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

exigencies of an artist’s imagination. In the aggregate, they performed a crucial cultural task at a devastating time: they created the East European Jewish past for non-Yiddish-speaking Americans. They provided the language, imagery, and conceptual framework through which Americans encountered that world that was no more. For second- and third-generation Jews especially, they sutured a rupture with a legacy that might not have been acknowledged had it not burst.
    Two different works titled The World of Sholom Aleichem nearly bookend this period of proliferating popular representations of East European Jewry. The first, an elegiac book by the Jewish nationalist Maurice Samuel, published in 1943, set the parameters for much of what follows; the second, a play by the leftist internationalist Arnold Perl, produced in 1953, was the first to bring Sholem-Aleichem (in English) to theatergoers around the country, and did so as a defiant rebuke to the anti-Communist blacklist. And centrally, in between, came two volumes of Sholem-Aleichem stories translated by Frances and Julius Butwin, inspired in part by Samuel’s book and utterly necessary to Perl, and the popular ethnography of the shtetl Life Is with People . If in the popular imagination Fiddler eventually cemented the image of the shtetl as a metonym for all of East European Jewish culture and fixed Tevye permanently within it, these various works made and mixed the mortar.
    *   *   *
    Samuel, a rising star of the Jewish intelligentsia, was well placed to blaze the English-language trail through Sholem-Aleichem (though he could not predict or, in the end, condone the Broadway musical to which it led). Having come back to Yiddishkayt as an adult after an indifferent youth, he burned with the zeal of a convert. Born in Romania in 1895 and raised in the Jewish immigrant quarter of Manchester, England, he showed little sign that he would become, as the Yiddish scholar Emanuel S. Goldsmith dubbed him, “the leading spokesman of Jewish rejuvenation and creative survival in America for half a century.” By his bar mitzvah, he had declared himself an atheist and a socialist, identities he sustained into his young adulthood. But when he dropped out of Manchester University after his three-year scholarship came to an end and migrated to the Lower East Side of New York in late 1914, a few months shy of his twentieth birthday, he had already grown weary of the “dogma” and “intellectual bullying” of party politics.
    In New York, Samuel fell under the spell of the commanding intellectual oratory of the Zionist leader Shmarya Levin. Samuel stalked Levin’s public appearances, at first struggling to keep up with his rich, allusive Yiddish but always sitting transfixed in the front row. (Samuel would go on to translate Levin’s three-volume autobiography.) The Yiddish and Hebrew he had disregarded as a boy he now reached back for, the better to participate in the cultural and political disputations tearing up the intellectual world he wished to join. Samuel frequented the Yiddish theater—Jacob Adler, even in his waning days, impressed Samuel most—and swallowed up the competing daily papers and the new Yiddish poetry of every faction. His uncle Berel, a tailor eking out a living by mending and pressing clothes in a grimy shop on East Fifteenth Street, served as Samuel’s unwitting tutor, simply by shooting the breeze in his pungent Yiddish. The language itself, Samuel later reflected, was his “gateway into Jewish life.”
    His experience in Europe after the First World War stoked his Jewish nationalism. In 1917, Samuel was drafted into the United States Army and, because of his fluent French, put to work in counterespionage in Bordeaux. From there, he took a seven-week stint as a secretary and interpreter for the Morgenthau Commission to investigate pogroms in Poland at the end of the war. Samuel found that the speeches he was called on to translate for Henry