The perfect match! How Fiddler on the Roof became a tradition.
This kind of fairy tale usually only happens in a Broadway musical: a scrappy rags-to-rags tale about poor Russian-Jewish peasants becomes the longest-running show ever to hit The Great White Way, gets fully absorbed into the cultural zeitgeist, transcends all cultures and continues to be performed and adored for decades to follow.
Based on the short stories of 19th century Russian writer Sholem Aleichem, the humble tales of Tevye the milkman and his five daughters took theatergoers by surprise when it debuted in 1964. In a Broadway of My Fair Lady and Camelot, Fiddler did not feel like a sure bet.
Yet lightning struck. American Jews were still coming to terms with the Holocaust, and slowly, shyly declaring their ethnic identity in a time when the safe game was to assimilate.
The musical’s score couldn’t hurt: “Tradition,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “If I Were A Rich Man,” and “Miracle of Miracles” quickly became standards, and the original cast album became imprinted on the minds of suburban American Jews for decades to come.
The show’s universal theme of embracing tradition versus rejecting tradition appealed to Jew and non-Jew alike, making it a favorite among school and community group theater programs.
In her book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, Alisa Solomon catches the lightning in a bottle. The story takes us from the obscure Pale of impoverished Russia to the global impact and liberating pleasure that the show has given to millions of astonished fans.
Here, she tells us how Fiddler gave us all a blessing on our heads.
Great idea for a book! What brought the idea to you?
It happened in 2004, when the Broadway revival had come out. I was still writing for The [Village] Voice then and had proposed a preview feature about it.
I hadn’t thought about Fiddler on the Roof since I was a kid. I had an idea about what I was going to write.
The first thing I had to do was go get the CD, because I hadn’t listened to it in so long.
I brought it home and I put it on, and three songs in, I started to cry. I cried all the way through the album. So I figured I shouldn’t be too cynical about this.
Something was lost within me and I was interested to know what that was.
Many Jewish-Americans can personally connect to that original Broadway cast album. It was quite a regular sound in many homes for decades.
I grew up in the Midwest. My family had the LP. We played it all the time and just knew those songs. They were completely internalized.
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What makes these songs transcend the Broadway cliché?
It’s hard now to think of hugely popular songs coming from the realm of the Broadway stage. Now they just come from the radio, from Top 40.
In the heyday of Broadway, these were the songs that were heard in grocery stores, piped-in Muzak versions, songs that everybody was doing covers of, that people were singing on The Ed Sullivan Show.
They were really a bigger part of popular culture, more than something like Spring Awakening would be now.
In a time when it was better to assimilate than to declare an ethnic identity, Fiddler was really out of the ethnic closet. Seems like a groundbreaking moment for Jewish Americans to declare themselves.
Especially to second and third generation assimilating Jews. They were trying to figure out that balance between blending in [as Americans] without disappearing.
One woman, who had seen the original production as a young woman, said to me, “It made us feel like it was okay to be Jewish.” That’s the most crystalized way of making that point.
A lot of people already felt OK to be Jewish, but for those who were having anxiety about being accepted as an American and being embarrassed by their immigrant parents with their accents, it was a moment of tremendous pride.
It was presented in a very loving way without any apology and it was embraced by the world. Everybody loved it.
Were there any detractors?
The academic Yiddishists really don’t like the show. They think it’s a bastardization of the brilliant Sholem Aleichem [stories], which it is, but OK.
One of the effects of the show is that it generated a lot of interest in the original Sholem Aleichem stories. It encouraged people to turn to the original material and to learn about their history and become more engaged.
The rallying around the plight of Soviet Jews in the ‘70s could very well be an effect of that.
Why is Fiddler a perennial favorite among schools and community theater?
It’s a favorite of community productions because it’s about community. When kids or community groups do any play together, there is a very strong sense of community or a family-like feeling that happens around a shared goal.
Because this is so much about the importance of a whole community and its efforts to sustain itself under various kinds of threat, it’s especially powerful to these kinds of groups.
I think schools like it too because there are lots of roles for women, and for boys and for girls. And that’s not so easy to come by.
The songs have become standards, but they are unusual, character-driven tunes that have an offbeat feel to them. Yet they still strike a universal chord.
There are some beautiful songs and some great opportunities for really good singers, but for some of the original cast members, their major strengths were not singing. Some of the songs were actually adjusted or changed.
For instance, “Matchmaker” has a pretty narrow range. It doesn’t require anything enormous from the singers, and the same with “Miracle of Miracles.”
The musical demands are always hard for non-professionals, and I’m not diminishing the beauty of the songs in any sense, but there are harder songs to sing in other musicals. It has a certain accessibility.
The movie version, presented in 1971, faced a huge task of trying to create the magic of the stage show.
It was one of the last road show movies, where there was a lot of hoopla around them, with a printed program. It was an event. You really had to prepare for it. It was a big deal.
The movie was a huge production and the director, Norman Jewison, approached it with a great deal of responsibility to get things right.
The actor Topol had an idea that the main character, Tevye, should be somewhat tougher and more macho [than he appeared in the short stories and musical].
Yet most people tend to associate the main character of Tevye with actor Zero Mostel, who appeared in the original Broadway cast and album.
I’m sorry to say I never saw him on stage, but yes, by all accounts, he was just phenomenal.
In the Mad magazine satire of the show [Antenna on the Roof], the main character resembled Zero [not Topol, the actor in the film version].
Zero was actually only in the show for nine months, but his stamp on it has remained. So he is the central drawing in the Mad magazine satire. It shows that he was still thought of as the definitive Tevye.
What surprised you the most in your Fiddler research?
[Earlier in the 20th century,] there were pathetic efforts to make [the short stories] to the New York Yiddish theater. I was very surprised by the earlier treatments of the material in English.
[Producer] Jerome Robbins was responding against much more sentimental treatments that had preceded the theater adaptation.
I was really surprised by the role Fiddler had in Poland. Not only surprised but very moved by the current young generation of Poles. They are trying to find a way to come to terms with Jewish history and culture and the people who had been so intertwined with Polish culture and to try to fill in the gaps of that history.
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Learn more about the book here
