Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (4 page)

Perhaps as part of an early marketing strategy, Adler and Thomashefsky threw a benefit evening of tribute befitting a superstar on October 31. It began at Adler’s Grand Theater, where fans packed all three tiers and saluted Sholem-Aleichem with an ovation lasting several minutes. Jewish community luminaries delivered laudatory speeches. Sholem-Aleichem offered a humorous reading. Eventually some three hundred members of the crowd repaired to a banquet, where Adler and Thomashefsky and their wives shared the head table with the honored guest. The absence of one faction of the community may have been lost on Sholem-Aleichem, but not on the English-language Jewish weekly the
Chronicler
, which laced its coverage of the festivities with a telling complaint:

The Jewish quarter might have shown some unity. All Jewish writers should have participated in the reception. Why did the Jewish Socialists and other radicals stay away?… Must we know to what party he belongs before we can honor him! Are they not all Jews who write for the Yiddish stage? Why did they not come? And why was the affair made so much of an advertisement for several Yiddish actors? Why was the dinner at such an ungodly hour, and why, oh why, will some people insist on delivering lectures after dinner held at two o’clock in the morning?

Another reception followed a few days later, this time at the Educational Alliance, a community center founded by Jacob Schiff and others in 1893 whose scope, its charter proclaimed, had “an Americanizing, educational, social and humanizing character.” The German Jewish elite regarded the folk writer as sharing their goal—moral sanitizing of the unwashed masses—and sought to claim him as an emblem of that effort. A legend quickly sprang up, telling how a special guest at the reception drove home the applicability of Sholem-Aleichem to the American context: Mark Twain. Indeed, newspapers that covered the author’s arrival in America translated him to local readers as “the Yiddish Mark Twain.” At the Educational Alliance reception, the American writer is said to have responded, “I am the American Sholem-Aleichem.”

For some two weeks, the New York press, in English and in Yiddish (with the conspicuous exception of the anarchist paper the
Fraye arbeter shtime
), ballyhooed the “great literary personality,” as the local English-language press called him. But, as Sholem-Aleichem recognized, the front pages would quickly give over to the arrival of new celebrities, and anyway, acclaim didn’t pay the rent. The benefit evening had raised $1,000 for the author, but the proceeds remained in the hands of a “treasurer” and Sholem-Aleichem felt humiliated and angry that a couple of weeks after the event he had to go see the imperious man to request the money; the treasurer handed over a check with a dismissive flick of the wrist, never even looking the beneficiary in the eye.

The funds didn’t last long: half went to Geneva and the rest to the renting of a furnished apartment in the Bronx, near Bernard. Under exclusive contracts with the
Tageblat
and the
Morgn zhurnal
, Sholem-Aleichem earned $40 per week for his regular contributions—hardly enough to support Olga and Numa in New York, much less the brood back in Switzerland. So off he went, as he had so many times in Europe, on a reading tour of the provinces. The American circuit was neither as heartening nor as lucrative as the ones back home. Arranged by Zionist organizations, which had slim followings in those years, the events—where Sholem-Aleichem served essentially as the warm-up act for Zvi Hirsch Masliansky’s fiery orations—deflated his spirits further. The winter tour left him, as Berkowitz recounted, “with only a hard chill that later drove him to his lung disease, and a pack of … stories from American country Jews.”

At last, however, the theater was coming through. Early in the new year of 1907, Thomashefsky paid the handsome sum of $1,000—nearly two years’ wages for a local presser in the garment trade—for the rights to
Stempenyu
. The role of the philandering musician seemed perfect for a man so handsome and adored that—as the influential writer and editor of the
Forverts
, Abe Cahan, put it—“When girls objected to the grooms their parents encouraged, their mothers would say, ‘What? You expect a Thomashefsky?’” He had no doubt that the multitudes would come to swoon at him as the irresistible musical romantic. The turmoil of a young woman chafing at the strictures of shtetl life would also speak to many spectators who, not so long ago, left just such a world behind. Rokhele’s ambivalence would allow them both to indulge their nostalgia and to affirm their break with the old home.

