Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

Abstract

Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders opens with two brief stories that, in the hands of another writer, might be mere anecdotes: Fiddler on the Roof’s near-simultaneous invocation in 2011 by political radio talk show host Glenn Beck and Jewish protestors involved with Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, the entire introduction, aptly named “A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” seems at first to dwell on the anecdotal. Before we come to the evolution of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, we are first introduced to kids singing “Sabbath Prayer” at summer camps, interfaith holiday greeting cards featuring Tevye, Augusto Pinochet’s banning of Fiddler in Chile in the mid-1970s, and references to Fiddler in The Simpsons. But, like the modest yet treasured possessions of the residents of Anatevka, there’s a lot more to these little bits then meets the eye. By page 2, Solomon has already essentially proven her central argument—that “Fiddler, like no other musical before or since, has seeped into the culture more widely, functioning in sometimes contradictory ways” (2) as a signifier of various kinds and degrees of Jewishness, a measure of political affiliation, and a mode of Jewish ritual practice, among others. Indeed, Wonder of Wonders tells the story of Fiddler on the Roof’s evolution and cultural impact with an astonishing breadth that is itself proof positive for her argument.The juxtaposition of Glenn Beck and Occupy at the start of the book is no mere anecdote, but a hint of what’s to come. For this book is not only about how Fiddler on the Roof came into being and its reception, though Solomon does provide a fresh take on that subject. But more than anything else, this is a book about the musical’s “radiant afterlife” as a global cultural phenomenon with “surprising, enduring, shape-shifting utility” (4). It is this shape-shifting quality that Solomon traces most closely, following the trail of each new permutation of Sholem-Aleichem’s original Tevye stories like a magician demonstrating how a simple scarf can change color and texture, become a bird, vanish into thin air, and then suddenly reappear. In Wonder of Wonders, we catch a glimpse of how this beloved, shape-shifting Broadway musical has become part of the world’s cultural ether, ever ready to meet the changing needs of its audiences.Time and time again, as Solomon demonstrates, Fiddler has morphed anew across a wide range of cultural contexts and locales. From the readers who first loved Tevye in Eastern Europe to the middle schoolers in a controversial Brownsville student production of Fiddler in 1968, from young Poles’ attempts to understand their country’s past via musical theater to Jewish parents hiring bottle dancers for bar and bat mitzvahs, from Sholem-Aleichem’s years of struggle to bring his work to the Yiddish stage to the Fiddler-themed Judaica and dishware that can be found in synagogue gift shops across the country, Solomon examines it all. In the hands of another writer, these might have been rendered picayune episodes, nothing more than footnotes to the “real” story of the Broadway musical. Not so in Wonder of Wonders. Instead, these examples illuminate Fiddler’s remarkable staying power as something more than just a play with many productions: a cultural touchstone.In Solomon’s capable hands, we readers are thus presented with dozens of incarnations of Tevye’s story as it is told and retold, deconstructed, reconfigured, and revived over the course of more than a century. Many fine books and articles have been written about Fiddler on the Roof, of course, but no one before Solomon has ever examined Fiddler as a cultural phenomenon with such comprehensive scope. Encompassing not only the expected topics (Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Jerome Robbins’s feud with Zero Mostel, the casting for the film) but also subjects that have never before been considered vis-à-vis their relationship to Fiddler (Hebrew theater in the forties, black-Jewish relations in the sixties, Fiddler’s impact on contemporary Jewish rituals), this is cultural history at its finest.Like the writers and artists who are her subjects, Solomon knows how to create dramatic tension. The single word that readers are most likely to automatically associate with Fiddler on the Roof (and the title of the show’s signature opening number, “Tradition!”), doesn’t appear in Wonder of Wonders until well over a hundred pages in, when Jerome Robbins finally realizes what his show is actually about. Solomon thus enables her readers to develop a fresh view of Fiddler on the Roof, one that builds and grows over the course of the book. When Jerome Robbins has his “aha” moment and realizes that tradition is the heart of the show, we experience the rush of enthusiasm and recognition that must have filled the room along with the creative team. Indeed, a full half of the book covers events that happened before Fiddler even opened on Broadway. By the time we arrive at opening night, the