Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (37 page)

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Not that Jewish spectators had to be as hugely conflicted as Jerry Robbins to share in the outsize emotional response to the play. In letters of gratitude they extolled Hal Prince and the authors for showing the world the beauty of their Jewish heritage in a place they never expected to find it. Rabbis sent copies of the sermons they were giving based on the play. (That they were giving sermons at all was a matter of the cultural adaptation that
Fiddler
both embodies and celebrates: Jewish worship had been “Protestantized” in the postwar period and preaching became increasingly important to a congregational rabbi’s role.)

One Jack Spiro attended the show on the first night of Passover and wrote to tell Hal Prince, “This is the first seder I’ve missed in many a year, but I felt more uplifted being in the audience of
Fiddler
than I would have had I passed that time in Temple.” With a surprising twist, he added, “I want to thank you for restoring my faith in musical theater”—as pure a testament as there could be to the idea that popular culture answered the spiritual displacement of many midcentury American Jews.

Untold others tapped into this exhilarating public esteem, even if they didn’t send notes to say so. One of thousands of such families was the Fiersteins from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—Irving and Jacqueline and their two boys. From Irving’s earnings at a handkerchief factory, they budgeted funds for regular family trips into the city for art exhibits, concerts, and plays. Jacqueline sent in for theater tickets as soon as new shows were announced and, as usual, garnered front-row balcony seats for
Fiddler
early in the run. The younger brother, age eleven at the time, was dumbstruck by the spectacle of men with beards and women with babushkas. In all their theatergoing, the family had never seen a stageful of Jews. The boy found it shocking. Most of all because those Jews were proud. Adults in his neighborhood gossiped about how Streisand ought to fix her nose and Jews needed to change their names to make it in showbiz, but here they were, a few blocks from an unaltered star faring so well in
Funny Girl
and, more astonishing, watching life unfold in a shtetl. Young Harvey Fierstein couldn’t get over it: Jews had come out of the closet, exuding self-respect and treasuring their ways. Songs from the show would be played at his bar mitzvah two years later and the sensibility would stay with him a few more years after that, as he became a pioneering gay playwright and actor (and, decades later, played Tevye in a twenty-first-century Broadway revival).

Some audience members wrote in to affirm the show’s veracity or, gently, to offer a suggestion or correction. “The play was the life of my grandparents, may their souls rest in peace,” began one of many such responses, this one from a woman not yet sixty years old who had been born in Zembrow, Poland, which “was very much like Anatevka.” Her grandfather wore a cap and a beard just like Tevye’s, she wanted the creators to know, and the show reminded her of a family story about a teenaged cousin shocking the town by dancing with a boy at a local wedding: “My grandparents hid for shame.”

A Mrs. Schwartz from East Orange, New Jersey, remembered having left “just such a little town in Russia” at age four and only wished that Tevye’s family, like her own, had packed a brass samovar along with the candlesticks. “I’m sure you can pick up a samovar on 3rd Ave,” she encouraged. “And believe me it will complete a beautiful scene.”

The producer received kind instructions on how the “Anatevka” sign in the train station where Hodel departs from her father should be written in the Cyrillic alphabet, how an actor should properly pronounce “Kiev,” how the ring in the wedding scene should be presented to the bride
after
the drinking of the first cup of wine, how Tevye should recite the Kaddish when he disowns Chava, and many more. Such letters suggest how powerfully
Fiddler
hailed members of the public who saw themselves reflected in it.

As
Fiddler
’s run extended over a year, then two, three, and more, the tone of the mail began to change.
Fiddler
was becoming an icon, which burdened it with extratheatrical responsibilities. The show reached its 900th New York performance in November 1966, without having had one empty seat or even an empty standing-room spot. In that short time, Prince had returned a profit of 352 percent to investors (not including the contemplated film sale, well in the works). And national companies were lighting down in cities large and small all over the country.

