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

Europe. Schwartz stressed the antisemitism of Tevye’s neighbors. He created an opening scene in which Khave is taunted by a gang of Jew-baiting Ukrainian youths. In general, the film paints Ukrainians in coarse strokes, as violent, gruff, drunk, and brutish. Meanwhile, Schwartz slathered on the pathos. He filmed the sequence in which Tevye tells the local priest he’d rather see his children “perish” than marry outside their faith. (Overhearing the conversation, Khave faints.) And he created another in which Tevye not only confronts the priest in an effort to retrieve Khave (as in the original story) but also throws himself at the priest’s feet (while Khave whimpers upstairs, as if locked away from the home she already pines for). In a drawn-out sequence filled with precise ritual detail, Tevye and Golde sit shiva as if their daughter were dead. Golde soon dies in earnest. Tevye is evicted and Khave pleads to come back because the marriage has turned out a disaster. In what the film critic J. Hoberman calls “a triumphant rebuke” to the typical assimilationist fables proffered by most popular Yiddish movies, the closing shot tracks Tevye’s wagon setting off for Palestine.
    The film may have captured the Jewish mood at the beginning of the war, offering some vague hope in the wish fulfillment of Tevye’s defiant survival. But even as critics praised Schwartz’s virtuosity and the film’s unusually high production values, they upbraided him for not representing the real Sholem-Aleichem. Foreshadowing the objections some Jewish critics would level at Fiddler on the Roof some twenty-five years later (and indeed at every dramatic and cinematic version of the material), the Communist Morgn frayhayt critic said the film “does not at all agree with the spirit and essence of Sholem-Aleichem’s writing.” Schwartz plays “with deep understanding” for the hero, he concluded. “But it is not Tevye der milkhiker , it’s something else and something worse.” The Forverts concurred: “Merely a shadow of Sholem-Aleichem remains.” But today’s corruption is frequently tomorrow’s fidelity: what comes to be considered “authentic” is often simply the most recent precedent from which a new interpretation departs. In time, Schwartz’s film would seem like sterling.
    Dramatizing the tension between tradition and progress, Tevye would cycle through many rounds of such charges in the years to come, serving as Jewish culture’s always shifting constant. Still, it was no straight line from the Yiddish Art Theater to Fiddler on the Roof . The cultural sphere had to absorb Sholem-Aleichem into English after the Second World War. As he had become for the Yiddish-speaking generation after the first war, Sholem-Aleichem became available to their English-speaking children as an icon of the past, employed for cementing a new mode of Jewish American memory making. Cahan and the Yiddish theatergoing public had dismissed him as too outdated to be relevant in 1907. Four decades later, his oldness was useful in a new way. His work would speak powerfully to postwar exigencies—but only when adapted as America commanded.

 
    CHAPTER 2
    B ETWEEN T WO W ORLDS OF S HOLEM -A LEICHEM
    A handful of translators, writers, and artists estab lished the ground on which Fiddler could eventually stand. In works produced between 1943 and 1957, they made Sholem-Aleichem accessible to non-Yiddish readers, painted in words and pictures the milieu he represented, and proved his stage-worthiness for the American mainstream. In the complicated postwar period—a time of both exuberance and trauma for American Jews—they taught Tevye to speak English and laid his path to the stage.
    These projects came in various genres and styles and from disparate directions, some with the express, urgent purpose of recovering a civilization that had just been extinguished, some propelled by the ideals of a lingering left, some dictated by the personal