Fiddler on the Roof premiered on the evening of September 22, 1964, at Broadway’s Imperial Theater. The original Broadway production was the first in history to surpass 3,000 performances and held the record for longest-running musical for nearly a decade. In the more than half-century since that auspicious debut, there have been five Broadway revivals of the show. In addition, every year at least five hundred productions of Fiddler are staged in the United States by both professional and amatuer theater companies, as well as by high school and college theater programs. Fiddler has also been translated and performed in 16 languages, including Spanish, German, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Japanese.
Most appropriately, in 2019, nearly 55 years after the original New York production of Fiddler, famed actor and director Joel Grey together with the National Yiddish Theater mounted a Yiddish version of the musical. Yiddish, the first language of most Eastern and Central European Jews, was the language in which the original stories on which Fiddler was based were written. That this first Yiddish language production of Fiddler debuted at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage — which describes itself as a Living Memorial to the Holocaust — could not be more fitting for a work of theater which portrays life in the very world which the Holocaust destroyed.
The origins of this iconic musical about a poor, humble dairyman named Tevye and his five unmarried daughters begins with Sholem Aleichem, undoubtedly one the most famous and beloved writers of fiction in the Yiddish language. Sholem Aleichem – whose name simply means “Peace be with you” in both Yiddish and Hebrew – is the pseudonym of the Russian Jewish author whose real name was Solomon Rabinowich. Often described as the “Yiddish Mark Twain,” Sholem Aleichem conceived the character of Tevye on a summer holiday in 1894, when he had the good fortune to meet a dairyman of that same name who sold butter, cheese, and milk off his horse-drawn cart. Charmed by this roving salesman, Sholem Aleichem took notes on their conversations and transformed them into stories over a 20-year period.
More than 45 years after Sholem Aleichem’s death, the story of Tevye was taken up by a talented group of theater artists, including Jerome Robbins, the director and choreographer associated with such hits as The King and I, Gypsy, and, most famously, West Side Story. While some Jewish historians, literary critics, and religious leaders may argue about the authenticity of Fiddler on The Roof as an expression of the Jewish tradition, both theater critics and audiences have been unanimous in their deep fondness for this play.
My family, like many other Jewish families, embraced Fiddler soon after it premiered. While it’s hardly surprising that so many Jews have found spiritual significance in Fiddler on the Roof, it is remarkable that so many non-Jews have been just as powerfully drawn to this story. Among the many universal spiritual questions asked by this play, the most central concerns the role of tradition in human life. Indeed, it is this concern that is most central to the peculiar image of that fiddler endlessly playing his fiddle up on the roof.
In the first scene of play, the entire population of the shtetl of Anatevka, Tevya’s village, is dancing slowly around a house on top of which sits a fiddler playing the now famous tune I sang at the beginning of today’s homily. Tevya then steps out of the circle of villagers and addresses the audience: “Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here we have traditions for everything…. You may ask, how did these traditions get started? I’ll tell you – I don’t know. But it’s a tradition… Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as… as a fiddler on the roof.”
That said, it soon becomes clear that many of these time-honored traditions are also teetering, teetering on the brink of social change and political upheaval. Symbolic of all of the community’s traditions under siege, the play focuses on the custom of arranged marriages. Given that Tevya and his wife, Golde, only have daughters and cannot provide proper dowries for any of them, the problem of getting them married occupies much of plot of the play.
Employing the traditional method of securing husbands, the village matchmaker, produces only trouble for Tevya and Golde. First, the eldest daughter, is betrothed by the matchmaker to a middle-aged, relatively prosperous butcher, a man she does not wish to wed. Adding to this problem is the fact that she also has fallen in love with a penniless young tailor, a man who she wishes to marry instead. Then the second daughter falls in love with a young Jewish revolutionary and decides to throw her lot in with him, another violation of tradition. Most problematically, Tevya’s third daughter falls in love with a young Russian man, a Christian. While Teyve reluctantly agrees to the first two marriages, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the play, this third break with tradition is one he decides he cannot accept. As a result, he chooses to disown his third daughter rather of accepting her marriage to a gentile.
Not only are the traditions of these people being threatened by change from within, but it’s also clear that larger forces are at work imperiling their way of life. Between the poverty of most of the inhabitants and the constant threat of violence from the Russian authorities, it seems that everyone in the village is increasingly teetering up there on the roof with that fiddler.
One reason this musical feels so relevant to my own experience is that my family history has multiple ties to this theme of how to deal with tradition. Like many American Jews, my family were also immigrants fleeing from persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe. My father’s parents were strictly-observant Orthodox Jews who continued to live in accordance with the old traditions here in America, while my father rebelled against them. In turn, observing my father’s rejection of many aspects of Jewish belief and practice encouraged me to question and evolve my own relationship to Judaism and its traditions.
Another deep connection I feel with Fiddler’s theme of the relationship between tradition and change concerns my maternal grandmother. In an example of life imitating art, my maternal grandmother was also an eldest daughter betrothed as young girl to a middle-aged merchant she didn’t wish to marry. Unlike the daughter in the play, however, my grandmother chose instead to emigrate to America at the age of 17 rather than accept the tradition of the world she was born into. As a result, my grandmother was the first of her large family to come to America. Because of her refusal to accept tradition, she was later able to help the rest of her family leave Europe and, as a result, escape destruction in the Holocaust, a fate many members of my father’s family were unable to avoid.
Ultimately, the spiritual lesson I most value in the Jewish tradition – is the one contained in my favorite song from the show: “To Life.” Because Judaism has no set belief as to what happens after we die, no promise of a heavenly reward or threat of a hellish punishment, the entire focus of the Jewish religion is on this life. The idea, as the poet William Blake reminds us, that “joy and woe are woven fine,” indeed that happiness may be found even in the midst suffering and sorrow, is as central to the Jewish perspective as it is to Fiddler on the Roof. Whether the occasion is a birth, a wedding, or a funeral, Jews always exchange the same traditional toast, L’Chaim, which means “To Life!” Nothing expresses the Judaic tradition’s ancient commitment to celebrating life in all its joy and sorrow, complexity and challenge than this age-old custom. As the lyrics of this song so exuberantly remind us: “Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us, drink l’Chaim, to life!” To which I can only add a hearty Amen!”