I see that the show ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is back in town: if you want to catch it, it’s on at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in London. Sixty years old now, it once held the record for the longest running musical on Broadway: 10 years, 3,000+ performances.
Adapted from
the Yiddish tales of Solomon Rabinovitch from Kiev, perhaps better known to you
and I as Sholem Aleichem, this piece of musical theatre – the brainchild of
three Jewish artists each of whom contributed to its success, with the book (Joseph Stein), the music (Jerry
Brock), the lyrics (Sheldon Harnick) – has retained its appeal over the
decades. It’s been revived every decade or so and I am sure there’s no one reading
this who can’t hum, or sing, some of its famous tunes. “If I were a rich man”,
“Sunrise, sunset”…One way or another it’s become part of our psyches. And yet, if
not exactly panned by the critics when it came out, it was met with remarkable
condescension by some reviewers who saw it when it premiered in 1964.
Philip Roth
called it “shtetl kitsch” and Cynthia
Osick, then – like Roth – at the beginning of a stellar literary career - called
it an “emptied-out, prettified, romantic vulgarization” of the Yiddish
original. I get that, and if I am being high-minded about these things, I might
even agree with them. Though high-minded might be just another word for
snobbish. And yet something about the show hit a nerve
with audiences, whether they saw it on stage or in its 1971 film version: not
just the singalong melodies but the drama of resilience demonstrated by a cultural
group in the face of dark times – “horrible things are happening all over the
land” is one line that resonates for audiences in different times and places,
in different cultures, and the drama addresses a universal dilemma about how
families are to survive difficult times: times of oppression, persecution, prejudice,
the hostility of others in a society or the antipathy of governments.
Do you adapt, do you compromise, do you hold on to traditions, do you let go of them? How do you survive in a rapidly changing world: it’s not just a Jewish question but it’s been a question for many cultural groups within modernity, and a question still very much alive today whether you’re Muslim or Ukrainian or Palestinian or white English working-class.
When the
group you identify with, the group you feel you belong to, feels threatened –
and that’s regardless of whether the threat is real or not, this is all about
subjectivity – if you feel threatened, how do you stay true to who you feel
yourself to be collectively?
For Jews in
the 20th century, the primary solution to this problem was of course
supposed to be Zionism. Only Jews living autonomously in their own land and not
feeling beholden to others would solve, it was said, the dilemmas of being an
unwelcome minority in other people’s lands. Well, we have seen how well that’s
turned out. Becoming a semi-pariah state in the eyes of much of the world has
replicated the problem rather than solving it.
As a few
prescient Jewish thinkers recognised prior to the establishment of the State –
Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Henrietta Szold, Gershom Scholem
– unfettered Jewish nationalism, a nationalism unanchored in the highest
ethical standards of the spiritual heritage of Judaism – could only lead to trouble.
They foresaw how the existence of the Jewish people within a land to which they
may have had a historical claim but that happened to be a land long-settled in and
claimed by others would mean that Jews would yet again be a problematic
provocation to the non-Jewish world - just as they had been in fictional Anatevka
and its real life counterparts in pre-revolutionary Russia.
But let me
stay with 'Fiddler on the Roof' for a moment, this very Jewish and yet universal
piece of storytelling. Its original investors, by the way, particularly Jewish
investors, were worried the show was “too ethnic” (by which of course they meant ‘too Jewish’); but
perhaps because the show was rooted in a family drama, an inter-generational
family dynamic of children wanting to
break free of inherited cultural ways, particularly when it came to marriage
partners, the show’s ethnic particularism didn’t seem to detract from its popularity;
and indeed, when it came to casting the lead (the role of Tevye) for the film
version in 1971, the actor most keen to do it – any guesses? - was Frank
Sinatra who seemingly didn’t feel that being an archetypical goy was any bar to
stepping into the shoes of Zero Mostel.
Actually my
thoughts about 'Fiddler on the Roof ' were sparked a few weeks ago. They came to
me via a circuitous route - but let me lead you down the rabbit hole of my
thinking here: bear with me.
When the recent
rioting erupted up and down the UK, it was of course really shocking and frightening
but as I watched the news each day and read about what was going on, I saw how
this outbreak of toxic nationalism was competing for airspace with another form
of nationalism, the benign kind, the nationalism of the Olympic Games. So you
had the bizarre phenomenon of two opposite expressions of nationalism going
head to head: the racist aggression of white Englishness attacking black, brown
and Muslim ‘foreigners’ – and on the other hand the countrywide support for Team
GB, a team filled with representatives of all those apparently unwelcome ‘others’.
And the irony, if that’s what one wants to call it, was of Team GB being cheered on by many of those same people
who were firebombing immigrant hostels and homes and mosques.
