Every
Jew has his star … why, the whole sky is Jewish … I hope it’s
not mine that just fell, I prayed, suddenly thinking of Hodl. Lately
she’d seemed cheerier, livelier, more her old self again. Someone
had brought her a letter, no doubt from her jailbird. I would have
given the world to know what was in it, but I was blamed if I was
going to ask. If she wasn’t talking, neither was I; I’d show her
how to button up a lip. No, Tevye was no woman; Tevye could wait …
Well, no sooner had I thought of my Hodl than she appeared by my
side. She sat down next to me on the stoop, looked around, and said
in a low voice, “Papa, are you listening? I have to tell you
something. I’m saying goodbye to you tonight … forever.” She
spoke in such a whisper that I could barely hear her, and she gave me
the strangest look— such a look, I tell you, as I’ll never forget
for as long as I live. . .
“What
do you mean, you’re saying goodbye forever?” I asked, staring
down at the ground to hide my face, which must have looked like a
dead man’s. “I mean ,” she said, “that I’m going away early
in the morning. We’ll never see each other again … ever.” That
cheered me up a bit. Thank God for small comforts, I thought. Things
could have been worse— though to tell you the truth, they
conceivably could have been better … “And just where,” I
inquired , “are you going, if it’s not too much of me to ask?”
“I’m going to join him,” she said. “You are?” I said. “And
where is he?” “Right now he’s still in prison ,” she said.
“But soon he’s being sent to Siberia.” “And so you’re going
to say goodbye to him?” I asked, playing innocent.
“No,”
she says. “I’m going with him.” “Where?” I say. “What’s
the name of the nearest town?” “We don’t know the exact place
yet,” she says. “But it’s awfully far away. Just getting there
alive isn’t easy.” She said that, did my Hodl, with great pride,
as if she and her Peppercorn had done something so grand that they
deserved a medal with half a pound of gold in it. I ask you, what’s
a father to do with such a child?
Last
week was the fiftieth anniversary of the Broadway opening of Fiddler
on the Roof. In a childhood devoid of religion, my Jewish
identity crept into me in roundabout ways. I talked, last week,
about the impact Israel had on that identity. But there were other
things as well: my the aunt's Yiddish aphorisms, my grandmother's
tsimmes, my father's sense of humor. And it came to me, at
least in part, through Fiddler. Growing up, I listened to
that album so often I had to pile pennies on the stylus to keep it in
the worn and scratched grooves. I can't remember a time before the
time when I knew every line of every song.
I have
always thought of Fiddler as a thoroughly Jewish musical. But
I discovered this past spring when I, for the first time, read the
stories on which it is based, that Fiddler on the Roof is not
really a Jewish show at all. Rather, its an American show projected
through a Jewish lens. Fiddler is the story of a man learning
to cope with modernity. Each of his three eldest daughters pushes
Tevye ever further from the the old ways. Tsaytl, his oldest,
asserts her right to choose for herself whom she will marry. Hodl
goes even further and declares her determination to marry whomever
she will regardless of whether her father consents. And Chava pushes
him even further, claiming the right to marry even outside the faith.
The
lessons his daughters teach him will stand Tevye in good stead
because by the show's end, he and his family – in fact, the entire
town – are expelled from their homes and forced to flee to America.
The deep irony here is that the ending is probably the most Jewish
thing about the show, for even as we shed a tear for the dear little
village of Anitevka, we know that this expulsion is, in reality,
Tevye's and his family's salvation from the Shoah that would
have engulfed them otherwise.
Fiddler
on the Roof, then, is a typical immigrant story of leaving the
old world of oppression for the new world of freedom. We sympathize
with Tevye for his feelings of loss, but not for the things he is
actually losing which are largely folkways and tribal customs that
have no place in America. That Tevye can indeed survive their loss –
that he even comes to some reconciliation with Chava – assures us
that he will survive; and that indeed constitutes a kind of happy
ending.
Sholem
Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman bears only a passing resemblance
to the musical Fiddler. This is not the story of a man
learning to bend in the winds of modernity. Rather it is a modern
retelling of one of Judaism's oldest and most powerful stories: the
story of Job.
Tevye
the Dairyman is composed of eight short stories written by Sholem
Aleichem between 1894 and 1916. In each story, the same amount of
time has passed in Tevye's life as has passed since the previous
story's publication. Indeed, each story is told as if Tevye were
catching up his honored acquaintance – the writer Sholem Aleichem –
on the doings in his life since last they met.
