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

come from Russia untouched by either Tolstoy’s brooding play of seduction and murder, Power of Darkness , or Gogol’s piercing satire about political corruption, The Inspector General .
    In the Yidisher kempfer , Joel Entin called Pasternak “a stillborn monster, a broken piece of calamity that any wind could blow away.” In the balcony, where Sholem-Aleichem had heard spectators laughing their heads off, Entin heard a silence like that of “a hospital wing filled with chloroformed patients.”
    Within a couple of short weeks, both plays closed. And that, declared B. Goren in his 1917 history of the Yiddish theater, “brought to an end Sholem-Aleichem’s career as a playwright” in New York.
    Abe Cahan summed up the problem best in the Forverts . True, New York’s self-appointed Yiddish cultural czar didn’t care much for the work itself—“the figures have no more life than a clay golem whose forehead bears a sign: ‘miser’ or ‘scoundrel’ or ‘good contemporary daughter,’” Cahan wrote of Pasternak . But more significantly, he announced in his column that it was time for a new judgment of the Jewish folk writer: “Once Sholem-Aleichem played a great role in Yiddish literature, but now that we have talents like Sholem Asch [the modernist playwright and novelist some twenty years Sholem-Aleichem’s junior], his place is not as great or important.” As far as Cahan was concerned, Sholem-Aleichem belonged to a different world, a world across the sea, best left behind. And, from a theatrical standpoint at least, the public seemed to agree. Adler and Thomashefsky had miscalculated. The more they appealed to the idea of Sholem-Aleichem as culture hero of the homeland—and the more the progressive press hammered on the point as a drawback—the less marketable he was on their stages.
    The problem wasn’t the quality of the works so much as a clash between the function of the theater and the function of Sholem-Aleichem in that moment. It was one thing to enjoy his stories in the private sphere of the home or amid the gatherings of hometown organizations or even amateur dramatic clubs. But the boisterous commercial realm of the theater was a site for forging a new collective identity, a place where Jews constituted themselves as an American public—largely proletarian, urbanized, and concerned with the new and pressing demands of cultural adaptation. To the extent that the Yiddish theater in New York invited spectators to dwell nostalgically on the customs, characters, and convictions of life in Eastern Europe, it was held in taut tension with the promises (fulfilled or broken) and the exigencies of life in America. Both sides of that equation—the old life and the new—could be held up on the stage for ridicule or for affection, for wistfulness or wrath. The point isn’t that the Yiddish theater in New York always made fun of or rejected the past or that it always extolled the American present. But the here and there, the then and now existed in relationship to each other. Though World War I would disrupt the emotional nature of that balance, in 1907 the carefully constructed persona of the folkshrayber of the Pale could find no footing on the lower Bowery, where Jews were becoming a different kind of folk, a modern urban audience and American ethnic group. Some four months after his plays flopped, Sholem-Aleichem, along with Olga and Numa, made the return voyage to Europe. Friends lent him money for the fare.
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    Sholem-Aleichem returned to Geneva, overjoyed to reunite with his family but still uncertain of how he’d keep afloat. Some income trickled in from two Yiddish newspapers in America, where, before leaving, he had begun two serial novels, and he kept sending them installments: Motl peysi dem khazns ( Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son ), a bildungsroman told by a boy who moves from a shtetl to New York after his father dies, a masterpiece of comic irony, and Der mabl ( The Flood ),