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Chapter 2. How Tevye Learned to Fiddle
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22 chapter 2 How Tevye Learned to Fiddle True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest. Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism” It would be difficult to name any Yiddish work more widely known than Fiddler on the Roof. Except, of course, that it is not a Yiddish work at all. Still, it has made Sholem Aleichem’s (1859–1916) Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman), or, rather, multiple versions of it, into the most transportable, international, and peripatetic Yiddish text in the modern world. No Yiddish text has been read, translated, adapted for stage and screen, analyzed, or— in some fashion—memorized more than this one. Even for those who have never read the Yiddish text or any of its numerous iterations, those who do not know that such a text exists, or those more familiar with the myth of Yid dish than with any Yiddish spoken or written word, this text has had an extra ordinary afterlife. On Broadway, on-screen, in schools, repertory companies, or amateur theater troupes, communities the world over have seen and heard some version of this memorable work. It is no exaggeration to say that Tevye has joined the ranks of archetypal tales such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or King Lear, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, or Charles Dick ens’s Oliver Twist. Like those other classics, it has been frequently reincar nated or modernized, undergoing astonishing transformations through time travel and shape shifting. And all this before Harvey Fierstein ever rasped his way through the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, or Herschel Bernardi, How Tevye Learned to Fiddle 23 Chaim Topol, and Alfred Molina reprised the role first made famous by Zero Mostel, and well before Japanese and Hindi versions made their way onto YouTube.1 In a literature that never developed the epic or had the wherewithal to crown a national poet, this story has helped Sholem Aleichem become the canonized spokesperson for Eastern European Jewish culture: part folklorist, part humorist, part historian, quintessential storyteller. Tevye and his daughters have had an afterlife that the twentieth century denied their nonfictional compatriots. These characters have become some thing of a metonym for the world destroyed by the Holocaust, a destruction that Sholem Aleichem, of course, could never have imagined. To some extent, this is the fate of much of Yiddish literature that is often read backward, as if it were prophetic of the horrible times to come, as if stories of poverty or discrimination or pogroms could help us understand what came after, even as if such stories were all that Yiddish literature contained. No author has been more widely appropriated (or simply misunderstood) because of such projections (what Michael André Bernstein most resonantly called “back shadowing”) than Sholem Aleichem.2 Whether seen as a timeless story of generational conflict, an exploration of the traditional world in the midst of modernization and revolution, an analysis of a changing economy, or love, or family, or of what is often considered the characteristically Jewish ability to laugh through tears, Tevye the Dairyman has been made to represent a Jewish past and present that its author would have found astonishing.3 The story cycle Sholem Aleichem produced between 1894–95 and 1914–16 has been widely interpreted as a collection of tales about patient, simple Jews who want only to tend their own gardens and live out their lives undisturbed, Jews who suffer because of the encroachment of modernity, the interference of anti-Semitic populations and authorities, economic and social deprivation, and more. But Tevye and other Sholem Aleichem characters can also be understood, in their own historical and social context, as rather ineffectual people facing a world they cannot comprehend, without the tools to make sense of it, without the necessary anchors of Jewish learning and faith or with those anchors rendered ineffectual by a changing world and their own inabil ity to change. Interpretations of Tevye himself are usually variations of two primary paradigms. He is seen as an old-fashioned folksmentsch, a purveyor of delightful Jewish humor, malapropisms, and misquotes of biblical and Tal mudic wisdom. Or he is seen as a Job-like figure, a long-suffering Jew who argues with God but will not give up, a patriarch whose children—in Tevye’s [3.230.76.153] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:29 GMT) 24 Chapter 2 case seven daughters and in Job...