Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (53 page)

For more than a decade after the events of 1968, the subject of Jews was officially closed in Poland, though no pronouncements were necessary to enforce the ban. Theater artists simply understood that they ought not include
Fiddler on the Roof
on the roster of planned productions that they had to submit for state approval every season. Movie theaters didn’t book the film, either. By the late 1970s, it had been commercially screened in Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey, among many other countries. But not in Poland.

That didn’t stop the literary critic and translator Antoni Marianowicz from rendering the script and lyrics into Polish. A Jew who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the war years hiding in a glass factory, Marianowicz knew as well as anyone that “staging the play was entirely unthinkable.” But he became enthralled by the show when he saw a performance on a visit to New York in the mid-1960s and he prepared the text anyway—for when, he had no idea. It wasn’t just the taboo on Jewish subjects that stood in the way. Poland’s relationship with the United States had curdled so bitterly that pursuing a standard licensing contract was just as hard to conceive of as broaching the topic of exiled Jews. Marianowicz recalled a Polish propaganda campaign that blamed America for the sudden, mysterious death of the country’s chickens during this period and wondered: “How was I supposed to go about getting the rights to stage the play, when telephone calls were being controlled, negotiations with the poultry murderers bordered on treason, and contacting workers from the U.S. Embassy was considered spying?”

Around the same time, the highly successful Polish TV director Jerzy Gruza made a trip to New York and watched an interview with Zero Mostel on his hotel room TV. Gruza laughed so hard he worried that the people in the next room would complain. He didn’t have a chance to see Mostel onstage, but the televised bits from the show planted in him the desire to direct the musical someday. He knew exactly who should play Tevye in a Polish
Fiddler
: the Jewish actor Juliusz Berger, whom Gruza had seen in the 1950s as Perchik in Sholom-Aleichem’s
Tevye der milkhiker
at the Polish State Yiddish Theater. (The production toured to London in 1957 and again in the summer of 1964, just as
Fiddler
was on its way to Detroit.) Gruza filed the idea in the back of his mind.

Poles had a lot of practice in the Communist era at quietly filing away officially disavowed knowledge—most famously, the knowledge that Soviets had massacred Polish officers at Katyn in 1940, though the official version blamed the Nazis. In 1980, when the Solidarity movement triumphed in Gdańsk, the strikers met to assess their victory and discuss how to organize their new union. Top on their agenda was how to produce a new, truthful history. As Robert Darnton reported in a
New York Review of Books
essay at the time, “The hunger for history, ‘true history’ as opposed to the official version, stands out as clearly as the bread lines in Poland today.” The main newspaper in Kraków started a daily column called “Blank Spaces in the History of Poland.” The editor explained to Darnton that Poles needed to repossess their past in order—as the Solidarity slogan demanded—for Poland to be Poland. They needed to know what “actually happened.”

Coming to terms with what actually happened to Poland’s Jews—in the Holocaust as well as in 1968—was not the immediate concern of the Solidarity movement, which was heavily connected to the Church and its imagery. But Poles did start to look into Jewish history. A core of the few thousand Jews who remained in Poland started organizing so as to study their heritage—people like the mathematician and philosopher Stanisław Krajewski, whose parents were kicked out of the Party in 1968, while he was in college and active in the student movement. The expulsions had a strange effect: “they reminded us we were Jewish.” Krajewski and some colleagues created underground avenues for learning about what that abandoned identity might mean—a “flying university” of study groups, as well as projects to locate and mark traces of Jewish existence. Monika Krajewska, an artist (and Stanisław’s wife), began to document Jewish tombstones with photographs. In 1982, she published an album of the pictures, one of the first postwar Jewish books in Poland. Tentatively, Jewishness was moving out of the closet into public discourse.
Fiddler on the Roof
would become a major vehicle.

By the time Krajewska’s book was in the works, martial law was attempting to stamp out Solidarity and other opposition movements. But there was no way to put the lid back on popular discussion. On the contrary, Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime needed to persuade the West that it was not crushing democracy with its repressive actions but simply restoring order; one way to do so was by pointing to its easing of the old censorship measures. That’s why—both Marianowicz and Gruza surmised—
Fiddler
was approved for production while Poland was still under martial law.

But mounting a production of
Fiddler
would take more than a little sudden state leniency. For several years, Poland had lacked hard cash. The economy was in a chronic state of collapse and the weakness of the zloty proved as censorious as state power in restricting the musical repertoire. How could a Polish theater possibly afford America’s licensing fees? And even if the fees were waived, converting the royalties to dollars would have required mountains of money, and even if such money miraculously could have been found, the government would not allow any cash to leave the country.