Then, just as Thomashefsky was beginning rehearsals in mid-January, and much to his surprise (or so he claimed years later), announcements appeared in the
Forverts
,
Tageblat
, and other papers boasting of “the first play by the famous literary author Sholem-Aleichem for the first time.” They were advertisements for
Shmuel Pasternak oder Der oysvurf
(
Samuel Pasternak, or The Scoundrel
), produced by and starring Jacob Adler. He was counting on his audience of sweatshop workers to embrace a farce that traces the downfall of a crooked small-town stockbroker. Ridiculing a speculator in over his head and revealing finance capitalism to be thoroughly corrupting—what could be better for drawing proletarian ticket buyers, many of them roused by the growing labor movement?

If nothing else, the two directors, old friends and bitter rivals, knew how to fan a conflict for publicity—and they were desperate to boost ticket sales. Thomashefsky stepped up the pace of his rehearsals and took out his own ads: “Sholem-Aleichem for the first time as a playwright! Sholem-Aleichem’s greatest masterpiece,
Stempenyu
, which has amazed the whole world, been translated into every language, and has now been dramatized by Sholem-Aleichem exclusively for the People’s Theater!” The race—and hyperbole—was on as the impresarios vied for the premiere of the brand-name author. A friend of Sholem-Aleichem’s persuaded the showmen to declare a draw: they would open on the same night, February 8, leaving both companies little time to get ready.

A couple of nights before the opening, a storm dumped eight inches of snow on New York. Six horses died after slipping and falling on the ice. Streetcars came to a standstill—a Twenty-third Street crosstown car remained stuck for a full night. Shops stayed closed for days. But the twenty-nine-mile-per-hour winds did nothing to cool the feverish preparations and flaming tempers in the Yiddish theaters. Both directors rushed their companies through rehearsals; Sholem-Aleichem dashed from one to the other, apparently unable to prevent the hasty “improvements” the two directors were making to his scripts. Thomashefsky added in some rhyming couplets; Adler embellished his part with jokes that lay “like poor patches on a rich garment,” as far as Sholem-Aleichem’s son-in-law, Berkowitz, was concerned.

When opening night came, fans traipsed through slush to fill both the two thousand seats at Adler’s Grand at the corner of Chrystie and Grand and, three blocks away, the 2,500 seats at the People’s Theater on the Bowery near Delancey. Sholem-Aleichem himself slid up and down the streets to spend two acts in one theater and two acts in the other. In both, spectators called him to the stage for several lengthy ovations. “The audiences seemed happy to me,” he wrote to his family the next day. He noted that the partisan press could not be counted on, but as long as audiences were responding so enthusiastically, he added, the critics hardly mattered. He was half right: the press did, in fact, divide right down Yiddish New York’s ideological fault lines. And Sholem-Aleichem himself widened the rift—and then walked right over the cliff—by delivering a curtain speech during the intermission of
Pasternak
. Though not given to grandiloquence, the author got caught up in the opening-night excitement and seized his minutes in the spotlight to hold forth about the “new page in Yiddish theater” that his play was turning over. Implying that he himself was the theater’s redeemer, propelled onto the stage by “new winds blowing” that would blast away
shund
, he ranted not against cheap entertainments but against Yankev Gordin, dramatic hero of the progressive elite. The
Forverts
, and the left more generally, championed Gordin as a leader of a literary theater of ideas, a realist in the mode of such serious modern dramatists as Ibsen and Gorky. The Orthodox press reviled Gordin for the very reasons the left-wing press embraced him: his eagerness to show the dark sides of life—poverty, family discord, social pressure, moral failure (though he didn’t hesitate to crank out some potboilers under a pseudonym when he needed ready cash).

In contrast, Sholem-Aleichem’s characters displayed foibles, not tragic flaws; their mishaps tore at the audience’s heartstrings, triggered laughter, or both; they didn’t offer an object lesson in the social questions of the day. In short, these characters were Jews as Sholem-Aleichem knew and loved them, not—like Gordin’s dramatis personae, in his opinion—generic people dressed up in beards or
shaytls
(the wigs worn by observant married women). In making the point from the stage at Adler’s Grand, Sholem-Aleichem unwittingly cemented his alliance with the Orthodox element of New York’s Jewish community, and they reinforced the bond with their unreserved praise for his comedy.

