Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (40 page)

As soon as the six-week rehearsal period got under way on April 22, Altman and Abbott’s enthusiasm collapsed—in part, because they arrived with a false set of expectations about the connection between Israelis and the world of Sholem-Aleichem. Altman naively expected a “cast full of rabbis” and was annoyed and even a little offended by how “forgetful of Jewish ritual” the performers were; he not only had to keep reminding characters passing in and out of Tevye’s house to kiss the mezuzah but repeatedly had to insist that they carry out the gesture in the religiously correct way. The Americans’ lack of background in Sholem-Aleichem’s writing also led them to misjudge Almagor’s translation. They didn’t understand that when he rendered “If I Were a Rich Man” as “If I Were Rothschild,” he was not merely making the line scan in Hebrew; he was using the title of a Sholem-Aleichem story (not one involving Tevye) in which a Kasrilevkite, so poor he can’t give his wife any money for preparing a Sabbath meal, daydreams about how philanthropic he could be if he commanded the means of the famous financier.

More important, because audiences laughed in unfamiliar places, the New York team thought Almagor had added extraneous jokes in translation; in fact, he had taken advantage of the audience’s grounding in Scripture—a mandatory subject in Israel’s Jewish public schools—to restore some of the specific humor of Tevye’s quotations, by all accounts the most difficult aspect of Sholem-Aleichem’s layered Yiddish to convey in another language. In English, Arnold Perl had sidestepped the issue by opting for generic proverbs; Stein made more of an effort, at least referring to what “the Good Book says.” For his first effort in Israel, Berkowitz admitted to changing Tevye’s puns and distortions, claiming to have had his father-in-law’s blessing in doing so, since Hebrew itself offered no one-to-one correspondences for Tevye’s intricate intertextual humor. Almagor believed that the point was to make people laugh, not to send them “to look in the Aramaic dictionary,” so he tried for analogues drawn from commonly known sources. For instance, Almagor’s Tevye changes the standard blessing over bread, “
hamotzi lekhem min ha’aretz,
” into an insult, by saying “
hamotzi lekhem am ha’aretz
”: the shift from “
min
” to “
am
” transforms “from the earth” (whence bread is brought forth) into a colloquial term for an idiot. Though Almagor’s renditions did not pass muster with the Yiddishists, they did succeed with audiences. Stein couldn’t understand why the rhythm of the scenes seemed off and told Godik to get someone to cut the interpolated jokes. He remembered Israel as the “only country where they played around with the script.”

But cultural misreadings hardly compared with the frustrations Altman and his colleagues faced in the basic mechanics of getting the show up. Rehearsals were cut short on Friday afternoons as the country shut down for the Sabbath; actors expected days off for religious holidays that none of them actually observed; they balked at the very idea of eight-hour workdays; many of the men refused to grow beards until threatened with being fired. The backstage crew was worse. “It’s been constant arguments,” Altman wrote to Robbins. “Even the new prop men are slow as molasses, and several items are still missing. (Item: They still haven’t given us enough bagels for the Bagel Man—they can’t find bagels in Israel?)” A week later, Altman’s patience was running out. “The inefficiency here is stupendous and it seems to take people here days what would be done in 10 minutes in the States,” he reported. “More than a few times Tommy and Boris and I have been ready to pack up and leave.”

The actors, at least, began to give him reason to feel heartened. “They all are responding to our directions beautifully,” Abbott told Robbins, “with the exception of the usual one or two nuts who have their own little world, all to themselves.” Thankfully, the man selected to play Tevye—Bomba Zur—was not one of those nuts, but word quickly made it all the way to New York that he was irredeemably miscast. Altman shrugged off the dire warnings as so much fractious squabbling, which, he was learning, was a popular national pastime. As he told Robbins, “Everyone—but everyone—here has a different (and very positive) opinion about who should be Tevye.”

Godik’s poster: Bomba Zur in
Fiddler
at the Alhambra.

