Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (22 page)

On Robbins’s instruction, Lapson took Zipprodt to observe people in Hasidic and Orthodox dress. They visited yeshivas, factories, and synagogues in Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn and paid calls to residences of the elderly in Manhattan. Lapson showed the designer her collection of photographs and Eastern European Jewish art. The two watched throngs of Hasidim see off their rebbe as he departed for Israel on the
Queen Elizabeth
that November.

But most important, Lapson brokered Robbins’s entrée into community celebrations so he could observe their dancing. A pioneer in Jewish dance, Lapson had studied at the Isadora Duncan School and with Doris Humphrey and Michel Fokine (whose work Robbins performed in his early years at the Ballet Theater) and had begun a career on the stage in 1929. Early on, she decided to dedicate herself to Jewish dance and set about studying, presenting, and teaching both religious and nascent Israeli folk forms. Before the war, she traveled to Poland, where she presented popular recitals and gained permission to study the dancing of the Bluzhever Rebbe and his followers (and she maintained a friendship with him when he emigrated to the United States after the war). In Israel in 1949, she forged connections with the Inbal Yemenite Dance Theater (which Robbins had championed after seeing their work on a trip to Israel in 1952) and with developers of national folk dance and became one of their greatest ambassadors in North America. Like Aronson and Robbins, she passed through the Yiddish Art Theater, with stints staging dances for Maurice Schwartz. Robbins caught up with her in the fall of 1963 through the Jewish Education Committee, where she was promoting the innovative idea of integrating dance into children’s school curriculums. Then in her midfifties and still carrying herself with the long-necked elegance of a woman trained in ballet, Lapson enthusiastically took on the job as “dance research consultant” to the world-renowned choreographer. She promptly supplied copies of her booklets and articles—“Folk Dances for the Jewish Festival,” “Dances of the Jewish People,” and “Jewish Dances of the Year Round”—inscribed to him “with best wishes and with devotion.”

Robbins’s timing in locating her couldn’t have been better. The autumn festival of Simkhes Toyre—commemorating the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah—was coming up in early October and Lapson knew a
shtiebl
, or small community prayer house, where this typically ecstatic holiday would be celebrated with special abandon. When the night arrived, Robbins headed across town to pick up his guide at her home on West Seventy-third Street. His assistant reminded him to bring yarmulkes. Bock, Harnick, and Stein joined them, and they set out for the wild wards of Hasidic Brooklyn—specifically to the blocks where a Hungarian sect resided in Borough Park. Dozens of men were crammed into the tiny
shtiebl
, singing, clapping, knocking back schnapps after schnapps after schnapps. Their dancing came as a revelation: the secular showmen expected gentle folk forms of all hold hands and mosey one way round a circle and then the other; instead, they felt the room shake from floor stomping, body twisting, athletic flinging, and writhing. This was a holiday less for noshing than for moshing. The next day, Robbins sent Lapson a big bouquet of flowers.

Weddings, as private affairs, would be harder to crash, but Lapson knew the way in: contact the kosher caterer. A little more than a week after Simkhes Toyre, she met with a Mr. Tennenbaum of Broadway Central Hotel Caterers and explained her interest in attending upcoming events under his supervision. What exactly she told him is lost to history, but she doesn’t seem to have mentioned anything about a Broadway musical. When she followed up with a note, she emphasized her own dance scholarship and knowledge of Hebrew and made sure to drop some venerable names: “I am a friend of the Rabbinical families Halberstam, Unger and Spiro and have attended their family simchas [celebrations] in the past.” Finally, she assured Mr. Tennenbaum that she was familiar with the rules of dress for these occasions and would, “of course, be escorted by a male member of my family because of the lateness of these events.” That escort would be none other than Jerry Robbins.

They scored an invitation for the very next night for a wedding at the Riverside Plaza Hotel, at the time a venue with opulent ballrooms on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Once again, the dancing enthralled Robbins with its “virile ferocity,” as he came to describe it. As the weeks and then the months of research and preproduction meetings wore on, Lapson also drew on her rabbinical connections and began calling Robbins regularly to tell him when weddings would be open to him and which ones would feature a lot of dancing, which would allow men and women to dance together, which would be particularly huge, involving the marriage of children of prominent families, which would have balconies from which people could observe, and when holidays would prevent weddings for a while.