In the
Morgn zhurnal
, for example, an unsigned review proclaimed that
Pasternak
heralded “a new epoch for Yiddish drama in America … full of authentic Yiddish humor.” Best of all, the critic asserted, “there was no dirt” in Sholem-Aleichem’s play, none of the “outrages that filled the Yiddish plays of the realist period.” The same day, the
Tageblat
review concurred that until Sholem-Aleichem came along there was “no true Yiddish theater before now. The dramas were not dramas, and the comedies were no comedies either. All the roles were stolen, false.” Worst of all, of course, was realism “with its dirt, its shame” and its “stifling” of Jewish life and humor on the stage. With the production of Sholem-Aleichem’s work, the paper declared with relief, “a new world opens for Jewish theatergoers.” (A second review in the
Tageblat
, a day later, focused on
Stempenyu
and condemned its third-act curtain falling, with heavy implication, on a bedroom scene. “This is simply scandalous,” the critic maintained. “Even the realists didn’t dare present such scenes. It’s an insult to everyone. Especially the women.”)

The insult, from the point of view of the progressive papers, was Sholem-Aleichem’s curtain speech. In the
Varhayt
, the nicest thing Louis Miller could say about
Stempenyu
was that “whenever a flash of Sholem-Aleichem’s talent as a novelist sparkles, Sholem-Aleichem the dramatist snatches it away like a thief.” Regarding
Pasternak
, the reviewer reported that he “exercised the privilege of ordinary mortals” by leaving in the middle. He wondered how Sholem-Aleichem could have come from Russia untouched by either Tolstoy’s brooding play of seduction and murder,
Power of Darkness
, or Gogol’s piercing satire about political corruption,
The Inspector General
.

In the
Yidisher kempfer
, Joel Entin called
Pasternak
“a stillborn monster, a broken piece of calamity that any wind could blow away.” In the balcony, where Sholem-Aleichem had heard spectators laughing their heads off, Entin heard a silence like that of “a hospital wing filled with chloroformed patients.”

Within a couple of short weeks, both plays closed. And that, declared B. Goren in his 1917 history of the Yiddish theater, “brought to an end Sholem-Aleichem’s career as a playwright” in New York.

Abe Cahan summed up the problem best in the
Forverts
. True, New York’s self-appointed Yiddish cultural czar didn’t care much for the work itself—“the figures have no more life than a clay golem whose forehead bears a sign: ‘miser’ or ‘scoundrel’ or ‘good contemporary daughter,’” Cahan wrote of
Pasternak
. But more significantly, he announced in his column that it was time for a new judgment of the Jewish folk writer: “Once Sholem-Aleichem played a great role in Yiddish literature, but now that we have talents like Sholem Asch [the modernist playwright and novelist some twenty years Sholem-Aleichem’s junior], his place is not as great or important.” As far as Cahan was concerned, Sholem-Aleichem belonged to a different world, a world across the sea, best left behind. And, from a theatrical standpoint at least, the public seemed to agree. Adler and Thomashefsky had miscalculated. The more they appealed to the idea of Sholem-Aleichem as culture hero of the homeland—and the more the progressive press hammered on the point as a drawback—the less marketable he was on their stages.

The problem wasn’t the quality of the works so much as a clash between the function of the theater and the function of Sholem-Aleichem in that moment. It was one thing to enjoy his stories in the private sphere of the home or amid the gatherings of hometown organizations or even amateur dramatic clubs. But the boisterous commercial realm of the theater was a site for forging a new collective identity, a place where Jews constituted themselves as an American public—largely proletarian, urbanized, and concerned with the new and pressing demands of cultural adaptation. To the extent that the Yiddish theater in New York invited spectators to dwell nostalgically on the customs, characters, and convictions of life in Eastern Europe, it was held in taut tension with the promises (fulfilled or broken) and the exigencies of life in America. Both sides of that equation—the old life and the new—could be held up on the stage for ridicule or for affection, for wistfulness or wrath. The point isn’t that the Yiddish theater in New York always made fun of or rejected the past or that it always extolled the American present. But the here and there, the then and now existed in relationship to each other. Though World War I would disrupt the emotional nature of that balance, in 1907 the carefully constructed persona of the
folkshrayber
of the Pale could find no footing on the lower Bowery, where Jews were becoming a different kind of folk, a modern urban audience and American ethnic group. Some four months after his plays flopped, Sholem-Aleichem, along with Olga and Numa, made the return voyage to Europe. Friends lent him money for the fare.