Ron Jacobs Professor
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Ron Jacobs Professor Slobin MUSC 297 3 November 2014
Fiddler Response Like a lot of Jews of my generation, I saw the film and play “Fiddler on the
Roof” before I ever heard of Sholem Aleichem. As my earlier encounter with “Fiddler” proved, it is almost impossible today to experience Sholem Aleichem unmediated. He comes to us through the lenses of translation and adaptation, each reworking of his material reflecting the moment of its own creation. To put it simply, it was hard to get “Fiddler” out of my head while first reading Tevye the Dairyman. “Fiddler on the Roof”—its creation, its narrative, its themes—is about identity and assimilation, religion and comedy, history and family, all in contention like a fiddler trying to play while balancing on a roof. After reading the original Aleichem stories, I have concluded that identity and image were probably the most trivial subjects for the adaptations. It could not have been perfect but I thought that Tevye’s witty personality transcended well in the film and was not completely watered down. He was wonderfully human and humorous just like in the stories. Another factor that was accurate was that life was a family affair just like in the stories. Loyalty to the family, concern about how the family is functioning in the world, and securing the future of family members are all a priority for Tevye shown in both mediums. In both, he also obsessively uses religious proverbs to express his morals and beliefs.
What struck me the most about Tevye was that it seems to be written in a realist tradition. However, Aleichem pretty much throws out the whole descriptive aspect of the realist genre. For example, instead of being described from head to toe, here characters are introduced with just the barest hint of what they might look like such as Hodl being described by Tevye as simply "beautiful." There's no description there. Essentially, I felt like not having lots of description was actually way more realistic with a first-‐person narrator. After all, when you're telling a story about someone, you don't usually pause the narrative to go into a detailed description of other characters in the world. Tevye’s voice, with its jokes, arguments, and attempts to deal with a crumbling world are exactly what made it so real. In the Tevye stories, Sholem Aleichem’s character is aware that he is being used for material, and he is sensitive about his portrayal. A few times he asks the author not to write about him, and if he does write something, to leave out his name. Today, in contrast, it’s Sholem Aleichem who is on the receiving end of the fame reflected by his character, and more because of Tevye’s appearance on platforms like Broadway and in film than because of his role in Yiddish fiction. Over the course of the stories, Tevye gains a fortune, loses it and suffers through his daughters’ escalating series of nontraditional marriages. In the end, he is exiled by czarist edict from his home, where he has lived his entire life. But unlike “Fiddler on the Roof,” which is set within a relatively short time frame, Tevye grows older in the stories and we also never get to see in the film what becomes of the younger two daughters, Shprintze and Beilke, other than Yente pairing them with two young boys before the family must leave Russia. I feel like leaving the Shprintze and Beilke stories out of the film
was a good idea because the unfortunate drowning sequence would not have fared well with the direction the film was trying to go in and would have detracted from the powerful morals that the audience already learns through the three older daughters. Something that was highlighted well in the film was the shtetl. The shtetl is unquestionably the center of Aleichem’s stories, and therefore the characters seemed natural and authentic for a Yiddish audience at the time. The shtetl’s dimensions are well defined in the film. The majestic wooden house synagogue in the film reminded me of the pictures we saw in class of the pre-‐World War II structure. The adaption to film was also able to stress the topic of assimilation from many angles. These stories were about characters who were Jewish, rather than Jewish characters. Their faith was a central part of their story without overwhelming it. I felt like the overall production had some success in this endeavor. Instead of isolating it to a Jewish audience, I felt like anyone critiquing the plot could very well draw comparisons to any secular heroes of literature. Instead of a people battered by the cultures they sought to participate in, these new generations were dynamic and strong. Tevye is not just a poor man oblivious to modernity; he wonders why he is poor, and he is a religious man who questions his faith. He keeps a Talmudic tradition alive. I felt like his character could easily be such a success to an unconditioned audience type because he was the type of Jewish patriarch men and women wanted to see. In the film, which carries an epic tone, the character of Tevye is jovial, even kind. But in the stories themselves, it seems like he has a much more misanthropic side to him. In one tale, Tevye grumbles to himself
that he isn’t worried about God. He will continue to confront a higher authority, no matter what, but “what bother[s] me is people.”Aleichem’s Tevye carries a much darker humor. It’s easy to see why a group of screenwriters would cut out this problematic piece of the character, no matter how truthful or authentic. The “Fiddler” Tevye was the epitome of the shtetl’s traditions. He was clearly the village’s representative as with the example of the close relationship between him and the Tsarist officer. The villagers always seem to consult him with any disputes that did not fall into religious matters. For any kind of production whether it be the Broadway play or the film adaptation, it is important to keep in mind that it is built on escapist themes. Sholem Aleichem’s work was far more confrontational than romances or adventures. It’s remarkable that the adaption writers managed to combine the sentimentality of the genre of musical theater with the starkly unsentimental subject matter: cultures that are going extinct, people who are struggling to hold onto one another. They did so by removing the real darkness at the heart of the Tevye stories and focusing instead on the lightness and the triumph of the characters. The spirit of “Fiddler on the Roof” is far more socially authentic than what you might assume from a crowd-‐ pleasing musical. This is probably due to a collective duty felt among those who decided to interpret Sholem Aleichem’s stories. They rightfully felt they must retain the source’s naturalness while honoring the inquisitive nature of their protagonist, Tevye. Though, above all, they must remain faithful to tradition and who could think of a better way to engrain this value than to make it the subject matter of the
musical’s first song. “Fiddler” has always been a part of my heritage and it’s hard to imagine life without it.
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