Yes, people
are strange. They don’t add up. But then maybe none of us do. Maybe we all have
our inner contradictions: it’s just easier to see the contradictions in others.
And condemn hypocrisy in others, while turning a blind eye to our own.
So – I am
coming to Fiddler on the Roof – I was watching how the UK government got to
grips with the situation with a sense of real urgency, this was grown-up
political leadership, using the police
and the courts and the apparatus of law, and I felt very thankful for living in
a country that was able to offer such robust protection to those being
victimised, and with a government intent on safeguarding our collective well-being
from thuggery and racism.
It brought
to mind the wisdom of Rabbi Hanina’s statement in the Mishnah two thousand
years ago: “Pray for the welfare of the
government; for without the fear and awe it inspires, people would swallow each
other alive” (Pirke Avot 3:2). But that down-to-earth pragmatism also brought
to mind Fiddler on the Roof’s commentary, as it were, on the Mishnah: Tevye’s
refrain – you may remember it - “May God
bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!”
Dark humour
has always been a Jewish defence against pain, and fear, but there’s also an
emotional depth to that line as well: you hear in it, I think, the authentic Diaspora
voice of ancestral Jewish ambivalence. On the one hand, Jews have felt gratitude
to the secular powers-that-be of the lands in which they lived, an attitude traceable
back to the prophet Jeremiah who wrote to the Jews exiled in Babylon: “Seek the
welfare of the city to which you have been delivered, and pray to God on its
behalf, for in its prosperity, you shall prosper” (29:7). And on the other hand,
Tevye is voicing an awareness - “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away
from us!” – that not all governments are going to be kindly disposed to the
minorities in their midst. Protectors can become persecutors in the twinkling
of an eye. Or from one generation to the next.
In the UK,
of course, prayers for the government still figure in our Jewish liturgy,
during the Torah service, along with prayers for the Royal family: it’s a
tradition – “Tradition!” – that goes back to Cromwell’s re-admission of the
Jews into England in 1656. Samuel Pepys records in his diary hearing a prayer
for the King when he visited a synagogue in 1663. British Jews wanted to demonstrate their loyalty
then to the wider society in which they lived – and they still do. And I
suppose we still retain this prayer not to impress any visiting non-Jew, but to
remind ourselves we are part of a larger society that we remain committed to.
And maybe subliminally the prayer acts as a reminder that our well-being as a
community ultimately depends on the laws of the land and their benign application
by the government of the day.
So, some
final thoughts on Anatevka, and ‘shtetl kitsch’. I think what Roth was offering
was a critique of how the show’s dramatists created an upbeat version of the original’s
more historically-accurate darkness: Sholem Aleichem’s fictional Anatevka was
lorded over by a brutal, cruel, antisemitic Russian official, but on stage he’s
turned into a sympathetic friend of the Jews; and in the original source
material, Tevye is left alone at the end,
his wife is dead, his daughters scattered. Whereas in the show they are still
together - and off to America for a new start. In that sense the show was a
betrayal of the fictional reality; and of the historical reality of Czarist
Russian antisemitism.
But my additional
thought – this is not Roth, I am building on Roth – is that this kitsch
betrayal was, remember, perpetrated in 1964, when the awareness of the
Holocaust was just entering fully into American consciousness (the word ‘Holocaust’
to describe what had happened only entered into public awareness in the early
60s) and it may be that this Broadway version went some way to unconsciously soothing
the trauma of Jews and the guilt of non-Jews, enacting, as it did, a
counterfactual narrative of persecution with a happy ending.
Because of
course it was all the real Anatevkas that were wiped out a mere generation
after Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories. Maybe part of Fiddler on the Roof’s popularity
is the way it acts as a psychic defence against the traumas of genocide. Then -
and now. Amazing to make a record-breaking show out of that.
And if you
want a final twist in the tail/tale of this show, you might be interested that – and here’s life imitating art – there is now
a real village, community, called Anatevka. It’s on the outskirts of Kyiv, and it was established
in 2015 on a plot of empty land after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine,
Crimea, led to tens of thousands of people being displaced, including thousands
of Jews. It was set up to supply food, medicine, housing and education for the
refugees. And who set it up? HaRav Moshe Reuven Azman, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine;
he deliberately named the community after the fictional shtetl, and it has,
since 2022 , become a leading operational centre for humanitarian efforts in
the current war.
So Anatevka
lives – not just in the pages of Yiddish fiction, and not just on the stage,
but as a living example of tikkun olam, Jewish ethics in action. As so
often, history is even stranger than fiction.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 24th, 2024]
