When the Israeli actor Chaim Topol died a few weeks ago the musical Fiddler on the Roof received almost as much attention as did he from the obituary writers. It is not surprising, Topol had become almost synonymous with the play’s lead character of Tevye the Milkman. He’d played the role for over 40 years, in nearly 4,000 performances.
Fiddler on the Roof is a phenomenally popular musical. It is highly romanticised fiction but its impact has been transformational. The play’s bitter-sweet evocation of life in a 19th century Polish shtetl has probably done more to raise awareness among Ashkenazi Jews of their family origins than all the sober histories and academic tomes written on the subject.
The play is based on a series of Yiddish books written by Sholom Rabinovitz at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Rabinovitz is better known by his pen name, Sholom Aleichem. (The name is a traditional Yiddish greeting meaning ‘peace to you’, to which the response is Aleichem Sholom, ‘to you, peace’. A similar greeting and response is used in Arabic).
Sholom Aleichem was born in 1859 in Pereyeslav, about 60 miles south east of Kiev. His father had been a wealthy grain and timber merchant but lost all his money to a fraudster when Sholom was a boy. The following year his mother died of cholera and the young Sholom and his 11 siblings variously lived with their grandparents or helped their father with the small inn that he now ran.
After leaving school at the age of 17, Sholom began to work as a Russian tutor. One of the positions he was offered was to tutor Olga Loeff, the teenage daughter of a local merchant. As in all the best stories Sholom and Olga fell in love, at which her father, thinking as fathers do that the boy wasn’t good enough for his daughter, gave him the sack. Sholom then obtained a position as a government rabbi in nearby Lubny and began writing articles in Hebrew for local Jewish newspapers. Olga came across one of his articles, contacted the publisher and obtained Sholom’s address. They married shortly afterwards, against her father’s wishes. Unlike most stories of the shtetl, this one has a happy ending. Olga’s father came to accept the fact that his daughter had married Sholom and invited the couple to live with him on their estate. For the next few years Sholom found himself free to write without having to worry about money.
Because the Hebrew newspapers were slow to accept his articles Sholom also started to write for Yiddish publications. There was a snobbery towards Yiddish among educated Jews: Hebrew and Russian were regarded as literary languages, Yiddish in contrast was thought of as nothing more than a vernacular. Knowing that his father shared this opinion, Sholom chose to hide his identity. He devised his pen name of Sholom Aleichem for his inaugural Yiddish article, written in 1883.
The death of his father-in-law in 1885 left Sholom Aleichem with a considerable fortune. His experience as a writer in Yiddish had convinced him that the language was in no way inferior to any other; that literary Yiddish could hold its own against any other genre. He invested some of the money he had inherited in founding an annual journal dedicated to the promotion of Yiddish literature. He published his own works along with those by other leading Yiddish writers of the time, including I.L Peretz and Mendele Moykher Soferim. The first issue was published in in 1888, the second a year later. There was no third issue; in 1890 the stock market crashed and Sholom Aleichem lost all his money.
Sholom Aleichem’s reputation as a storyteller began to take off around the turn of the 20th century. He had spent the 1890s trying unsuccessfully to recover the fortune he had lost on the stock market, by 1900 he had decided to dedicate himself fully to writing, in both Russian and Yiddish. The Russian author Maxim Gorky was just one of several prominent writers to extol his work. They compared him to Dickens and Gogol and encouraged him to continue to follow in the great Russian literary tradition.
But Sholom Aleichem’s heart lay elsewhere. He was now a committed Zionist; he had written pro-Zionist pamphlets, had read his works at Zionist meetings and translated speeches by Zionist activists into Yiddish. He was devasted by Herzl’s early death, believing that he had not been sufficiently appreciated during his lifetime. In despair he asked whether it was true that Israel had no luck. He repeated the question the following year when reporting to the New York newspapers about the traumatic 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. Two years later, he found himself caught up in a pogrom in Kiev, in a riot that lasted for three days, during which he sought refuge in the Imperial Hotel. It finally convinced him that his destiny lay, not in Russian literature, but with the fortunes of his own people.
Sholom Aleichem’s Yiddish output was prodigious. His stories about Tevye the Milkman are his best known because of Fiddler of the Roof, but they are just a small instance of his work. Like Charles Dickens and others at the time he wrote his stories in instalments, publishing them in chapters in newspapers and periodicals before compiling them into books.
Tevye the Milkman was based on a character that he met when spending the summer of 1894 in his wife’s family dacha. He brought out the first volume of the saga the same year; he wrote it as a letter from Tevye to himself, Sholom Aleichem, thanking him for his interest in him and suggesting that a fee might be in order.
