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

in America. At least there was the good news of Beilis’s acquittal, which made Sholem-Aleichem break into “a hysterical shaking.” He sent Beilis a congratulatory gift: a set of his collected works.
    When Sholem-Aleichem returned to his family in Lausanne, Tevye was still tugging on his psyche. He went back to work on the dramatization, and he kept revising it when—unable to bear the cold winter—he moved on by himself to the Italian Riviera. He didn’t seem to worry that a change from the original genre would alter the way his protagonist frames his own experiences as stories—onstage, Tevye would speak directly to spectators instead of to the unseen yet mediating Sholem-Aleichem persona. Rather, he was thrilled with the outcome, as he told his wife in a letter the day he finished a completely new dramatic version, in four acts with seven scenes. In the last scene—the most touching, he told her—Tevye takes leave of his home, kissing the naked walls and bidding a sad farewell to the cat that is about to be abandoned.
    The story he put at the center was Khave’s—the daughter who marries a Ukrainian man and is mourned as though dead—but this time he gave it a happy ending: in the play, Khave leaves her husband and returns to the family fold when she hears that Jews are to be expelled from their homes. Sholem-Aleichem was responding directly to edicts that followed the Beilis affair (and, in an early draft of the play, he even had Khave’s husband believing the blood libel). Writing the play forced him to revisit the set of stories he thought he’d completed in 1911: if Tevye was going to be kicked out by czarist edict, he couldn’t already have left for the Land of Israel. So he opened the new story, “Lekh Lekho” (“Get Thee Out”), with Tevye telling the author, who must be surprised to see him still clamoring around the village, that just as he was getting ready to leave, his son-in-law Motl suddenly died and he had to stay behind to take care of his daughter Tzaytl and her children. That set up the plot possibility (which would prove crucial to Fiddler ) for the local officer to come and throw him out. And in the story, as in the play, Khave returns to accompany her father and sister into the wilderness.
    The title—recognizable to Sholem-Aleichem’s readers—hints ironically at some possibility of redemption: it quotes God’s words to Avram in Genesis, telling him to leave his home for a land where God would make of him a great nation. Tevye’s prospects may be more humble and uncertain. Nevertheless, he tells Tsaytl, “We ought to be counting our blessings. Even if we didn’t have a penny to our names, we’d still be better off than Mendel Beilis.”
    When Sholem-Aleichem first thought about dramatizing the Tevye stories, he knew that the role—“the crown of my creation,” as he called him—would require an extraordinary actor, one who could combine grandeur and humbleness, draw equal measures of tears (but not too sentimental) and laughter (but without ridicule). It would take an artist of great skill, sensitivity, and charisma. As the play progresses, he predicted, “the audience loves him all the more.” He’d thought originally of Rudolph Schildkraut, when the legendary actor was still in his heyday, but now he had that grand old shark Jacob Adler in mind. “Although a hard man to do business with,” Sholem-Aleichem admitted in a letter to a friend in New York whose help he was requesting, Adler was “truly an artist, and I realized that Tevye was made for him.”
    Even before he finished his script, Sholem-Aleichem drafted a letter—a mash note, really—to Adler. The address at the top of the page alone slathered on the flattery: to “the great artist and master of the Yiddish stage, Mr. Jacob P. Adler, New York.” It went on to insist, “only an artist like you is able of creating and revealing the soul of this character.” Sholem-Aleichem spared no praise for his