But one didn’t need to be near a theater hosting a production to know and partake of the
Fiddler
phenomenon. In his Tevye costume, arms posed as if playing an invisible violin, Mostel graced the October 19 cover of
Newsweek
in 1964 (paid circulation 1.6 million). The original cast album, released that same month, topped $1 million in sales within a year. Right away, wedding bands all over the country were expected to be able to strike up its tunes on demand. Long before the movie played in cinemas in every small town, Cannonball Adderley recorded a jazz version of the score, Joe Quijano a Latin one. Eydie Gormé sang “Matchmaker” on the
Ed Sullivan Show
only a few months after
Fiddler
opened; the Supremes and the Temptations teamed up for a medley as part of a special broadcast on NBC. (Later, even the Osmond Brothers harmonized and boogalooed through the
Fiddler
songs in pastel three-piece suits.)
Fiddler
belonged to everyone.

The more
Fiddler
’s image of the mythic Jewish past proliferated, the more anxiety some Jews expressed over its duty to hold up a dignified, religiously correct ethnic self-portrait. For such spectators,
Fiddler
wasn’t only speaking about Jews; it was speaking for them. And thus they had a personal stake in making sure the show got them right.

Complaints started to trickle in about Gluck Sandor’s portrayal of the rabbi. Robbins initially enjoyed the “funny kind of tenderness” his old teacher brought to the role, playing him as a little frail and absentminded but approachable and admired by the community. As time went on, Sandor doddered across the line of dignity and spectators didn’t hesitate to make their disappointment known. Beginning with high praise for the show in general, their letters objected to a “stupid ridiculous,” “idiotic,” “half-witted,” “buffoonish” characterization that did “a disservice to the play and the Jewish people.” No less than Maurice Samuel issued a public protest in a lecture in St. Louis, deriding the show’s authors for presenting the rabbi as “a confused nebbish, a jester,” and sniping that “only a Broadway musical comedy could cast the rabbi as a comic.” Prince gamely answered the mail, explaining, “The real intention was that we not treat the rabbi pompously, over-reverentially. He’s a villager and warm and fallible.” Anatevka wasn’t Vilna, after all; its rabbi was a provincial, not a world-class scholar. Still, Prince sometimes admitted, “the gentleman who plays the rabbi often gets carried away,” and he knew that the authors agreed. Joe Stein held little faith that Sandor could go back to playing the “simple, gentle man” Stein had written, and pleaded with Robbins, “for the sake of the show and for my own peace of mind, I’d like to urge that we make a change.” Robbins duly wrote Sandor “another letter about you know what—that rabbi problem again” and tenderly threatened his job. But Robbins couldn’t bring himself to fire his early mentor; Sandor stayed in the show until 1970—with no impact on the box office.

Hisaya Morishige as Tevye in Tokyo: within a decade,
Fiddler
had played in two dozen countries.

Nevertheless, the mild outcry in the mail revealed the rising stakes in some quarters of the Jewish community. And soon it wasn’t enough for the show to represent honorable Jews; it had to behave like them, too. To be a Jewish ambassador,
Fiddler
had to be a Jewish exemplar.

Never was this expectation more blatant than in a brouhaha over the dismissal of a cast member in the fall of 1966. The actor in question was Ann Marisse, a seasoned though young performer who had replaced Joanna Merlin as Tzeitel in the late spring of 1965. (Merlin left the show when her pregnancy reached the point—four and a half months—where the costume shop couldn’t take out her wedding dress any further.) Prince found Marisse “strong and appealing” in her first performances. Taller than Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes, she commanded the space as the oldest sister and she sang well. She had taken over the part of Consuela in
West Side Story
and had racked up several other Broadway credits (including a role in the megaflop
Cafe Crown
). In
Fiddler
, she played for a year and a half without a glitch.

Then, in September 1966, she missed a performance on Rosh Hashanah without advance notice—or so management said. The producers typically allowed actors to take a day off for the High Holidays if they made a request in advance. Marisse called in sick the afternoon of the holiday instead but claimed she had already alerted her understudy. When the stage manager balked at the flouting of procedure, she cried discrimination. That incensed Prince. “It makes me especially angry in that she didn’t even ask to miss those couple of performances,” he told Robbins. “I called Joanna Merlin, and she seems anxious to return to the company for a number of months. Goodbye, Ann Marisse.”

