Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (52 page)

A
Fiddler on the Roof
sing-along: projecting the desire for a usable past.

Some ninety minutes into the occasion, the high spirits deflated. How could it be otherwise after the pogrom in Act 1 and the bleaker and bleaker mood as Chava becomes dead to Tevye and Hodel departs for Siberia? Once the Anatevkans receive their expulsion edict and they pack up against a gray, desolate landscape in the pitiful scene the sing-along became dead to participants. The mirthful energy cannot be sustained in the face of such darkness.

But up until that point, participants frequently left their seats to ham it up in front of the larger-than-life images of Tevye and his family, often standing in the path of the projector’s flickering light stream so that their own shadows danced into Anatevka. The metaphor was hard to miss:
Fiddler
continues to provide American Jews a screen onto which to project their desire for a usable past.

Outside America, and in places with few Jews,
Fiddler
has served as a screen, too, for making visible the shadows of history. Nowhere did this happen as powerfully as in Poland.

CHAPTER
9

S
KRZYPEK NA
D
ACHU
: P
OLAND

T
he train was due at 8:00 p.m.
T
he crowd waiting for it at the station listened for the clatter of wheels on the old, narrow-gauge tracks as it approached, trundling through the San River valley. Soon they could make out the lively beat of a
freylekhs
, a catchy dance tune, being played by a klezmer band in an open boxcar. And quickly, like the couple dozen passengers on the train, they started to clap along. Next stop: Anatevka.

Or so their town had become, it seemed, to residents of Dynów, Poland, who had assembled at the long-abandoned station one July night in 2006 for an open-air performance of
Fiddler on the Roof
. The show would start when the train pulled in with the band playing. The director, Magdalena Miklasz, wanted the spectators to feel like villagers greeting the musicians’ arrival. She wanted them to blend in with the world of the play. The old train station was the perfect locale for creating such a mood, she and the designer, Ewa Woźniak, had decided. The station house with its weathered wooden planks would serve beautifully as the inn where Tevye and Lazar Wolf drink
l’chaim
. A rustic old shed would be Tevye’s home. The pines and lindens framing the playing space between the buildings, and the terraced fields beyond, would evoke the landscape Tevye traverses with his milk wagon every day. Never mind the wide sight lines. With the audience seated on the tracks and atop old train cars, and the actors playing on the scrubby ground, the layout was ideal. Everything would feel so close, so immediate, so
real
. The traditional barrier between actor and spectator would dissolve, just as Miklasz wanted, and the people of Dynów would imagine that they were living alongside Tevye and his family.

Once upon a time, they had. At least figuratively, as Miklasz saw it. Before the Holocaust, which snuffed out three million—90 percent—of Poland’s Jews, half of Dynów’s population was Jewish. Bakers, barbers, tailors, shoemakers, city council members, orchestra players, sports club competitors, recipe-swapping and kid-minding neighbors—Jews were woven fully into the fabric of life in the town, whose residents numbered about 3,700 on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Born in 1983 and 1984, respectively, Miklasz and Woźniak are barely old enough to remember Poland’s Communist times, much less the period before the Second World War when Catholic Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived together in inescapable if uneasy propinquity. Yet they wanted to present
Fiddler
as a way of recalling Dynów’s multicultural past—and as a way of looking toward Poland’s European future.

Miklasz’s great-grandparents had lived in Dynów since before the war in a squat stone house about a mile from the town square. As a young girl growing up in Kraków, Miklasz spent her summers in the town, visiting her great-grandmother. Here, in the countryside, she could pick cherries right from a tree behind the house, sing by the campfires they built in the rambling backyard, swim in the San. Sometimes she crawled into the dank concrete root cellar and tried to imagine what it had been like for her great-grandmother’s Jewish neighbors, the Koch family, who hid there in September 1939 while Nazi soldiers scoured Dynów of its Jews.