When Robbins planned to attend, as he often did through the fall of 1963, she’d call with reminders: it will begin promptly at 9:00, so pick her up at 8:15; you can bring two people this time; don’t forget change for the beggars. For a fee of $500—plus reimbursement of $37.50 that covered cab fare, tips at weddings, and two dozen yarmulkes—Lapson became Robbins’s regular date for the devout. Time and again, they saw the bride and groom lifted up in chairs by the cavorting guests and, often, a flimsy cord hastily stretched between stanchions instantly acquire the force of a high concrete barrier, separating women from men.

But every time, it was the men’s dancing that amazed Robbins. “My great wonder, watching the dancers, was how people weren’t hurt & bruised as bodies were flung centrifugally from out-of-control circles,” Robbins later marveled in handwritten notes for a letter. “Hats flew off, chairs overturned—but the rough dominant force that was released by all this kinetic energy was overpowering—for in spite of each man improvising as he felt—in spite of primitive variations of the basic rhythm—two things held them together. Their constant hand grip—when if broken by the external momentum of the dance, or by another body flinging itself into the dancer, was always regained, reunited. And secondly, the deep & powerful assertion—a strength I never knew—a dedication to a rite, claiming survival & joy, procreation & celebration. An explosive foot thrust to the floor that shook the room that said Yes I am here, & I celebrate the continuity of my existence.”

It was as if the shame Robbins had long felt about “weak” Jewish (and gay) masculinity was pulverized by the whirling frenzy of these homosocial dances, then kicked up and blown away like old, dry dust. This dancing provided the proof positive, and further inspiration, for his demand that the show express Jewish robustness and resilience—the strength that not only he “never knew” but that had been obscured in popular representations for decades.

He was intrigued, too, by a man with a rusty beard who seemed to be a regular at these weddings, entertaining the guests by weaving among them with a particular trick. Lapson had seen such antics during her research in Europe and mentioned them in an article for the
International Folk Music Journal
: he was performing a
flashen-tantz
, a caper in which “the man balances a bottle on his head as he dances, perhaps to prove himself sober.” Robbins referred to him as “Mr. Redbeard,” but it didn’t take long for Lapson to identify him and track him down. And more: this Rabbi Ackerman from Borough Park would be glad to meet with Robbins.

Yet Robbins said little about how he would use dance in the show. All fall, he was meeting daily with, or at least taking calls from, the writers or designers or producer, or all of the above, to discuss the script, the music, the costumes and set, the budget. The only clue that he expected dance to play a significant role in the show was his insistence, when he agreed to take the job, on an atypically long rehearsal period of eight weeks before hitting the road for tryouts—four for his work as choreographer, four for the staging of the book.

But rehearsals were still more than half a year away, and in those months when his “intense research on the Sholem Aleichem musical” was “taking most of my time,” as he told a friend (by way of apologizing for not getting to the scripts she’d sent him), he was putting the authors through their paces. He tasked them, too, with conducting deeper, more personal research. Stein felt his own family background exempted him from such homework, but he did the reading. (An exchange Stein adapted for Perchik and Tevye—“Money is the world’s curse.” “May God smite me with it!”—comes not out of the Butwin translation of the stories but from Maurice Samuel.)

Beyond the booklist, Harnick dove in. He started questioning his own relatives about a background he had never heard about before. “You want some Jewish customs for your new play?” Harnick’s mother wrote in reply. “Here goes.” His aunt Choni also sent letters detailing what she recalled from her childhood. Between them, they told how their mother (Harnick’s grandmother) spent two hours chopping gefilte fish in a wooden bowl for Shabbos, how she covered her head and circled her hands to light the Friday night candles, how a “Shabbos goy”—a Gentile neighbor—came each Saturday morning to light a fire in the kitchen and parlor stoves so the family would be spared breaking the religious commandment to refrain from all work. The earthenware pot with a philodendron climbing out of it on Harnick’s mother’s patio in 1963 had once been used by his grandmother every week for making the long-simmering Sabbath stew called cholent, which cooked overnight in an oven at the corner bakery; the children fetched it home at lunchtime on Saturdays, when their grandfather returned from shul. Through these revelations and the show’s development, Harnick began to “feel more Jewish.” As the work went on, “as a writer and as a person, my life came together,” he said. “I knew who I was and who Sholem-Aleichem’s people were, and where our lives touched.”

