Read Online Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon - Free Book Online

go-getting Jewish Americanness—because he was perceived as representing the suffering of Jews in Europe, he could now be earnestly celebrated in that very role in the theater of the streets. As the departed symbol of the lost Old World, Sholem-Aleichem was nothing less than the community’s collective pintele yid .
    That function required flattening into literalness the artistic persona he had cultivated in the early part of his career, and myriad commentators lent their sincere weight to the project. In an “appreciation” after his death, the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner, for one, declared Sholem-Aleichem “not a ‘folk writer,’ not even ‘ the folk writer,’ but rather … a living essence of the folk itself.… What we have [in his work] is the life of the people in its authentic form, a true, vibrant cross-section of their lives.… The great Sholem-Aleichem had no style—he had no need of style.”
    There could not be a more usable Eastern European Jewish past than that. And therefore Sholem-Aleichem—and before long that “crown of my creation” Tevye, with whom the author was increasingly (if erroneously) identified—became a font for signifying, and even for conferring, “authentic” Yiddishkayt . Which is to say, every competing Jewish faction, cause, or campaign claimed him as its own. And molded him to serve its agenda.
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    Three years after his death, more than a decade after his double debut in that ill-fated February of 1907, Sholem-Aleichem finally found success on the New York stage. The new prince of Yiddish theater, Maurice Schwartz, opened his second season as a director on August 29, 1919, with a Sholem-Aleichem play and had a colossal creative and commercial triumph. Not only did it fuel Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater with income and with the inspiration to produce epic family dramas over the several decades the theater lasted in one form or another, it also demonstrated the enduring stage-worthiness of a family story about Jewish steadfastness and adaptation amid a world of change: it was the premiere production of Tevye der milkhiker . (A few months before, Zion films made a silent feature adapted from “Khave” that invented the characters of Fyedka’s parents; it disappeared in obscurity.)
    Schwartz’s script was essentially the one Sholem-Aleichem had almost sent to Adler in 1914; the author had tinkered with it some once he had come back to America, and, as a condition for granting Schwartz license to produce it, Olga Rabinowitz insisted that their son-in-law, Berkowitz, supervise any text revision. (Berkowitz added the village priest from the “Khave” story to the dramatis personae, though Sholem-Aleichem had not included him.) At last, Sholem-Aleichem had his smash hit—the show sold out for sixteen straight weeks—despite a few reviews that insisted that great prose, with its openness to ambiguity and its potent narrative viewpoint, loses its dynamism when translated to the specificity required of the stage: no performance can ever match the ideal in a reader’s imagination, the argument goes. “What more can the stage say about Tevye that the book has not already said?” asked M. Grim in the most cantankerous review that peddled this line. Grim—like future guardians of Yiddish literature who would rail against Fiddler —maintained that Schwartz (and presumably the author himself, though Grim does not mention his role in the adaptation) had “wiped out” the “brilliance, the Sholem-Aleichem-ness.” Others mocked Schwartz’s penchant for animals onstage (real chickens, doves, a cow, and a horse crowded Tevye’s yard) and a clunky lighting effect (a moon that rose in the west but seemed to illuminate the house from the east). Still, Olga Rabinowitz was pleased enough with Tevye ’s success that she granted Schwartz the rights to the entire Sholem-Aleichem canon—and he made good use of it over the next several decades, presenting, with