Zur, thirty-six, was a pudgy comedian with a round, innocent face known for his clowning, and he had been well received as Mr. Doolittle in
My Fair Lady
. But apart from some girth and some zaniness, he shared little in common with Zero Mostel: he had scarce experience not playing for laughs and even less confidence. When he auditioned for Tevye, “he read the more serious scenes very well—with a great warmth and simplicity that seemed to surprise Godik’s people,” Altman noted. “He’s scared to death—which is fine with me. He’s a sweet man, & I expect him to be quite good.” As rehearsals wore on, Zur’s panic got the better of him. He’d make strides when working alone with Altman and the pianist but fall apart, losing focus and energy, among the rest of the company. In an early run-through, “‘Rich Man’ and the monologues were especial bores,” Altman complained. When Stein arrived, he wrote to reassure Robbins that Zur “has the equipment to make a good Tevye.… He’s a little frightened of the part, very insecure, and Dick is bringing him along slowly, and I think quite successfully.” By previews—except for one for which Altman chided him for being “shockingly lazy”—Zur was “getting there.” And, Altman hastened to add, “the audiences absolutely love him.”

By all accounts he projected a sweetness and likability onstage. In his own view, Zur succeeded because he made the role Israeli. “My Tevye doesn’t groan, weep, wail, and sigh like a miserable Jew in the Diaspora,” he proclaimed. “I dropped all the ‘oy vey ist mir’s from Joseph Stein’s script.” The script doesn’t actually contain any, but this was a good wisecrack, signaling the actor’s proper sabra scorn for the
galut
. With a similar sneer, reporters greeted the American librettist. Stein was startled by how hostile the press interviews seemed, as if the journalists were angry at him. “What makes you think we would be interested in shtetl Jews?” he remembered them demanding. “We’re not interested in that culture anymore.” Stein shrugged in his good-natured way and answered, “Wait till you see the show.”

When Israelis did see the show, they were ecstatic—the public, anyway. The critics and intellectuals, on the other hand, sounded like the Yiddish guardians who had railed against
shund
in America half a century earlier, writing as if trying to outdo one another with the barbed cleverness of their takedowns: they dismissed the show as “cheap, empty, and hollow”; “saccharine water with rose petals made of cellophane”; “
Yiddishkayt
drowning in shmaltz”; “not even fresh shmaltz, [but] putrid shmaltz.”

As for Zur, those who knew the original stories recognized what he was doing and despised it, even if they hadn’t read the interview in which Zur defined Tevye as “a warmhearted human being who loves his daughters and his home more than his religion.” Little surprise that the newspaper of the National Religious Party would resent this portrayal by a sabra who “never knew what an exilic Jew is and can’t play one.… There is nothing Jewish about this Tevye. He talks to the Almighty as if he were an army major.” But more mainstream papers also protested that “he was the least Jewish of all the Jews onstage, with nothing of Tevye in him,” that he was “more goy than Sholem-Aleichem-like,” and that he was “miscast as Tevye, a character he does not understand.” And yet they conceded that “he does his part with grace and charm” and that “Bomba cannot be on the stage and not entertain.”

For their part, audiences could not have cared less about Zur’s failure to be religiously correct or, more generally, about
Fiddler
’s alleged lack of authenticity. The show was doing cultural work that didn’t require such fealty. On the contrary, it likely succeeded because of its distance from the burden of historical accuracy.

Beyond the spectacular dancing, great songs, touching story—the obvious reasons audiences responded to the show—something more profound and complicated was at play that unexpectedly let the show get under the cactuslike skin of anti-
galuti
sabras.
Fiddler
arrived at a time when Almagor and Topol’s generation was being shaken loose from its smug repudiation of the European past. “Negation of the Diaspora”—the central Zionist principle that Jewish emancipation requires national ingathering—had hardly gone away as a patriotic precept, but the scorn for those who had perished in the Holocaust, and for the dynamic culture they’d created, was lifting. The catalyst had been another highly theatrical event some four years earlier: the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann.

