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Mar. 21st, 2015 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIn winter of 2012, I rewatched Fiddler on the Roof for the first time as an adult and got unexpectedly emotional. In winter of 2014, I read the original short stories by Sholem Aleichem that Fiddler on the Roof was based on and got unexpectedly emotional.
This endless winter, I read Alisa Solomon's Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, a NONFICTION BOOK ABOUT THE PRODUCTION OF A BROADWAY MUSICAL, which I figured should be pretty safe, right? NO, ACTUALLY. IN FACT, it turned out to be the most unexpectedly emotionally affecting thing of all? OK. THANKS, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.
OK, actually, though, when I say that Wonder of Wonders is about Fiddler on the Roof, that is true; it is about Fiddler on the the Roof, which means that it's about the history of what it means to be Jewish in America -- and also what it means to be Jewish in places that aren't America -- and also what it means to see representations of Jewishness in places that used to have Jews, but don't anymore -- and what it means for someone to see themselves in a story, for someone to use a story to rediscover pieces of themselves they've lost, or didn't know they'd ever had -- and then, conversely, what it means when a single story comes to be identified so strongly with a certain piece of history that people forget that it's a story, and not the truth; that the "Bottle Dance" is actually Jerome Robbins choreography; that "Sabbath Prayer" is a Broadway song, and not an actual prayer.
Alisa Solomon starts, as you would expect, with Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish theater (old friends to me by now!), and then moves to the 1960s and the collection of extremely assimilated second-generation Jewish dudes, who somehow came to the decision to transform a bunch of Yiddish-language stories into a mainstream Broadway musical because they thought it would be kind of cool, and then found themselves forced to terms with a heritage they had either wandered away from or actively shoved away.
I was expecting the stories of wacky Broadway hijinks, of obsessive directors and grueling rehearsals and conflict between blacklisted Zero Mostel and friendly HUAC witness Jerome Robbins. All of which I got! Along with extremely solid critical analysis of the ways that the show transformed Judaism into something friendly and digestible for American (and American Jewish) audiences, something that "handed over a legacy that could be fondly claimed without exacting any demands." (Do I feel like I resemble some of those remarks? YEP, SOMETIMES.)
I wasn't actually expecting the stories like the one about how at the end of the show, the book-writer gave the lyricist a mezuzah -- the first one that he ever owned. Stories like the ones about Jerome Robbins -- Mr. "I didn't want to be like my father, the Jew, or any of his friends, those Jews;" Mr. "Wash yourself clean of it -- bathe & scrub; change your clothes, cut your hair, alter your walk, your talk, your handwriting, recast your future, remold your life, your friends, your taste ... leave behind forever the Jew part" -- Jerome Robbins, who dedicated the show to his immigrant father. Jerome Robbins whose father came backstage after the opening night, asked 'How did you know all that?' and "threw his arms around his son and wept."
I'M SORRY, OK, I'M NOT MADE OF STONE.
Now, at this point I'm having a lot of feelings about Jerome Robbins and I've already gotten a lot from the book, but, like, Solomon has gotten us to the point of the show getting on Broadway and I figured we'd talk a little bit about the movie and we'd be done?
We were not done. The chapters about the follow-up productions about Fiddler are in some ways harder-hitting than the section on the creation of the musical itself. Solomon starts with the first Israeli production, in a macho 1960s Israel that had for years been attempting to distance itself from the idea of the sad little weak victimized Jew of the shtetl and the Holocaust. From there, she jumps (in what is maybe her most hard-hitting chapter) to 1968 and a highly publicized high school production -- highly publicized, because it was performed by black and Puerto Rican students at a Brownsville school, in the middle of the ugly and incendiary 1968 Brownsville teacher's strike that was being framed by everyone involved as "blacks vs. Jews!" And after that (with a brief stopover to talk about the movie) she moves to a recent production in Poland, performed in a village that -- before the Holocaust -- was 50% Jewish.
Solomon is neither sentimental nor nostalgic about Fiddler. She's writing about the ways that this particular image of Jewish identity has been retold, recreated and reformed for various audiences and various moments, and she does so clearly and critically. Academically, historically, it's all fascinating. I think it would be fascinating for anyone. But it's about my culture, and in a very real way it's about me, so, you know, there's a lot that I wasn't reading academically.
