Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Read Online Free PDF

Sholem-Aleichem himself slid up and down the streets to spend two acts in one theater and two acts in the other. In both, spectators called him to the stage for several lengthy ovations. “The audiences seemed happy to me,” he wrote to his family the next day. He noted that the partisan press could not be counted on, but as long as audiences were responding so enthusiastically, he added, the critics hardly mattered. He was half right: the press did, in fact, divide right down Yiddish New York’s ideological fault lines. And Sholem-Aleichem himself widened the rift—and then walked right over the cliff—by delivering a curtain speech during the intermission of Pasternak . Though not given to grandiloquence, the author got caught up in the opening-night excitement and seized his minutes in the spotlight to hold forth about the “new page in Yiddish theater” that his play was turning over. Implying that he himself was the theater’s redeemer, propelled onto the stage by “new winds blowing” that would blast away shund , he ranted not against cheap entertainments but against Yankev Gordin, dramatic hero of the progressive elite. The Forverts , and the left more generally, championed Gordin as a leader of a literary theater of ideas, a realist in the mode of such serious modern dramatists as Ibsen and Gorky. The Orthodox press reviled Gordin for the very reasons the left-wing press embraced him: his eagerness to show the dark sides of life—poverty, family discord, social pressure, moral failure (though he didn’t hesitate to crank out some potboilers under a pseudonym when he needed ready cash).
    In contrast, Sholem-Aleichem’s characters displayed foibles, not tragic flaws; their mishaps tore at the audience’s heartstrings, triggered laughter, or both; they didn’t offer an object lesson in the social questions of the day. In short, these characters were Jews as Sholem-Aleichem knew and loved them, not—like Gordin’s dramatis personae, in his opinion—generic people dressed up in beards or shaytls (the wigs worn by observant married women). In making the point from the stage at Adler’s Grand, Sholem-Aleichem unwittingly cemented his alliance with the Orthodox element of New York’s Jewish community, and they reinforced the bond with their unreserved praise for his comedy.
    In the Morgn zhurnal , for example, an unsigned review proclaimed that Pasternak heralded “a new epoch for Yiddish drama in America … full of authentic Yiddish humor.” Best of all, the critic asserted, “there was no dirt” in Sholem-Aleichem’s play, none of the “outrages that filled the Yiddish plays of the realist period.” The same day, the Tageblat review concurred that until Sholem-Aleichem came along there was “no true Yiddish theater before now. The dramas were not dramas, and the comedies were no comedies either. All the roles were stolen, false.” Worst of all, of course, was realism “with its dirt, its shame” and its “stifling” of Jewish life and humor on the stage. With the production of Sholem-Aleichem’s work, the paper declared with relief, “a new world opens for Jewish theatergoers.” (A second review in the Tageblat , a day later, focused on Stempenyu and condemned its third-act curtain falling, with heavy implication, on a bedroom scene. “This is simply scandalous,” the critic maintained. “Even the realists didn’t dare present such scenes. It’s an insult to everyone. Especially the women.”)
    The insult, from the point of view of the progressive papers, was Sholem-Aleichem’s curtain speech. In the Varhayt , the nicest thing Louis Miller could say about Stempenyu was that “whenever a flash of Sholem-Aleichem’s talent as a novelist sparkles, Sholem-Aleichem the dramatist snatches it away like a thief.” Regarding Pasternak , the reviewer reported that he “exercised the privilege of ordinary mortals” by leaving in the middle. He wondered how Sholem-Aleichem could have