Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (17 page)

But the short stories—those, Stein told his collaborators, might be more suitable for the stage. He remembered that his father, an immigrant from Poland who was now living with him, had read them in Yiddish when he was young. That pious, affable milkman with his tangled Talmudic quotes and rebellious daughters. Those tragicomic tales of ruin and survival. Couldn’t those make a good musical? Even Rodgers and Hammerstein had thought so, though Stein didn’t know it at the time.

But where to find the stories in English in 1960? Frances Butwin’s
Tevye’s Daughters
had been out of print for nearly a decade and even though some Sholem-Aleichem was still available in translation, Stein wasn’t having any luck locating it. Neil Klugman and the other caustic characters in
Goodbye, Columbus
seemed to be shouting from every bookshop window, asserting themselves, controversially, as the irreverent new voice of Jewish America. Stein called all over the city and finally, at O’Malley’s secondhand bookstore on Park Avenue South, he put his hands on a volume with a fading gray green cloth cover, the title
Tevye’s Daughters
looping across it in a gilded cursive font. Inside, he rediscovered the sympathetic, stalwart hero who made him laugh so hard he cried. In March 1961, Bock, Harnick, and Stein met formally for the first time to discuss staging the stories.

Harnick was surprised by how much the stories appealed to him. He remembered reading some Sholem-Aleichem when he was in high school on the recommendation of someone who’d heard how much he enjoyed American humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber. But stories by “the Jewish Mark Twain” left him cold. Harnick “wrote them off, just dismissed them” at the time. But twenty years later they came across as “wonderfully human and moving and funny.” For what reason—emotional maturity? more refined literary sensibility? inchoate postwar fondness for the old Jewish world? simply the availability of a better translation?—Harnick couldn’t say. They simply resonated. Bock and Stein had the same reaction: the stories were “so warm and human and emotional that they cried out for music.” Only later would Harnick acknowledge a buried basis for the appeal. “Over and above the beauty of the stories themselves, there was another reason why we were all drawn to this material, which can perhaps be best illustrated by a title which Mr. Stein suggested: ‘Where Poppa Came From.’” But in 1960–61, the men did not recognize that motivation. “It never entered our minds that it was Jewish,” Harnick recalled. “We all felt the same way about the stories, that they were just very beautiful and we couldn’t wait to work on them.” Or, as Stein liked to put it, “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.”

Like a lot of other American Jews, that’s pretty much how Bock, Harnick, and Stein felt about themselves. Stein, the oldest of the three, was the only one raised by Orthodox immigrant parents in a Yiddish-speaking household. But he “was never very involved in religion” and after his bar mitzvah found whatever spiritual calling he may have felt in the collaborative world of the theater. Bock and Harnick came from less observant families—Harnick in a mostly Gentile neighborhood, where a brief adolescent interest in becoming a rabbi was quickly supplanted by music and writing, and Bock in a secular family where it was his grandmother’s singing of Russian and Yiddish folk songs that infused him with what he referred to as his ethnic “juices.” All three—like ever-growing numbers of other Jewish Americans—felt comfortable in this era of growing acceptance and integration. Being Jewish was not the governing fact of their lives, but neither was it an issue. They would never deny that they were Jews, they just responded to the identity with the quintessential Jewish gesture: a shrug.

From the beginning, Bock, Harnick, and Stein ran into discouraging, even derisive, reactions to their effort. The first came from Stein’s own agent, who let him know she thought he was wasting his time on a ridiculous project. “I’ll go through the motions of making a routine contract,” she told him with some irritation when he asked her to draw up a standard agreement among the three partners; she expected that it would not amount to anything. The writers had plenty of their own doubts. “Who would be interested in producing a show about a shtetl?” Stein wondered. But they kept at it, simply out of love of the material and the desire to work together. “It was pure speculation and pure affection,” Stein said.

