut of cultural and political Jewish life in New York.

That made sense, in the writer Yehoash’s estimation. “Sholem-Aleichem was from beginning to end a microcosm of the Jewish people,” he said in his eulogy. And such a symbol provided the community with exactly what it needed in an emotionally complex period in which the immigrant generation sensed it was losing, in Europe’s violence, what it had already rejected. If Sholem-Aleichem could not be fully embraced in the New York Yiddish theater—the boisterous arena for the forging of a go-getting Jewish Americanness—because he was perceived as representing the suffering of Jews in Europe, he could now be earnestly celebrated in that very role in the theater of the streets. As the departed symbol of the lost Old World, Sholem-Aleichem was nothing less than the community’s collective
pintele yid
.

That function required flattening into literalness the artistic persona he had cultivated in the early part of his career, and myriad commentators lent their sincere weight to the project. In an “appreciation” after his death, the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner, for one, declared Sholem-Aleichem “not a ‘folk writer,’ not even ‘
the
folk writer,’ but rather … a living essence of the folk itself.… What we have [in his work] is the life of the people in its authentic form, a true, vibrant cross-section of their lives.… The great Sholem-Aleichem had no style—he had no need of style.”

There could not be a more usable Eastern European Jewish past than that. And therefore Sholem-Aleichem—and before long that “crown of my creation” Tevye, with whom the author was increasingly (if erroneously) identified—became a font for signifying, and even for conferring, “authentic”
Yiddishkayt
. Which is to say, every competing Jewish faction, cause, or campaign claimed him as its own. And molded him to serve its agenda.

*   *   *

Three years after his death, more than a decade after his double debut in that ill-fated February of 1907, Sholem-Aleichem finally found success on the New York stage. The new prince of Yiddish theater, Maurice Schwartz, opened his second season as a director on August 29, 1919, with a Sholem-Aleichem play and had a colossal creative and commercial triumph. Not only did it fuel Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater with income and with the inspiration to produce epic family dramas over the several decades the theater lasted in one form or another, it also demonstrated the enduring stage-worthiness of a family story about Jewish steadfastness and adaptation amid a world of change: it was the premiere production of
Tevye der milkhiker
. (A few months before, Zion films made a silent feature adapted from “Khave” that invented the characters of Fyedka’s parents; it disappeared in obscurity.)

Schwartz’s script was essentially the one Sholem-Aleichem had almost sent to Adler in 1914; the author had tinkered with it some once he had come back to America, and, as a condition for granting Schwartz license to produce it, Olga Rabinowitz insisted that their son-in-law, Berkowitz, supervise any text revision. (Berkowitz added the village priest from the “Khave” story to the dramatis personae, though Sholem-Aleichem had not included him.) At last, Sholem-Aleichem had his smash hit—the show sold out for sixteen straight weeks—despite a few reviews that insisted that great prose, with its openness to ambiguity and its potent narrative viewpoint, loses its dynamism when translated to the specificity required of the stage: no performance can ever match the ideal in a reader’s imagination, the argument goes. “What more can the stage say about Tevye that the book has not already said?” asked M. Grim in the most cantankerous review that peddled this line. Grim—like future guardians of Yiddish literature who would rail against
Fiddler
—maintained that Schwartz (and presumably the author himself, though Grim does not mention his role in the adaptation) had “wiped out” the “brilliance, the Sholem-Aleichem-ness.” Others mocked Schwartz’s penchant for animals onstage (real chickens, doves, a cow, and a horse crowded Tevye’s yard) and a clunky lighting effect (a moon that rose in the west but seemed to illuminate the house from the east). Still, Olga Rabinowitz was pleased enough with
Tevye
’s success that she granted Schwartz the rights to the entire Sholem-Aleichem canon—and he made good use of it over the next several decades, presenting, with irregular success, productions of such plays as
The Grand Prize
,
Wandering Stars
(adapted by Schwartz from the novel), and
Hard to Be a Jew
(featuring as Popov a promising young actor named Muni Weisenfreund—later known as Paul Muni). In 1931, Schwartz brought Sholem-Aleichem to Broadway in an English-language version of
Hard to Be a Jew,
running for seventy-seven performances under the producer-approved title of
If I Were You
.

It is as Tevye, though, that Schwartz reigned supreme. Even critics who found fault with the staging more generally lauded him for his effective new approach to acting. Though not quite thirty at the time, Schwartz was larger than life and brought a surprising sense of wisdom as well as playful charm to the part. His commitment to toning down the stamps and shouts, the broad gestures and center-stage speechifying of the popular theater in favor of a quieter, more contemplative acting style paid off with Tevye. Schwartz won high praise, for example, for a first-act scene in which, sensing with a glance that Khave’s suitor, Fyedka, has been in the house to visit her, Tevye seems to feel the foundations of his poor but happy Jewish home shake. Or when he silently rebukes his eldest daughter, Tzaytl, when she tries to awaken some sympathy in him for her sister. The influential Abe Cahan extolled Schwartz’s “wholehearted” and “realistic” performance, most remarkable, in Cahan’s reckoning, for steering clear of “
shund
effects” and “tricks to draw unearned applause.” Schwartz did, however (as several critics noted), elicit genuine tears.

Maurice Schwartz in his film of
Teyve der milkhiker
, bringing realism and restraint to the role.

After the first sixteen weeks, the play held the stage at the Irving Place on weekends for almost the entire season. Schwartz put Tevye in rotation when the troupe toured to such cities as Boston, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Vienna, contributing to the worldwide popularity of the play. And he kept it in the repertoire for years, continuing to play Tevye with “an unstrained style which approaches suaveness itself” and moving with agility “from stark tragedy to downright slapstick.” Perhaps Bertha Gersten, who played Khave (to reviews lamenting her lack of fire), captured Schwartz’s achievement best in her memoir: “It was hard to tell if Schwartz created Tevye or Tevye created Schwartz.”

But Schwartz’s performance alone can’t account for the success of
Tevye der milkhiker
. The new realism of the acting meshed with the play’s ability to speak to a community in the throes of cultural transition (just as
Fiddler
would do two generations later). With the Great War over and the scope of its destruction known, and with pogroms erupting in Russia’s civil war,
Tevye der milkhiker
gave audiences a new occasion for coming together to focus their thoughts and emotions: a tempered presentation of one traditional man’s recognition that his way of life is going under.