A watershed episode in Israeli history, the four-month trial unfolded in the spring and summer of 1961, heavily covered in the newspapers and often broadcast live on the radio. In his eight-hour opening address, Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner, vowed to pronounce the indictment in the name of the “six million accusers” who “cannot rise to their feet to point an accusing finger toward the glass booth and cry out at the man sitting there, ‘I accuse.’ For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, washed by the rivers of Poland, and their graves are scattered the length and breadth of Europe.” He eulogized the history of European Jewry—“the heart of the nation, the source of its vitality”—ticking off the instrumental Zionist thinkers and cultural heroes who had arisen from there. Marc Chagall and Sholem-Aleichem were among those prominently mentioned.

Hausner had fashioned himself—in the Israeli historian Tom Segev’s phrase—as the “impresario of a national-historic production.” In calling witnesses, Hausner gave stage to more than a hundred survivors who, having been silenced for nearly two decades, testified in detail about the horrors they experienced. Hausner was playing especially to the young generation, aiming to turn their repugnance for the past into respect and understanding. In Segev’s view, he largely succeeded. The trial, Segev writes, “marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the way Israelis related to the Holocaust. The terrifying stories that broke forth from the depths of silence brought about a process of identification with the suffering of the victims and survivors.” Almagor, for one, remembers the shame and regret his father repeatedly expressed during the trial over the way his generation had educated their children. Many of those children—then in their late twenties—became motivated to fill in the gaps.

A splashy Broadway musical, of all things, was one medium through which they could do so, in not too taxing emotional terms. Artificial and cheery by virtue of its genre,
Fiddler
brought audiences close to the Old World without collapsing the distance that national self-definition still required. As one local critic covering the show wryly remarked, “The Diaspora is returning to us [after] it was condemned to oblivion, via Broadway.”

Which may have been the most expedient way it could have returned. The nine Tony Awards bestowed on the Broadway production even as the Israeli version was opening proved how much America adored Tevye. The most ardent cultural self-loather had to wonder, then: how contemptible could
Yiddishkayt
be?

Even the denunciations of
Fiddler
in the Hebrew press served as a means of elevating Yiddish culture. Those reprimanding the show for its shmaltzification of Sholem-Aleichem were asserting, in essence, that Yiddish literature was better than the commercial entertainment American showbiz had made of it. Whether extolling or reviling the musical, the Israeli critics couldn’t help proclaiming the preciousness of Yiddish heritage.

Fiddler
played in Israel for some fifteen months; Hal Prince’s office bragged that more than one-quarter of Israel’s population of about 2.5 million people saw it. (And if El Al’s special promotion worked, scores of American tourists saw it, too, booking tickets for the “5,760-mile Off-Broadway production” at the airline office in New York. After all, the campaign pointed out, “It may be forever before you can get tickets for Broadway’s ‘Fiddler.’”)

About six months into the run, Godik replaced Zur—whether because Zur demanded an outsize raise or because Godik could finally get the actor he originally wanted remains a matter of conjecture and dispute. In any event, Godik worked a deal with Habima to pry Shmuel Rodensky away from his repertory contract for two months. Rodensky, born in the Russian Empire in 1904, was a sensitive bear of an actor (who had played the spiteful priest in Habima’s 1959 production of
Tuvia ha-kholev
) and he gave the critics a Tevye they could love (while still getting their digs in at the show): “He filled that character with human warmth that is otherwise lacking in that sterile musical. He replaced some of the melodramatic foam with tragic power.” The show sold out for almost another year (with Rodensky suspended by Habima for failing to return after his contracted leave) and it took brief tours to Haifa and Jerusalem. Then, in a grand gesture, Godik took advantage of Rodensky’s background and produced
Fiddler
in Yiddish. Though the Yiddish production closed within a couple of weeks, it was declared an event of national importance. “It shows how rooted and mature Hebrew is that it can dispense its energy on a production in another language and, even more so, Yiddish, our national language of the past,” wrote a critic for the daily
Ma’ariv
. “When the cast—most sabras, and even some Yemenite—does so well in Yiddish, we feel a coming together of people and generations and we are proud that could have taken place in our generation.” It was a pride that could not have been felt or named only a few years earlier.