She did not go quietly. “It is true that I am an actress and that you are the producer. I am in your employ and you pay my salary. Does this also imply that you have leased my dignity and my spirit?” she wrote to Prince, reminding him that her father was an Orthodox rabbi and that her husband was ordained, too. (Her husband threw in the tallis, though, for a career in Hollywood; some years later, he directed the slasher flick
Graduation Day
.) Marisse complained to Actors’ Equity, which affirmed that management acted within its prerogative, and threatened to go to the state’s Human Rights Commission, which has no record of having granted the complaint a hearing. When she took her story to the press, however, journalists couldn’t resist the apparent irony. As the
New York Post
put it, she was fired “of all things for not coming to work on the Jewish High Holy Days.”

The issue of
Fiddler
’s observance of the High Holidays had come up the year before. It’s a ready-made controversy: the contest between shul and showbiz for the soul of an American Jew on Yom Kippur is a sturdy emblematic one, driving the plots of works going as far back as
The Jazz Singer
and the melodramas of the Yiddish theater. The
New York Post
walked right into the trope in 1965, when Leonard Lyons ran a brief item in his column noting that the show would go on Yom Kippur eve, despite some misgivings from Luther Adler, who had replaced Mostel as Tevye. Letters to Prince’s office protested that playing on the holiday was “a disgrace,” “an insult to all Jews everywhere,” and made “such a mockery of the traditions the show celebrates.” An executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis sent a series of telegrams with such assertions as: “Sholem Aleichem would turn in his grave were he to know that his beloved Tevya who was so close to God would be violating the holiest day of the year publicly.”

Prince took care to reply, explaining that canceling the performance wouldn’t be fair to people who had purchased tickets more than six months in advance, particularly to those from out of town. “Next Tuesday evening 1500 people will leave the theatre with a warm and edifying impression of Jewish life,” he wrote to the cable-happy rabbi. Or, as he put it more pointedly in his letter to Lyons, “The Imperial is not a Temple; it’s a theatre, and
Fiddler
makes more friends for the Jews than Yom Kippur does.”
Fiddler
’s curtain went up on the evening of October 5, 1965, just as it did at every other Broadway show then on the boards, and at every show on the boards in the past, including those with Jews in their plots.

A few days after the Lyons column that gave Prince “a potful of trouble,” the
New York Times
sports pages carried a wire story of scarcely a hundred words. Its headline: “Koufax Out Wednesday.” The superstar southpaw’s refusal to pitch the World Series opener for the Dodgers on Yom Kippur galvanized American Jews across the denominational spectrum. To the pitcher’s own surprise, he was suddenly elevated to a valorous Jewish status he had never intended when he reflexively put into his player’s contract some years earlier that he would never take the mound on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar (“comparable to Good Friday for Christians,” the
Times
helpfully pointed out).

That Koufax wasn’t religiously observant—and probably didn’t even attend services on Yom Kippur—made the gesture all the more important in affirming the identities multitudes of midcentury American Jews had been forging. With dispersal from urban centers in the postwar period, affiliation with synagogues skyrocketed, increasing from 30 percent in 1930 to nearly 60 percent in 1960 and rising, even as religious practice declined. By the mid-1960s, a majority of American Jews were living in suburbs, where affiliating with a modern synagogue was the most concrete (and least onerous) way of asserting Jewishness: belonging to and supporting the multipurpose institution—often, as the saying at the time had it, “shuls with pools”—mattered more than ritual observance. Sanctuaries filled up on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur but drew a mere smattering of congregation members on the Sabbath and other holidays. Community leaders derided the growing legions of “twice-a-year Jews” and wrung their hands over the constant crisis of Jewish continuity: yes, all those suburban synagogues operated Hebrew schools where children learned the rudiments of the faith and prepared for bar and bat mitzvah, but without reinforcement in the home, without any lived experience of Judaism’s rites and rhythms, the rabbis and Jewish educators worried, what would being Jewish mean for them?