reader has the sense of only just understanding this iconic musical for the first time.Wonder of Wonders is structured in three parts, arranged chronologically. The first set of chapters considers the Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem and his authorship of the Tevye stories, his failure to break into the Yiddish theater, and the subsequent work of translators, writers, and artists who garnered visibility for this work among English speakers (Maurice Samuel, Arnold Perl, Frances Butwin, and others). Part 2, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” examines the long process via which Fiddler came to Broadway and its initial reception. But it is part 3, “Tevye’s Travels,” that represents the most significant contribution of this book: Solomon’s careful tracing of how Fiddler on the Roof has, to an extent unique among Broadway musicals, thoroughly permeated the cultural landscape with a broad global audience that includes Jews and non-Jews, and theatergoers and non-theatergoers, within its reach.Solomon displays many talents in these pages: careful researcher, astute scholar, skilled cultural critic. But above all, it is Solomon’s power as a storyteller that is on fullest display. In clever, witty, memorable prose, Solomon introduces us to a vivid cast of characters who at times seem to almost burst forth from the page. On Jerome Robbins’s goals for Fiddler: “[he] labored mightily to burn away the schmaltz that for two decades had encased the world of the shtetl like amber.” (119) Or on Zero Mostel’s relationship to his mother tongue: “Yiddish never stopped gurgling within him; often it spilled out.” (154). Or, about the rivalry between the two men: “If a time machine could put a story about them on the Yiddish stage of earlier decades, charismatic, outsize Thomashefsky would have to play Mostel and haughty, blazing Jacob Adler would embody Robbins” (151). Solomon’s description of the Yiddish theater rivals in chapter 1 is so vivid that she can continue to reference them throughout the book.Indeed, Wonder of Wonders offers the reader a refreshingly rich and nuanced overview of Yiddish literature and the history of the Yiddish stage interwoven with a century of Tevye’s journeys. The triumph of this book lies in Solomon’s exacting insistence on telling the whole story of Fiddler on the Roof, leaving no stone unturned. To entice the wary reader who may not consider him- or herself interested in such details as the state of Yiddish publishing in the nineteenth century or the history of translations of Sholem-Aleichem, Wonder of Wonders explains the significance of these contextual pieces through superb historical storytelling that makes the fluid and multifaceted relationship between the turn-of-the-century explosion of modern Yiddish culture and Fiddler transparent. Fiddler, in other words, didn’t emerge in a vacuum; and Solomon wants to make sure that the reader understands the cultural landscape that birthed Tevye’s story. Not only does Wonder of Wonders provide a rich mini-history of Yiddish literature, but Solomon also leverages Yiddish sources to demonstrate how Yiddish culture influenced the production itself. For instance, she explores Boris Aronson and Jerome Robbins’s involvement with Yiddish theater prior to their Broadway careers, and analyzes how their experiences might have influenced particular production choices (like Robbins drawing upon his experience acting in Di brider ashkenazi at Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater for Fiddler’s wedding scene). Solomon also examines the response to Fiddler in the Yiddish press, which has never before been examined, when considering the Jewish community’s reaction to the musical. This is, to my knowledge, the first time in musical theater scholarship that a direct, continuous relationship between the Yiddish theater and Fiddler has been suggested, and it is a significant contribution. Solomon is implicitly proposing—quite rightly, I believe—that Fiddler represents a moment of sharp continuity between the Yiddish stage and Broadway, in which American Jewish theater artists drew directly upon what they had learned early in their careers in the Yiddish theater. This perspective is far too often overlooked, and is a much needed corrective to scholarship that assumes that Yiddish culture was already long gone in postwar America.In sum, Alisa Solomon has written a brilliant, eminently readable, remarkable gem of a book that is so delightful to read that one has the sense of guzzling down her prose, all 448 pages of it. Upon finishing the introduction, my first thought was, “I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.” My second thought was, “I can’t wait to have my students read this book.” This is no small feat for a hefty, meticulously researched scholarly book, steeped in years of archival research. And yet—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—Solomon pulls it off, this fusion of sophisticated academic argumentation with all of the literary qualities of a page-turner in a manner so seamless that it is nothing short of miraculous.