How could it have happened? Miklasz wondered. And who
were
these Jews who once made up such a large portion of her country but had been decimated long before she could have encountered them directly? Could they really have left no traces in Dynów? What could that history mean for her generation now? Miklasz and Woźniak wanted to find out, and as young theater artists—especially in Poland, where theater traditionally has played a significant role in progressive movements—their best means of exploration was to make a play.

In the Bialystok Puppet Division of the National Theater School of Poland, where Miklasz and Woźniak met in 2004, they worked on a production of
Memorial Prayer
, an adaptation of Sholem-Aleichem’s Tevye stories with some bits of
Fiddler
woven in, written by the Russian playwright Grigory Gorin in 1989. More rustic and sardonic than the Broadway musical, Gorin’s play draws from the same four Tevye stories—“Modern Children,” “Hodl,” “Khave,” and “Get Thee Out”—but adds Menachem Mendel as the matchmaker. Gorin’s Tevye was the crowning role for Russia’s great comic actor Yevgeny Leonov until his death in 1994, hours before he was to go onstage in the part. Reading the play, Miklasz couldn’t believe how familiar the characters seemed. Golde was just like her great-grandmother, she marveled. The beleaguered sense of humor, the folksy aphorisms, the affectionate, jokey antagonism between husbands and wives—it all echoed her girlhood summers in Dynów. Surely this communal temperament was more regional than ethnic. After all, Sholem-Aleichem’s imagined Anatevka lay just across the San, which came to mark the boundary between Poland and Ukraine only through the Hitler-Stalin pact. While the national borders slicing up Galicia could mean the difference between life and death for Jews escaping into Soviet territory during the Nazi occupation of Poland, in cultural terms the frontier was arbitrary, meaningless—and not only among Jews.

Miklasz knew that Dynów was part of Galicia, once the most diverse region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its multilingual mix of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Roma, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and others. On day trips to nearby Przemysl, a larger town some thirty miles straight east across a narrow, farm-lined road through the San River basin, she and Woźniak noticed how an Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, and the remains of a synagogue (now a library) stood within a stone’s throw of one another. What clearer sign could there be that different peoples mingled in the public square—and, at least in some instances, beyond? They didn’t have to squint hard to envision Tevye pulling his wagon along this lush valley, conjure the Jewish homes where everything came to a tranquil halt for the Sabbath, and see how easily Chava and Fyedka could meet and fall in love.

In the first two summers that Miklasz put on shows in Dynów, the troupe—incorporating under the town-echoing name De-Novo—presented
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Puss in Boots
: ambitious and enjoyable projects that gave the locals as much to gloat about as did their pristine views of the Carpathian foothills. The mayor, Zygmunt Frańczak, held high hopes for De-Novo’s helping to build tourism and thus to boost the depressed economy of the town, where unemployment climbed to 12 percent in 2008. “If people know where Dynów is, it’s because of these performances,” said Mayor Frańczak, who granted 2,000 zlotys (about $550) to the company despite his meager municipal coffers. While the town gets some traffic from travelers on their way to the mountains, Dynów is an international destination only for small bands of Hasidic men who make an annual pilgrimage to the grave site of Rebbe Tzvi Elimelekh Shapiro (1783–1841) and his sons. The rebbe’s acolytes maintain a small tomb in Dynów’s otherwise long-neglected, weed-entangled Jewish cemetery and make a startling spectacle for local residents when they tread through town in their black cloaks and broad hats.

If the mayor saw De-Novo as an engine of economic development, Miklasz and Woźniak were driven by less measurable but perhaps loftier goals. By mixing professional actors, theater students, and local amateurs (adults as well as children), they wanted to hold up high aesthetic standards based on skill, serious preparation, and an uncompromising work ethic. The payoff was not only a solid production but a profound act of community building: everyone had a stake. The people of Dynów voluntarily fed the troupe during their three-week rehearsal period. The bakery doled out bread, local farmers contributed eggs and cheese for lunches, the nursing home served the company dinner five days a week. Parents of children in the production—De-Novo draws a number of them each year given the absence of any day camps or other summer programs—often showed up at the end of a workday with homemade cakes and sweets for everyone. The actors brought in from out of town slept in the public school.

