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Authors: Alisa Solomon
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century since then—the play served as a touchstone for communal pride and commitment to continuity in times of turmoil, no matter how extensively or fractiously that community may revise, or internally dispute, its essence. As a drama about cultural adaptation that itself has been adapted repeatedly for shifting cultural circumstances, Tevye has grappled with the anxieties and the promises of constancy and change in form as well as content.
* * *
Maurice Schwartz’s regular revivals and world tours helped bring Tevye der milkhiker into the international Yiddish repertoire—as did Jewish history itself. Artists around the world created versions of the drama that responded to their own local upheavals.
In Warsaw, amid the interwar groundswell of Jewish culture, the actor Rudolf Zaslavsky staged an adaptation of the story “Tevye Goes to the Land of Israel” in 1928. Polish Jews, who had not gone through the kind of rupture from the homeland that American immigrants had experienced, received the production as a touching rendering of a revered classic, but in that time and place the play could not help but feel like a bit of a throwback. Eight years earlier, the Vilna Troupe (which had moved to Warsaw in 1917) revolutionized the Yiddish theater with its production of The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds , the mystical play by S. Ansky based on his ethnographic expedition through western Russia just before World War I. The expressionistic staging (directed by Dovid Herman in Warsaw and then, in 1922, by the avant-garde pioneer Evgeny Vakhtangov in a Hebrew-language production in Moscow, while Maurice Schwartz’s production in New York in 1921 took a less stylized approach) challenged the folksy realism of plays like Tevye . In another two decades or so, the village milkman would acquire tragic new resonance on the killing fields of Poland, of course, but while Yiddish modernism flourished in Warsaw Tevye laid a claim for Yiddish classicism—the pleasing standard against which a new aesthetic could define itself.
The Tevye material seems to call for at least a measure of theatrical realism. Apart from the story’s demand for empathy with its characters, which abstract stage styles typically spurn, the breaking down of the Old World has an emotional impact only if that world is established through the experiences of engaging characters. Post–World War I modernism, after all, rejected everything Tevye stood for: convention, tradition, belief in an all-powerful God. If a Tevye play has already disassembled such values in its very form, there is no place for the play to go, no means by which the action can unfold a process of dissolution. So the artists of the Soviet Yiddish stage understood. A five-hour adaptation of the Tevye stories was a triumph at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (or GOSET, the Russian acronym by which it’s usually known) only after the regime officially repudiated avant-garde approaches.
GOSET belonged to the sweeping Soviet program for spreading the revolutionary gospel to the masses in the languages to which they’d most readily respond. Recognizing Jews as a “national minority” (along with such groups as Uzbeks, Tatars, and Ukrainians), the state subsidized Yiddish-language schools, newspapers, publishers, and theaters; GOSET’s charge was to produce work that was, as the regime sloganeered, “national in form and socialist in content.” The theater, which opened in 1921, managed to walk the tightrope of that seeming contradiction for some three decades, producing some of the greatest productions in the USSR in any language. The state often pointed to GOSET as a shining jewel of cultural achievement. And Sholem-Aleichem was one key to its success. Reviled by early Soviet critics for “romanticizing” prerevolutionary Jewish life, Sholem-Aleichem was quickly rehabilitated, heralded as a sly satirist of czarist oppression. GOSET’s debut production, in 1921, was an evening of
* * *
Maurice Schwartz’s regular revivals and world tours helped bring Tevye der milkhiker into the international Yiddish repertoire—as did Jewish history itself. Artists around the world created versions of the drama that responded to their own local upheavals.
In Warsaw, amid the interwar groundswell of Jewish culture, the actor Rudolf Zaslavsky staged an adaptation of the story “Tevye Goes to the Land of Israel” in 1928. Polish Jews, who had not gone through the kind of rupture from the homeland that American immigrants had experienced, received the production as a touching rendering of a revered classic, but in that time and place the play could not help but feel like a bit of a throwback. Eight years earlier, the Vilna Troupe (which had moved to Warsaw in 1917) revolutionized the Yiddish theater with its production of The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds , the mystical play by S. Ansky based on his ethnographic expedition through western Russia just before World War I. The expressionistic staging (directed by Dovid Herman in Warsaw and then, in 1922, by the avant-garde pioneer Evgeny Vakhtangov in a Hebrew-language production in Moscow, while Maurice Schwartz’s production in New York in 1921 took a less stylized approach) challenged the folksy realism of plays like Tevye . In another two decades or so, the village milkman would acquire tragic new resonance on the killing fields of Poland, of course, but while Yiddish modernism flourished in Warsaw Tevye laid a claim for Yiddish classicism—the pleasing standard against which a new aesthetic could define itself.
The Tevye material seems to call for at least a measure of theatrical realism. Apart from the story’s demand for empathy with its characters, which abstract stage styles typically spurn, the breaking down of the Old World has an emotional impact only if that world is established through the experiences of engaging characters. Post–World War I modernism, after all, rejected everything Tevye stood for: convention, tradition, belief in an all-powerful God. If a Tevye play has already disassembled such values in its very form, there is no place for the play to go, no means by which the action can unfold a process of dissolution. So the artists of the Soviet Yiddish stage understood. A five-hour adaptation of the Tevye stories was a triumph at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (or GOSET, the Russian acronym by which it’s usually known) only after the regime officially repudiated avant-garde approaches.
GOSET belonged to the sweeping Soviet program for spreading the revolutionary gospel to the masses in the languages to which they’d most readily respond. Recognizing Jews as a “national minority” (along with such groups as Uzbeks, Tatars, and Ukrainians), the state subsidized Yiddish-language schools, newspapers, publishers, and theaters; GOSET’s charge was to produce work that was, as the regime sloganeered, “national in form and socialist in content.” The theater, which opened in 1921, managed to walk the tightrope of that seeming contradiction for some three decades, producing some of the greatest productions in the USSR in any language. The state often pointed to GOSET as a shining jewel of cultural achievement. And Sholem-Aleichem was one key to its success. Reviled by early Soviet critics for “romanticizing” prerevolutionary Jewish life, Sholem-Aleichem was quickly rehabilitated, heralded as a sly satirist of czarist oppression. GOSET’s debut production, in 1921, was an evening of
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