Of Sholem-Aleichem’s eight Tevye stories in the Butwin volume, they initially chose to work from five: “Modern Children” (the story that focuses on Tzeitel’s marriage to Motel the tailor), “Hodel” (the daughter who chooses Perchik, the revolutionary, and follows him to Siberia), “Chava” (the one who marries a non-Jew), “Shprintze” (who drowns herself after her wealthy beau’s uncle calls off their betrothal), and “Get Thee Out” (in which Tevye and his family are evicted).

Stein’s first order of business was figuring out how to weave the distinct and separate stories—written over the stretch of two decades—into a single drama. He had adapted works before, but not from fiction, and Sholem-Aleichem presented difficulties that went far beyond the need to spin full scenes and dialogue out of narration, some of it quite minimal. (All that is said in “Modern Children,” for instance, about Tzeitel and Motel’s nuptials is a near throwaway line—“the next day they were engaged, and not long after were married”—yet it inspired what eventually became
Fiddler
’s lengthy and elaborate act 1 finale. In the movie, the scene lasts a whopping twenty-one minutes.)

The stage’s demand for incident was the least of Stein’s challenges. The bigger problem lay in the clash between the musical’s essential means—full frontal delivery—and Sholem-Aleichem’s thickly layered indirectness. In the original series of prose monologues, the action emerges more from Tevye’s way of recounting events than in the events themselves—in the twists of his language, the ironic drama of his dawning self-consciousness, the sheer relentlessness of his verbiage (in contrast to his tragic failure to speak up during the events he now relates), his vital need to narrate himself through every situation. Stein would have to determine how—and where—to use monologue in a way that didn’t reduce Tevye’s complexity. For starters, without Sholem-Aleichem as his listener—the frame the original author created—to whom would Tevye be speaking?

Then, there was Tevye himself. He is far more complex than
Juno
’s blustery Captain Boyle or
Plain and Fancy
’s conservative Papa Yoder. If Tevye occasionally shares a few of their characteristics—some self-inflated authority, some delay in recognizing what’s transpiring around him—they are neither what make him funny nor what make him affecting. Comic and tragic incongruities combine in Tevye, this man of unshakable faith who constantly questions God. Enduring one catastrophe after another, the man with no power confronts the Highest Authority. He even quotes Scripture in the process: Tevye throws the Book at Him. But that’s the easy part for Tevye. “I wasn’t worried about God so much. I could come to terms with Him, one way or another,” he says in the Shprintze story as he heads home from hearing her suitor’s uncle break the engagement. “What bothered me was people.”

Jerry Bock (at piano) and Sheldon Harnick: songs should serve the show.

This is a mirthless humor that would prove difficult to translate to the commercial theater, even half a dozen years after Samuel Beckett’s comic bleakness had been introduced to the Broadway stage (where it found less than mass enthusiasm). Stein labored to keep Tevye lovable and funny without sacrificing—or sensationalizing—his pathos. He understood that when the audience laughs at Tevye, it must not be with condescension or there would be no emotional truth in their show. But understanding a critical point is one thing, applying it credibly in the theater another.

Stein pored over the Butwin volume, numbering sections with a light pencil to create a workable sequence of connected events. He encouraged himself with the certitude that any adaptation is a new thing in itself, not a literal translation: “I’m not a stenographer.” Even so, he wanted to capture what had touched and stirred him and his collaborators in Sholem-Aleichem’s work in the first place. Otherwise, what was the point? He was determined “to be very true to the original in terms of mood and feeling.”

Keeping faith with those qualities tested the three men as they met periodically over the spring and early summer of 1961 to exchange ideas and as they weighed a couple of outline variants that July. One question thrummed beneath their labors even if it was never explicitly named, a version of which (unbeknown to them) had vexed even Sholem-Aleichem himself when he tried to adapt the material for a popular theatrical audience: to what extent could they maintain the tragic tone of the Tevye stories when writing for the chipper expectations of Broadway? How they’d treat the Chava story provided one key answer. Like Sholem-Aleichem before them, they changed its ending. Their first outline has Chava returning to the family fold at the play’s close: “With pogrom threatening, her place is here. Her husband knows where she is, she feels he will come. Tevye accepts her.” And though Stein would rewrite the scene many times before settling on a final version, that essential action stuck.