For his part, Robbins interviewed his father, learning for the first time about the ruse and bribe that enabled Harry to steal out of Rozhanka at age fifteen on an “underground railway,” as Robbins likened it. Harry traveled by foot with a deserting Russian soldier, all the way to Amsterdam. Robbins was moved by the rare opportunity to “feel my father’s feelings so strongly.” He asked Harry, too, to explain how and why he had discarded Orthodox practice. Answer: his recognizing how his relatives and other Jews engaged in “juggling and bending” the religious laws to accommodate the demands of American business and culture. Robbins also pondered his maternal grandmother, who had come to live with his family when Robbins was an adolescent, “a wonderful tiny, amazingly wrinkled little woman” who “never lit a stove or turned on electricity after sundown on Sabbath eve; kept separate dishes for dairy & meat foods; attended shul religiously & was always reading the Talmud.” He could still picture how beautiful she looked on Sabbath evenings in her dark velvet dress with a tiny handmade lace collar, lighting the candles and reciting the blessing. As a child, he was “both awed and scornful of her ritual gestures.” He “‘despised’ her Jewish backward ways,” which he could not ask her about, even if he’d wanted to: she spoke only Yiddish. Some thirty years later, he was finally allowing himself to make sense of this heritage that had been “laid open for me and more gently than i ever realized, i absorbed it, drank it in and let it sink to a place deep within me, quietly building up a rich & glorious storehouse of cherished sacred and touching knowledge—all stored away—deep & away.” Now he was not only opening the vault but spelunking into its many caverns, hauling up one treasure after another to enliven the world of the play, in order to make it specific. And true. The more he delved, the more he pressed the writers to toughen and tighten the script.

*   *   *

The version Robbins first read had come a long way since the initial draft, with its stagnating action and some sections sticky as damp sugar. In response to Bock’s and Harnick’s notes, Stein had restored the ironic confusion in the meeting between Tevye and Lazar with a light, humorous hand and, in place of a series of escalating insults between them that had ended the scene before, the men now concluded with a happy toast “To life!”—and broke into song. In this draft, Perchik was charmingly introducing the subject of marriage to Hodel as a “political question,” and in general humor was emerging more out of character than from set-up jokes. A scene in which Tevye goes to the local priest to demand his daughter Chava be returned to the family ends with him reeling away, rebuffed. Following Sholem-Aleichem, Tevye wonders in a troubled monologue, here set to music, why God bothered to make different kinds of people: “Forgive me for asking / But why did you choose / to make of your children / both Gentiles and Jews? / These questions, almighty God / I hope you’ll excuse / But I had a daughter / Too precious to lose.” The action finds a spot of uplift when Motel acquires a sewing machine at last and sings it a love song, but then the constable delivers a new, irrevocable blow: eviction. In acquiescing to the decree, Tevye stands up to its minion (and plays to the house): “We are not strong, we have no power in the government. But we have a special talent to survive. We are a peaceful people, we do not win great wars, but we survive—we flourish and survive!” Then Chava joins the family, pledging to emigrate with them no matter what her husband decides. (He shows up and, after a tense silence, Tevye tells him to help with the packing.)

In addition to “Sabbath Prayer,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Tevye’s Dream,” Bock and Harnick had already written a touching musical plea from Tzeitel begging not to have to marry the butcher, “Poppa Help Me,” and a “Letter to America” in which the community, led by Tevye, responds to mail from relatives overseas by singing of their love of Anatevka, asking, “Who needs America? / Who needs a new community / changing our ways to I don’t know what? / Maybe there’s opportunity / Maybe I’d like America, but…”

All of these developments gave the show more dramatic tension and shape. Stein was fattening the characters and the songs were advancing action or thickening context.