Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon Read Free Book Online

downtown were cheering for a different vision of Americanization: one that did not cost their distinctiveness.
    Despite the record ticket sales—the Forverts estimated that some 55,000 people saw Dos pintele yid —the show could not pull Thomashefsky’s theater out of the red. As for Adler, with no similar extravaganza to offer he didn’t have a chance of surviving the 1909 season. That fall, he infamously sold his lease for the Grand Theater to the budding movie moguls Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. (Thomashefsky and Kessler participated behind the scenes, each paying Adler $5,000 to abandon New York for the year and ease up the competition.)
    Back in Europe, Sholem-Aleichem remained thoroughly ignorant of the economic distress of New York’s Yiddish theater, and almost as ignorant of the mind-set of its audience. But for a time, at least, he could stop chasing after Adler and Thomashefsky. If he still dreamed of conquering the American stage, his survival no longer depended on it: a Russian-language edition of his works, as well as a settlement on proper royalties for his Yiddish publications (secured by Olga), finally provided a comfortable income. For the next several years, Sholem-Aleichem and his family moved according to the climate best for his health: winters on the northwest coast of Italy, springs on a Swiss lake, summers in the Black Forest resorts of Germany. While Adler and Thomashefsky were scrambling in New York, Sholem-Aleichem, despite weakness from the TB and other ailments, was entering one of the most productive periods of his writing life.
    In addition to work on Wandering Stars , 1909–10 saw the publication of his Railroad Stories , a series of twenty dark monologues—tales told to a traveling salesman (who in turn tells them to the reader) by a wide range of Jews riding in a third-class train car as it trundles through Russia. Both contained by the train’s compartment and set loose into the modern world by its speed and reach, the passengers occupy a spate of contradictions: a father with a gravely ill son is the happiest in his town because he persuades a renowned medical professor to examine the child; a husband goes along with his wife’s strenuous efforts to get their son into a Russian high school only to see the son join a student strike; a pimp from Argentina makes a rare trip back to his shtetl to grab himself, so he claims, a “hometown girl” for a wife.
    A chief accomplishment of this period was the completion of the Tevye cycle—though Sholem-Aleichem added a new ending later—with the seventh story, “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel” (1909). The daughter at the center this time, Beylke, attaches herself to a man her father approves. Golde, his wife, has died, sending Tevye into a fit of nihilism—“What’s the point of the whole circus, this whole big yackety racket of a world on wheels? Why, it’s nothing but vanity, one big zero with a hole in it!” Hoping to prevent further troubles for her father, Beylke weds the nouveau riche boor suggested by the local matchmaker, even though Tevye sees she cannot bear him. The new son-in-law schemes to send the embarrassingly low-class Tevye away, if not to America (which does not interest Tevye), then to Palestine, “where all the old Jews like you go to die.” The story ends with Tevye recognizing his part in obedient Beylke’s unhappiness—“To tell you the truth, when I think the matter over, the real guilty party may be me”—and selling off his belongings, even his horse, as he prepares to leave for the Land of Israel. Two years later, in 1911, Sholem-Aleichem published the entire series of stories, written over seventeen tumultuous years, in a single volume, Tevye der milkhiker . It seemed he was shutting the book on his voluble hero, as if, remarkably, there were nothing more he could say, as if just when Tevye stood on the brink of “going up” (the literal translation of the verb for moving to the Land of