skygiants

Yuletide reveals!

It will probably not surprise many people to learn that I, a person with many swirling feelings about the Yiddish language and queer Judaism and complicated sibling relationships and problematic revolutions, wrote un mir zenen ale shvester, a Fiddler on the Roof fic for the 2018 Yiddish Folksbiene production. Way early in the Yuletide season, when sovay (with whom I saw the original production) asked if I'd happened to get this assignment, I joked that I could probably combine a bunch of reconditarmonia's fantastic prompts by writing lesbian Shprintze as a socialist journalist going back to Russia to write about the October Revolution and meeting her sisters there, but I wasn't going to do that because I absolutely didn't have time to go on the required Russian Revolution research dive before deadline .... well. Anyway. Here we are!

To Avoid Stagnation, The Romance Must Progress! is a pinch-hit I picked up for Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun. As soon as I saw the prompt asking about how Sakura and Nozaki-kun finally get together I realized I'd had a fairly clear idea about this in my head since I first watched the anime in 2014 or so. So I sat down and wrote this out more or less in one night ... and then realized my recipient was also almost entirely caught up on the manga, which I had never actually read, and zoomed through 100 chapters of scanlations in a panic on December 31st to make sure that none of it outright contradicted anything I'd written. A nice last-minute 11-volume boost to my 2020 reading list! Anyway this was extremely fun to write and gave me an outlet for all the screwball energy that wasn't going into un mir zenen ale shvester.

For the first time in a couple years, I also managed to post a Yuletide treat, that which is worth waiting for. Back when people were posting their letters, which also happened to be square in the middle of my Queen's Thief spiral, I'd also written a couple of bits and pieces of a Kamet/Costis fic with the vague intention of bulking them out into something much longer and more thoughtful as a treat for lirazel's prompt later in the Yuletide cycle .... as it turned out, that did not happen! What did happen is that three hours or so before Yuletide go-live, after finally completing all edits to my two assignment fics (and reading 100 chapters of Nozaki-kun), I looked at my bits and pieces once again and decided I probably had just enough time to write the connecting tissue that would pull them together into something coherent. (I did not, however, have enough time to come up with a good title.)

Thank you to genarti, saramily, gramarye1971, and Roommate M for all the extremely useful and reassuring beta reads, and to everyone who sniped me repeatedly by writing such INCREDIBLE gifts that I have barely had any opportunity to read anything else in the collection yet because I just keep going back to the things that were written for me instead!

In 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.