Free Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon

Sholem-Aleichem one-act plays adapted from the Menakhem-Mendl stories notable, among other things, for set designs by Marc Chagall, who decorated the entire theater with murals as a means of erasing the boundary between audience and stage. Across the walls and ceiling, multisized figures danced, leaped, and rolled in a carnivalesque pageant featuring the theater’s artists, proletarian spectators, an emerald cow, and repurposed folkloric motifs. An acrobat wearing tefillin cartwheels as though overturning religion; a Torah scribe writes “once upon a time” onto a scroll, thereby secularizing a sacred text; and a green-faced violinist wearing a striped tallis that juts properly across his cubistically rendered clothing stands astride the rooftops of two little houses.
    The staging was also emphatically antirealistic. Chagall “hated real objects as illegitimate disturbers of his cosmos and furiously threw them off the stage,” the art critic and GOSET dramaturg Avrom Efros recounted. In costumes and makeup also designed by Chagall, actors moved in an angular, mechanical choreography and their faces were painted with brash geometric designs—half green, half yellow for Solomon Mikhoels, who played Menakhem-Mendl with one eyebrow raised two inches higher than its natural position. The production, Efros wrote, looked like “Chagall paintings come to life.” Chagall was long gone from the USSR by the time GOSET got around to staging Tevye , but his work would eventually be identified with Tevye’s story.
    About a decade into GOSET’s history, the Soviet regime demanded adherence to “socialist realism,” and the theater had to change gears; the original director, Alexander Granovsky, defected to Germany, leaving the theater’s reins in the hands of Mikhoels, reportedly one of the nation’s greatest actors in any language. In 1939, he directed and performed in GOSET’s version of Tevye der milkhiker . As Tevye had been at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York, its Soviet cousin became one of GOSET’s greatest hits. And as in America, the version in Moscow swayed with the local prevailing winds. Mikhoels, a small man but a sturdy presence onstage, played Tevye as a sympathetic relic of what he deemed a “fossilized patriarchal life of the Jewish family,” whose Scripture quoting showed how inadequate the “dead dogma” of Judaism was for explaining “the contradictions that develop with changed social relations.” Luckily, Perchik comes along not only to woo Hodl but also to teach Tevye the merits of dialectical materialism.
    That same year, Maurice Schwartz made a movie version of Tevye der milkhiker , using for exteriors a wheat and potato field near Jericho, Long Island—Schwartz said it looked just like the Ukrainian countryside near his birthplace. While filming, the company heard the shocking news that Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact. It wasn’t just the planes blaring into and out of nearby Mitchel airfield that disrupted the filming. Political discord strained life on the set. Like any other Yiddish cultural project of the period, Tevye ’s company comprised participants with conflicting commitments—Depression-era Communists, anti-Stalinist socialists, unaffiliated lefties, apolitical artistes. What united them was dread: as the filming fell behind schedule and work was extended past the end of August, the worst news broke—the Nazis had invaded Poland, where many had relatives. And now the story of Tevye’s perseverance and Khave’s return to her people took on an almost sacred temper. It is certainly the most somber of the Tevye adaptations. “There sits upon Tevya’s shoulders the great resignation which is the birthright of his people,” declared a reviewer for the English-language Chicago Daily Tribune when the film was released in December.
    For audiences, it expressed the anxiety and horror that gripped American Jews reading helplessly of Hitler’s advance across