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

irregular success, productions of such plays as The Grand Prize , Wandering Stars (adapted by Schwartz from the novel), and Hard to Be a Jew (featuring as Popov a promising young actor named Muni Weisenfreund—later known as Paul Muni). In 1931, Schwartz brought Sholem-Aleichem to Broadway in an English-language version of Hard to Be a Jew, running for seventy-seven performances under the producer-approved title of If I Were You .
    It is as Tevye, though, that Schwartz reigned supreme. Even critics who found fault with the staging more generally lauded him for his effective new approach to acting. Though not quite thirty at the time, Schwartz was larger than life and brought a surprising sense of wisdom as well as playful charm to the part. His commitment to toning down the stamps and shouts, the broad gestures and center-stage speechifying of the popular theater in favor of a quieter, more contemplative acting style paid off with Tevye. Schwartz won high praise, for example, for a first-act scene in which, sensing with a glance that Khave’s suitor, Fyedka, has been in the house to visit her, Tevye seems to feel the foundations of his poor but happy Jewish home shake. Or when he silently rebukes his eldest daughter, Tzaytl, when she tries to awaken some sympathy in him for her sister. The influential Abe Cahan extolled Schwartz’s “wholehearted” and “realistic” performance, most remarkable, in Cahan’s reckoning, for steering clear of “ shund effects” and “tricks to draw unearned applause.” Schwartz did, however (as several critics noted), elicit genuine tears.

    Maurice Schwartz in his film of Teyve der milkhiker , bringing realism and restraint to the role.
    After the first sixteen weeks, the play held the stage at the Irving Place on weekends for almost the entire season. Schwartz put Tevye in rotation when the troupe toured to such cities as Boston, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Vienna, contributing to the worldwide popularity of the play. And he kept it in the repertoire for years, continuing to play Tevye with “an unstrained style which approaches suaveness itself” and moving with agility “from stark tragedy to downright slapstick.” Perhaps Bertha Gersten, who played Khave (to reviews lamenting her lack of fire), captured Schwartz’s achievement best in her memoir: “It was hard to tell if Schwartz created Tevye or Tevye created Schwartz.”
    But Schwartz’s performance alone can’t account for the success of Tevye der milkhiker . The new realism of the acting meshed with the play’s ability to speak to a community in the throes of cultural transition (just as Fiddler would do two generations later). With the Great War over and the scope of its destruction known, and with pogroms erupting in Russia’s civil war, Tevye der milkhiker gave audiences a new occasion for coming together to focus their thoughts and emotions: a tempered presentation of one traditional man’s recognition that his way of life is going under.
    Centered, as it is, on the Khave story, the play sounded a question that had rushed to the surface of communal consciousness with the war—an implicating question that the popular audience, perhaps, didn’t have breath to ask directly. Khave’s marriage raises it obliquely as it conflates the threats of antisemitism and intermarriage: Would Jews survive?
    Reviewing the production for the Forverts in 1919, B. Vladek was exactly right when he noted how the play touched the public’s nerve at a time when “the whole Jewish people is in danger of being wiped out, when no day goes by without news about Jewish misfortune.” The audience broke out in thunderous applause, he reported, “when Khave comes back and Tevye turns out to be the conqueror in spirit and in belief.” Vladek suggested that their ovation conveyed their own steadfast conviction that “no one can break the Jews.”
    In that instance—and in the myriad forms Tevye der milkhiker has taken over nearly a