There Ain't No There There: Reimagining Eastern European Jewish Culture in the 21st Century

It is Thanksgiving of 1971 and I, accompanied by my wife, my Yekke father-in-law and his even more Yekke mother, get in their tiny VW and drive to the cinema in Washington, DC to see the ubiquitous Thanksgiving afternoon film. It is the hit of the season: Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (based on the wildly successful 1964 Broadway musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein). The film opens with Topol as Tevye talking to the audience:

A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask "Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?" Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition! ¹

Tears all round; no one more than my wife's grandmother, who had escaped with her children by Zeppelin to New York in 1938 from Berlin, and for whom Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] (like me) were slightly suspicious. "Tradition!" Actually what he should have shouted was "Nostalgia," nostalgia for a world that never existed except in the universe of Sholem Aleichem's text. For the 1970s this was the perfect image of the world of "Life is with People," ² dispersed across the nations, destroyed in the Holocaust, remembered by their American (and German) mishpokhe. This was as true in East Berlin, where the musical was the great hit of the 1971 season at the Comic Opera—all of those comrades sitting and weeping and laughing. To paraphrase Theodor Adorno's comment about hearing two elderly German ladies leave a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Frankfurt in the 1960s: "At least those people should have lived." ³

It is February of 2004, and a revival of Fiddler on the Roof with the very non-Jewish British-Spanish actor Alfred Molina as Tevye opens to great acclaim on Broadway. ⁴ By 2004 it has stopped being a "Jewish" musical and has become (as the play and the film of The Diary of Anne Frank had been half a century before) a "statement about humanity." ⁵ As Calev Ben-David writes in The Jerusalem Post (September 22, 2004): "The lack of yiddishkeit in this production's cast has led Broadway wags to dub it 'Goyim on the roof.' Jewish novelist Thane Rosenbaum observed in The Los Angeles Times that 'this musical for the new millennium isn't your grandmother's Fiddler. The sensation is as if you're sampling something that tastes great and looks Jewish, but isn't entirely kosher.'" And the reviewer attributed this to the different world of late twentieth-century America: "While lamenting the slightly treif taste of the new Fiddler, Thane Rosenbaum added: 'Perhaps that's not the production's fault as much as it is a reflection of how well, and quickly, the Jewish immigration saga in America was transformed from one of despair to one of reinvention.'" ⁶ By the end of its run in 2006, none other than gay and Jewish Harvey Fierstein is singing the supremely heterosexual Tevye. For Fierstein it is not a bit of a stretch: "Fierstein says he 'isn't at all observant now,' but that his Jewish upbringing still informs his work. So does being gay. There are parallels between a parent dealing with a homosexual son and a father coping with a daughter marrying outside her faith, he has said. Both situations challenge tradition, and, he says, 'that's what the entire show is about.'" ⁷ And why not?

By 2006 a new Jewish culture, a vibrant Jewish culture, had replaced the Jewish nostalgia culture of the 1960s. Suddenly the 21^st century saw an extraordinary explosion of a new Jewish culture in North...