Even so, the collaborators worried that the second act piled one sad event upon another: apart from Chava’s marriage to Fyedka, there was Hodel’s departure for Siberia, the town’s eviction and exodus, and, in an early variant outline, even Shprintze’s suicide.

Couldn’t they use some comic relief? They thought of removing Chava’s story line entirely and replacing it with a vastly modified version of “Shprintze,” Sholem-Aleichem’s most painful story of all. They imagined that with “light and humorous treatment” they could exploit the story for its “valuable social elements” addressing the class divisions among Jews. What if, they wondered, instead of Shprintze’s drowning herself when her suitor’s wealthy family tears him away from her, Tevye tries to calm his heartbroken daughter? The scene could have “high humor and tenderness without any Second Avenue quality.” And more: “We will also be able to make another kind of comment because we will see the wealthy family being evicted together with the other Jews.”

Like any number of bad ideas entertained in a creative process, the suggestion was quickly abandoned. Wringing humor from “Shprintze” would have required too great a distortion for a weak payoff, especially when compared to the affecting Chava story (one that they would come to use to escalate the challenges that Tevye faces, just as Sholem-Aleichem did). They dropped “Shprintze” altogether. They wouldn’t have time for five stories and, in any event, it was too dark for the show that was beginning to take shape.

Besides, Stein had settled on a means of bringing the material home to contemporary audiences: he was sending Tevye’s family to America at the end of the play. Though in the first outline Tevye himself was to remain behind—“he is too old, he is afraid of new things, this is his home; he will survive; survival, he assures them, is his strongest trait”—a letter from an uncle who has already emigrated persuades him that his children should do the same. To Stein it just “felt right” that they should come to the United States. It was historically true that the wave of Jewish immigration surged in the period after the failed 1905 revolution and the subsequent pogroms. Sholem-Aleichem and his wife and son were among more than 150,000 who came in 1905–06 alone. Stein’s own parents arrived only a few years later. Stein entertained giving the daughters less “exotic” names like Rachel and Sarah.

Where Tevye and his family were coming from proved just as significant an adjustment. At first, the script didn’t specify. “Does Tevye live in Boiberik?” the authors asked in some early notes, naming the summer resort town to which Tevye delivers his milk and cheese. In the original stories, Tevye lives between Boiberik (which Sholem-Aleichem based on the real-life Boyarka) and Yehupitz (based on Kiev) and sometimes bemoans his remoteness from a Jewish community. Kasrilevke (Golde’s hometown) and Anatevka (where the butcher Lazar Wolf and the tailor Motel Kamzoyl live) lie some versts away. But like the earlier radio adaptations of the stories, Stein moved Tevye to the center of Anatevka, collecting all the characters in a single setting. Dramaturgical expediency ended up serving the postwar Jewish immigration narrative, flagging the trajectory’s end points: shtetl to America.

With an outline all three men approved, Stein started to flesh out the scenes. He built upon what little dialogue he found in the stories and kept much of the book’s language in Tevye’s monologues. He pulled in some bits and pieces of background from other stories in the volume that aren’t part of the Tevye series. He invented—as he had to—many of the interactions. In mid-October 1961, he completed a draft of act 1.

“Move! March, you foolish animal!” ran the first line—the voice of Tevye heard from the wings, urging his tottering horse to get a move on. Then a stage direction: “Tevye enters, sits on a rock, sighs wearily.” He spills his heart out to the audience, complaining cheerfully about his “stubborn animal.” He ponders aloud: “Well, even a horse is one of God’s living creatures and he has the same rights as other living creatures—the right to feel tired, the right to be hungry, and the right to work like a horse!” He explains that he sells milk and cheese for a meager living, that he has a wife and five daughters—“One more beautiful, smarter, livelier than the next.… And I have only one question about my daughters. How do I get them off my hands?” He all but announces an ambivalent fatalism: “The good Lord made many, many poor people. And if He wants it that way, that’s the way it should be. You see, if it should have been different, it would have been. (
Pause
.) And yet, what would have been wrong to have it different?”