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

Israel), there was no lower point to which Sholem-Aleichem could bring him.
    But things got worse for the people Tevye had come to embody. In March 1911, as Sholem-Aleichem was publishing the complete Tevye cycle, a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy disappeared on his way to school in Kiev. When his mutilated body was found a week later, the local right-wing movement seized the misfortune to inflame opposition to liberals in the Duma who had considered abolishing the Pale—elections were coming up—by distributing leaflets at the boy’s funeral claiming he’d been slain by Jews who needed his blood to bake matza and calling for pogroms to avenge the death of the “martyr.” Though local police linked the murder to a criminal gang, the Kiev district attorney dismissed their findings and prosecuted the case as a ritual murder. In July, authorities arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, an unassuming clerk in a brick factory located near the scene of the crime. He languished in prison for two years as the case ground forward.
    When the trial finally came to pass in the fall of 1913, it riveted the worldwide press as well as Sholem-Aleichem, who eventually linked Beilis’s fate to Tevye’s. High-profile writers and intellectuals, Jewish and Gentile, spoke out against the obvious scapegoating. In New York and in other cities around the globe where Yiddish theater scraped by, a spate of Beilis plays rushed onto local stages, provoking denunciations of the theaters’ shameless exploitation of a national tragedy for commercial ends—in newspapers that did not fail to advertise the plays. In New York, even Jacob Adler threw a tsaytbild —or “picture of the times”—onto the boards. And soon so did Kessler and Thomashefsky.
    Sholem-Aleichem, too, could not help but respond to the trouble riling up the city where he once lived and cowered as pogromists rampaged through the streets. He wrote a novel called Der blutiger shpas ( The Bloody Hoax ), whose plot centers on a high-stakes prince-and-the-pauper reversal (perhaps influenced by his association with Mark Twain): as they graduate from high school, two friends, Hersh Rabinowitz and Grigori Popov, agree secretly to trade places for a year so Popov, a wealthy Gentile, can learn what life is like for the Jews in czarist Russia. Starting out as a standard comedy of inversion, the novel takes a bitter turn when Popov is accused of a blood libel. (Sholem-Aleichem adapted the novel into a play a few years later, giving it a more comic twist and a new title, Shver tzu zayn a yid—Hard to Be a Jew. )
    Sholem-Aleichem followed the Beilis case obsessively and as he pondered the deadly farce onstage in the Russian courtroom, Tevye marched back into his imagination. He pulled from his drawer a dramatic adaptation he had tinkered with some years earlier at the suggestion of a friend, and, predicting that the new medium of cinema would supplant the stage, and even literature, he wrote two screenplays based on his Tevye cycle. One, drawn from the first story, in which Tevye returns the lost ladies to their dacha, uses film’s unique capacity to show fantasy sequences—Tevye could imagine his passengers as witches with a dissolve; spectators could visually enter his dreams of becoming a miller, a store owner, even a banker doing business with Rothschild as he contemplated his reward. The adaptation of “Khave” relies on flashbacks—Tevye visibly recalling his daughter’s image as he bewails her shattering choice. (In this version, she drowns herself in a well at the end.)
    Visiting Berkowitz and his family in Berlin in the fall of 1913, Sholem-Aleichem tried to peddle these screenplays to local filmmakers, along with one adapted from The Bloody Hoax . But the directors passed on the material—they didn’t want to show Russia in a bad light at a time when German-Russian relations were strained—and, according to Berkowitz, his father-in-law stashed the scripts for better times, perhaps