And
what a life that turns out to be. Tevye, we quickly learn,
interprets everything that happens to him through verses of the
Bible, the Talmud or the siddur. He lives his life in constant
dialogue with God and takes as axiomatic that anything to befall him
is God's doing. He tells us in his first story
As we say on Yom Kippur, mi yorum umi yishofeyl—
who will be exalted and who humbled - leave it to Him to decide who
goes on foot and who gets to ride. The main thing is confidence. A
Jew must never, never give up hope. How does he go on hoping, you
ask, when he’s already died a thousand deaths? But that’s the
whole point of being a Jew in this world! What does it say in the
prayer book? Atoh bekhartonu! We’re God’s chosen people;
it’s no wonder the whole world envies us …
The
touch of irony you sense in those words will deepen almost to
bitterness in the end for Tevye will suffer greatly. Hodl, we know,
will follow her Pertchik to Siberia. Chava will marry outside the
faith and become dead to him. Tevye's fourth daughter, Shprintze,
will fall in love with a rich boy from a nearby town. The boy's
family is convinced that Tevye is a gold digger and moves away. And
Shprintze throws herself into the river and drowns. His fifth
child, Beilke, fulfills Tevye's life-long dream of having a daughter
marry a rich man. But that nouveau-riche husband is so disgusted by
his poor, dairy-man father-in-law that he plots to ship Tevye off to
the land of Israel. The husband goes bust before Tevye can board the
boat and he and Beilke flee to America to escape his creditors. And
along the way Tsaytl's husband Motl dies, and Golde dies, and Tevye
is evicted from his home. The one bright spot in Tevye's life is a
repentant Chava's return on the eve of the family's eviction. The
last view Sholem Aleichem gives us of Tevye is as a homeless old man,
trying to take care of his two remaining daughters and his
grandchildren. Through it all, the dialogue with God goes on.
To say
that Tevye is a modern-day Job is not to compare suffering. It is to
compare their response to suffering. Job is described as blameless,
upright, God-fearing, shunning evil. When his children go off
partying at night, he sacrifices burnt offerings on their behalf,
lest they should blaspheme in their revery. And when it is all taken
from him and he is reduced to sitting on an ash heap, scraping at his
diseased skin with a shard of pottery, he fearlessly and forthrightly
insists that the reason for his suffering lies not in his own
actions, but in the secretive ways of the Almighty. “Know that God
has wronged me,” he says. “He has thrown up siege works around
me. I cry 'Violence' but am not answered; I shout, but can get no
justice.” When Job cries out “I know that my Redeemer lives!”
it is practically a challenge to God to defend Himself.
Compare
this with the very end of Tevye the Dairyman and our
protagonists astonishing valedictory:
I ask you, Pan Sholem Aleichem, you’re a person who
writes books —is Tevye right or not when he says that there’s a
great God above and that a man must never lose heart while he lives?
And that’s especially true of a Jew, and most especially of a Jew
who knows a Hebrew letter when he sees one … No, you can rack your
brains and be as clever as you like— there’s no getting around
the fact that we Jews are the best and smartest people. Mi
ke’amkho yisro’eyl goy ekhod, as the Prophet says— how can
you even compare a goy and a Jew? Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must
be born one. Ashrekho yisro’eyl—it’s a lucky thing I
was, then, because otherwise how would I ever know what it’s like
to be homeless and wander all over the world without resting my head
on the same pillow two nights running?
In his
introduction to his translation of Tevye the Dairyman, Hillel
Halkin remarks that there are three common ways through which people
understand the suffering of the innocent. Either they believe that
God is good and all powerful and what we perceive of as injustice is
just an illusion or a test. Or they believe that God is good but not
all powerful and that He sometimes loses out to these other, evil
forces. Or they believe that that God does not exist and suffering
is like all other things – the result of blind chance. But Halkin
goes on to say that there is yet a fourth way of understanding why
the innocent suffer. It is to say “God exists; He is good; He is
all-powerful; therefore He must be just; but He is not just;
therefore He owes man an explanation and man must demand it from Him.
This is Job’s response. And it is also Tevye’s.”
The
story of Fiddler on the Roof reflects the times in which it
was created. Jews like Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock and Joseph
Stein and Jerome Robbins could look back fondly at the Tevyes in
their own lives and see in their sufferings and pains the seeds of
their own success. What those immigrant Jews were forced to give up
was quaint and comforting and not without its rewards. But what they
gained in return was something far greater: freedom; freedom to be
Jews, freedom to be like every one else. Its a wonderful story and
wonderfully told. But its an American story. It isn't the story of
Sholem Aleichem's Tevye. For that Tevye is more than a simple dairy
man. He is, indeed, a man in the mold of Abraham and Moses and
Jeremiah and Job – a man who can stand upright in his wretchedness
and call the Almighty to account. On this day, when we are charged
with standing before the Creator of All and beseeching His
forgiveness, it is good to remember the Tevyes who demand that God be
worthy of answering our prayers.
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