I certainly don't agree with Solomon all the time, especially at the very end, when she makes some sweeping statements about contemporary Jewishness that are maybe true for New York Jews but I think are A STRETCH AT MINIMUM to apply to Jews in America overall. That doesn't mean I don't think she's brilliant, because I do; and it doesn't mean I'm not also a little upset to have been ambushed by all these feelings about my identity as an American Jew and all of the history that's gone into making me the kind of Jew I am right now, because that is definitely also true.
This endless winter, I read Alisa Solomon's Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, a NONFICTION BOOK ABOUT THE PRODUCTION OF A BROADWAY MUSICAL, which I figured should be pretty safe, right? NO, ACTUALLY. IN FACT, it turned out to be the most unexpectedly emotionally affecting thing of all? OK. THANKS, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.
OK, actually, though, when I say that Wonder of Wonders is about Fiddler on the Roof, that is true; it is about Fiddler on the the Roof, which means that it's about the history of what it means to be Jewish in America -- and also what it means to be Jewish in places that aren't America -- and also what it means to see representations of Jewishness in places that used to have Jews, but don't anymore -- and what it means for someone to see themselves in a story, for someone to use a story to rediscover pieces of themselves they've lost, or didn't know they'd ever had -- and then, conversely, what it means when a single story comes to be identified so strongly with a certain piece of history that people forget that it's a story, and not the truth; that the "Bottle Dance" is actually Jerome Robbins choreography; that "Sabbath Prayer" is a Broadway song, and not an actual prayer.
Alisa Solomon starts, as you would expect, with Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish theater (old friends to me by now!), and then moves to the 1960s and the collection of extremely assimilated second-generation Jewish dudes, who somehow came to the decision to transform a bunch of Yiddish-language stories into a mainstream Broadway musical because they thought it would be kind of cool, and then found themselves forced to terms with a heritage they had either wandered away from or actively shoved away.
I was expecting the stories of wacky Broadway hijinks, of obsessive directors and grueling rehearsals and conflict between blacklisted Zero Mostel and friendly HUAC witness Jerome Robbins. All of which I got! Along with extremely solid critical analysis of the ways that the show transformed Judaism into something friendly and digestible for American (and American Jewish) audiences, something that "handed over a legacy that could be fondly claimed without exacting any demands." (Do I feel like I resemble some of those remarks? YEP, SOMETIMES.)
I wasn't actually expecting the stories like the one about how at the end of the show, the book-writer gave the lyricist a mezuzah -- the first one that he ever owned. Stories like the ones about Jerome Robbins -- Mr. "I didn't want to be like my father, the Jew, or any of his friends, those Jews;" Mr. "Wash yourself clean of it -- bathe & scrub; change your clothes, cut your hair, alter your walk, your talk, your handwriting, recast your future, remold your life, your friends, your taste ... leave behind forever the Jew part" -- Jerome Robbins, who dedicated the show to his immigrant father. Jerome Robbins whose father came backstage after the opening night, asked 'How did you know all that?' and "threw his arms around his son and wept."
I'M SORRY, OK, I'M NOT MADE OF STONE.
Now, at this point I'm having a lot of feelings about Jerome Robbins and I've already gotten a lot from the book, but, like, Solomon has gotten us to the point of the show getting on Broadway and I figured we'd talk a little bit about the movie and we'd be done?
We were not done. The chapters about the follow-up productions about Fiddler are in some ways harder-hitting than the section on the creation of the musical itself. Solomon starts with the first Israeli production, in a macho 1960s Israel that had for years been attempting to distance itself from the idea of the sad little weak victimized Jew of the shtetl and the Holocaust. From there, she jumps (in what is maybe her most hard-hitting chapter) to 1968 and a highly publicized high school production -- highly publicized, because it was performed by black and Puerto Rican students at a Brownsville school, in the middle of the ugly and incendiary 1968 Brownsville teacher's strike that was being framed by everyone involved as "blacks vs. Jews!" And after that (with a brief stopover to talk about the movie) she moves to a recent production in Poland, performed in a village that -- before the Holocaust -- was 50% Jewish.