In the 1930s, the area had been famous for its community orchestras, singing groups, and theater clubs, but all that was ground out by the upheaval of the war—and later by the arrival of a television in every home. Miklasz wanted to return that source of pleasure and accomplishment to Dynów. “In a small town like this where there’s not much money and not many opportunities, our work shows people how much they can achieve if they have an idea, believe in the idea, and work for it,” she said.

By the time she returned to theater school in the fall of 2005 and began thinking about the next summer’s project, Miklasz sensed the community was ready to dig deeper. The
Memorial Prayer
production still gripped her imagination. Meanwhile, she felt an unarticulated but palpable queasiness at the narrow nationalistic rhetoric unleashed in the Polish elections that fall, which brought to power the right-wing Law and Justice Party. Then her “crazy uncle Bogdan”—so regarded by the family because of his frequent off-color, vaguely antisemitic, and otherwise inappropriate quips—suggested that De-Novo put on
Fiddler on the Roof
because it was one of his favorite movies. If
Fiddler
could speak to her uncle, Miklasz thought, if it could touch a sensitive place even in him, then it could reach Dynów. All impulses pointed toward Tevye.

*   *   *

Miklasz and Woźniak had seen
Fiddler on the Roof
on TV as girls. The film is shown on the Polish state channel every now and then. But that was not always the case. Far from it. For all intents and purposes,
Fiddler
was banned in Poland until the years Miklasz and Woźniak were born, two decades after the play’s New York premiere.

From shortly after the end of World War II until the openings forced by the Solidarity movement some thirty-five years later, Poland suppressed public discussion and representation of Jewish themes (with the notable exception of the State Yiddish Theater, led by the internationally beloved actor Ida Kaminska). At precisely the moment
Fiddler
was setting out into the wide world of international productions—even to other Soviet satellites—Poland was ever more aggressively smothering what little breath of Jewish expression the country had left. As early as 1966, the legendary opera director Walter Felsenstein was making arrangements to bring the show to his Komische Oper in East Berlin. (Robbins was to have directed but he bowed out, leaving Felsenstein to direct it himself. The production finally went on in 1971, with just a few adjustments personally recommended by the Soviet ambassador: excising the words “pogrom,” “America,” and “Kiev” and any phrases referring to Jews being forced to leave their homes.) Czechoslovakia opened
Fiddler
in its capital with the first breezes of the Prague Spring in February 1968. By the time the show went up in the western city of Pilsen eighteen months later, the movement had been crushed and its democratic reforms reversed; audiences booed the Russians who burst violently into the wedding scene at the end of the first act as if they were Soviet occupiers.

But there could be no
Fiddler on the Roof
, no
Skrzypek na Dachu
, while Poland was cracking down on its small remnant of Jews. Following the Six-Day War in the summer of 1967, a battle for control within Poland’s Communist Party expressed itself in virulent anti-Israel rhetoric that cast the country’s 40,000 Jews—in the infamous words of Prime Minister Władysław Gomułka—as a potential “fifth column.” The vast majority of these Jews were highly assimilated and regarded themselves as thoroughly Polish, many of them properly anti-Zionist Party faithful. Nonetheless, they found themselves suddenly suspect. Eight months later, when student protests erupted in Warsaw (triggered by the authorities censoring a play) and then spread through the country, the Party blamed the Jews. Right away, Jews were purged from government, academic, and other posts and from the country itself. Some 20,000 were forced to emigrate. When they departed Poland—most for Scandinavia and Europe, not many for Israel—they were required to denounce their Polish citizenship. Ida Kaminska and most of her troupe were among them. Only a few months before their departure, her husband, the theater’s manager, had written to Joe Stein expressing interest in presenting
Fiddler
at the State Yiddish Theater. Some of the troupe had seen the Broadway production when they toured the United States in the fall of 1967 with
Mother Courage
and
Mirele Efros
, Yankev Gordin’s “Jewish Queen Lear.” Now Kaminska was leaving Poland for good, settling in New York with grand—and, it turned out, vain—hopes of opening a Yiddish theater there.