Most of the Tevye stories centre around him, his wife Golde and their seven daughters. Each volume addresses, with typical ironic humour, the social issues surrounding shtetl life. In Heintige Kinder, or Modern Children he deals with the issue of arranged marriages. The matchmaker has arranged for his oldest daughter Tzeitl to marry the wealthy Lazer-Wolf. She refuses though, preferring instead to spend her life with the impoverished tailor Mottel. Tevye takes it upon himself to persuade Golde that Tzeitel has made the right choice, pretending to have seen dire apparitions of his wife’s grandmother and Lazar-Wolf’s dead wife. He tells Golde that both apparitions have predicted fearful consequences should the marriage between Tzeitel and Lazar-Wolf go ahead. He is philosophical about Tzeitel’s decision. “So go complain about modern children. You slave for them, do everything for them! And they tell you that they know better. And….maybe they do.”
Tevye’s luck is no better with his daughter Hodl. He had given a lift in his cart to a young man with revolutionary ideas named Feferel and invited him to dinner. Hodl was due to meet an eligible bachelor who the matchmaker has identified for her. Before she met him however, her father saw her walking alone with Feferle. When challenged she told her parents that they had just become engaged to marry. She explained that he had to go away very soon and that she had to marry him before he went. It turned out that he was about to be sent to prison in Siberia and that Hodl was going too, to be with him. Unable to break the news to Golde, Tevye told her that Hodl was leaving to collect an inheritance.
It is the story about the third daughter Chava which caused the greatest difficulty to the playwright Joseph Stein who, after Sholom Aleichem’s death, reworked the Tevye stories into Fiddler on the Roof. In the original story Tevye had come across his daughter Chava in conversation with a Christian boy, Fyedka. When he questioned her she told him that Fyedka will be a famous author, of a similar stature to Maxim Gorky. Tevye, who had no idea who Gorky was, told Chava to stay away from Fyedka. Then the local priest turned up telling Tevye that Chava has been to see him for advice and instruction. Realising that she intended to convert to Christianity and marry Fyedka, Tevye told Golde that they must act as if she is dead.
Sholom Aleichem wrote the story about Chava in 1906, shortly after visiting New York. It deals with a problem that disturbed all Jewish families emigrating to the West; how to protect their children from assimilating into the majority culture, how to stop them marrying out or converting to Christianity.
The solution that Tevye adopted, of treating Chava as dead, was not Sholom Aleichem’s final word on the subject. In 1914 he wrote another Tevye story, Lech-Lecho. Golde was dead by this time as was Tzeitel’s husband. Tevye and Tzeitel had heard that the village was preparing to launch a pogrom and decided to leave home. As they were packing up, Chava suddenly arrived. She told her sister that she could not stay in the village, that whatever was about to happen to them would happen to her too. She has realised that she cannot carry on as Fyedka’s Christian wife hoping that nobody will attack her for being Jewish. She realises that once a Jew, always a Jew. She wants to return to her father and sister.
This is how Sholom Aleichem tried to explain to those traumatised families who feared losing their children that their offspring will never fully abandon them. It took him eight years to write this sequel, eight years during which we are led to imagine that both Chava has been grappling with the enormity of her decision to leave her community.
But when writing the script for Fiddler on the Roof, Joseph Stein changed the ending. In the play Golde is still alive, she and Tevye are on their way to America because of the impending pogrom and Chava and Fyedka turn up just as they are leaving. Chava tells them “Papa, we came to say goodbye. We are also leaving this place. We are going to Cracow.” Fyedka butts in. “We cannot stay among people who can do such things to others. Yes, we are also moving. Some are driven away by edicts, others by silence.” It is a powerful ending but nothing like as emotional as the original.
Why did Joseph Stein feel the need to rewrite the ending? Wasn’t the fact of Chava turning up again to be reunited with her father exactly the sort of happy ending that theatre and cinema goers have grown to expect? Was there perhaps something unpalatable about writing a play for Broadway in which the Jewish bond, Jewish exceptionalism if you like, is shown to be so strong that it reinforces the view of Jews as alien to the majority culture. Or is it that maybe, by the early 1960s when Fiddler on the Roof was written, assimilation had become so commonplace that for Chava to give up one life for another would have made little sense to the audience?
Whatever the reason, the ending is not the one Sholom Aleichem intended. Tevye probably wouldn’t have minded though, once the royalties started coming in. The wish he had sung about for so long had finally come true. Now he was a wealthy man.
I saw Fiddler on the Roof twice in London and once translated to German in Hamburg. It is a great play and I will see it again if the chance arises. I want to read the original Tevye by Sholem Aleichem at the end of the 1800, but have not found a copy.
The film changed a lot of things. Two that come to mind are: "He sold a horse but delivered a mule" became "he said the horse was 8 years old, but it was 20 years old".
The other was at the end, where to paraphrase, "we have been thrown out of many places at a moment's notice. Perhaps that is why we always wear our hats".
For me, although Topol is, are rather was, a great actor, the film was a disappointment after seeing the play.
On another point, I found it ironically interesting that the Hebrew word Hamas, means violence. I believe in Arabic it means zeal, strength or bravery.
Best regards and thanks for ending these articles.
William McCreight