Solomon is neither sentimental nor nostalgic about Fiddler. She's writing about the ways that this particular image of Jewish identity has been retold, recreated and reformed for various audiences and various moments, and she does so clearly and critically. Academically, historically, it's all fascinating. I think it would be fascinating for anyone. But it's about my culture, and in a very real way it's about me, so, you know, there's a lot that I wasn't reading academically.
I certainly don't agree with Solomon all the time, especially at the very end, when she makes some sweeping statements about contemporary Jewishness that are maybe true for New York Jews but I think are A STRETCH AT MINIMUM to apply to Jews in America overall. That doesn't mean I don't think she's brilliant, because I do; and it doesn't mean I'm not also a little upset to have been ambushed by all these feelings about my identity as an American Jew and all of the history that's gone into making me the kind of Jew I am right now, because that is definitely also true.
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Date: 2015-03-21 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-21 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-21 11:34 pm (UTC)SOB
This is like one of my parents' FAVOURITE musicals (other favourite musicals of theirs: Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, you get the picture), and so I saw it like ninety times growing up and now whenever I hear even just a few notes of "Sunrise Sunset" I scream and flee. But you make me want to read the book! It sounds fantastic.
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Date: 2015-03-21 11:40 pm (UTC)I watched Fiddler a couple times growing up -- we saw it in music class (in my 50% Jewish elementary school, of course) and I remember watching it at my aunt's house, so, like, I knew it, large bits of it were tucked away in the back of my brain somewhere -- but I never reached the point of getting sick of it. I did have this memory of it as fairly Rogers-and-Hammerstein schmaltzy, though, which is why I was so surprised when I rewatched it and had ALL THESE FEELINGS. I thought I was protected against schmaltz! And then it turns out there are certain kinds of schmaltz against which I have NO defense.
...that said, the benefit of reading a book is that there is no need to hear even a few notes of "Sunrise Sunset!" :D
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Date: 2015-03-22 12:30 am (UTC)I think that got played at EVERY SINGLE ONE of my stepsisters' weddings....which between them now number four. No, five.
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Date: 2015-03-22 12:41 am (UTC)(And yet, do I now want to go listen to Yidcore's Fiddlin' On Ya Roof, Fiddler on the Roof Goes Latin, and Klezmer Fiddler on the Roof featuring the Magnetic Fields? MAYBE, KIND OF, YES.)
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Date: 2015-03-21 11:55 pm (UTC)(For the record -- though this is pretty irrelevant to the content -- the book is also dedicated to Alisa Solomon's female partner. :D)
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Date: 2015-03-22 07:24 pm (UTC)The movie "Camp" (with bb!Anna Farris knocking "Ladies Who Lunch" out of the park) has a summer-camp production with a teeny black kid in full Hasidic dress.
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Date: 2015-03-23 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-24 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-23 12:47 am (UTC)... Admittedly I've been pretty avoidant of "Jewish" narratives since around 2008 though and I'm not really sure how it'd make me feel at this point.
This sounds like an interesting book, though!
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Date: 2015-03-24 10:47 pm (UTC)Heh, I feel like it's the opposite for me; I never really looked at all for Jewish narratives when I was a kid, and now I go through periodic phases of rolling around in them.
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Date: 2015-03-24 01:36 pm (UTC)(I, uh, have never actually seen Fiddler. I've heard several of the songs in isolation, of course, and even sung something -- I think a medley, of the usual Adapted For SATB High School Choir sort? -- in high school choir in Cincinnati, in my school that was heavily enough Jewish that we had the High Holy Days off school, but I've never actually seen the musical.)
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Date: 2015-03-24 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-24 10:54 pm (UTC)Edit: which is to say that I am not in the least averse to watching it, except for a certain reflexive BUT WHAT IF I DON'T LIKE IT THOUGH wariness about watching a canon I have no idea of my opinions about along with someone who has MASSIVE FEELINGS about it. *laughing* Weigh that risk as you will!)
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Date: 2015-03-26 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 10:32 pm (UTC)Apparently the guy who did the Brownsville production has a memoir about it, which is available on restricted at the BPL and which I may make a field trip to go read ...