Marianowicz came up with a plan. In the spring of 1981, he proposed it to Joe Stein. “As you probably know, we in Poland are now involved in a struggle against all forms of political and moral oppression,” he explained in a letter. “One of them is antisemitism, and one of the reasons it may still exist is a total ignorance of Jewish history and culture.”
Fiddler
would be an important political and artistic intervention, he argued, but the lack of Western currency made normal arrangements impossible. “This is the reason I allow myself to suggest a payment in Polish zlotys, with an appointment to Jewish philanthropic purposes—e.g. to a committee, raising funds for the reconstruction and renovation of famous Jewish cemeteries in Poland.”

The
Fiddler
team accepted the proposition—though Robbins would have preferred the proceeds to go to
living
Jews rather than to cemeteries—and Stein replied to Marianowicz two weeks later: “If our show can have some small effect in helping the Polish people in their struggle for political liberty and against antisemitism, we will be most gratified.”

Thus
Fiddler
entered the Polish repertoire as a document of Jewish history, bound up with the emerging project of commemoration. As in Jaffa and in Brooklyn, but in yet a different way,
Fiddler
in Poland would be more than just another show. In generating funds for the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries, the Broadway musical would stand in for the slaughtered generations unable to perform the ritual of
geyn af keyver oves
—visiting the ancestral graves. It would also stand in for the ancestors, offering the postwar generation its first contact with a Jewish world and, as Marianowicz observed, reminding older Poles of “the people who once lived in our land” but “after whom nothing remains, like Atlantis after the ocean swallowed it up.”

Marianowicz well knew that the swallowed Atlantis was more varied than the one
Fiddler
represented. He himself came from a highly assimilated bourgeois family in Warsaw, which had been a vibrant center of urban Jewish life for more than half a century. It’s where Sholem-Aleichem’s
Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt
met with success in the spring of 1905, sparking his dreams of the American theater. Soon after, when the czarist ban on Yiddish was lifted, it’s where “modern mass Jewish culture,” as the scholar Michael Steinlauf has written, “sprang into being virtually overnight.” That culture flourished through the interwar years as Jews (and Poles) became increasingly urbanized. On the eve of Hitler’s invasion, a majority of Poland’s Jews lived in cities. That still left more than a million residing in shtetls, but they were not the norm. Marianowicz could see how the musicalized mythic shtetl might serve as a point of entry for Polish audiences of the 1980s, gently inviting a peek into a distant past that was removed from more raw and recent trauma.

The first production opened at the Musical Theater of Łódź in May 1983. The theater’s artistic director had come to love the music after a student of his from America had brought the original cast album with her to Poland in the late 1970s. He was lucky that the local Party dignitary in charge of approving the repertoire had seen the show on a trip to New York and, as Marianowicz put it, “made it his point of honor to bring it to the Łódź stage.” By all accounts, this premiere was weak—badly sung, clumsily staged, barely coherent. But it did break the ice—deep, long-frozen ice. Such was the case, too, with Poland’s second production, eight months later, at the Grand Theater in Poznań, where the staging was stiffly operatic. Jerzy Gruza’s production in November 1984—the biggest hit the Musical Theater of Gdynia had ever seen—shook the state. The opening-night ovation lasted twenty minutes.

Gdynia is the sister city to Gdańsk in the northern port area of the country, and it shared in the role as epicenter of Solidarity activism. The tenacious spirit of resistance that charged the local air energized audiences, who received
Fiddler
and its brave new subject as a continuation of the democracy movement in a highly entertaining form. Gruza was an exuberant showman—“The social task of musical theater is to give entertainment to tired, overworked people,” he mischievously maintained—and he made extravagant use of the Communist-style arts subsidies his theater enjoyed, even in tight times. To this day, Gruza boasts of the sheer size and lavishness of the production: a hundred people in the company, another hundred in the orchestra.

Juliusz Berger, veteran of the Yiddish stage, did play the role of Tevye, with warmth and soft-edged stoicism. Gruza’s assistant director was Jan Szurmiej—the son of Golda Tencer and Szymon Szurmiej, members of the Yiddish theater who had taken over Ida Kaminska’s post. Gruza counted on Berger and Szurmiej to bring “authenticity” to the production by telling the cast about Jewish culture and customs. The subject, for all of them, was a vast blank.

Gruza watched spectators sobbing at the show night after night. “The production raised in them a strong sense of tolerance,” he concluded. His good friend Marianowicz couldn’t help but hear how “the final scenes of the musical, when the exiled Jews leave Anatevka, resounded in our country.” No one could say what happened to emotion spilled in the theater once the curtain came down. But whether roused or stunned or safely and briefly entertained, spectators encountered language and imagery that had been closed to them for decades.

Reviews raved about the heartwarming story and, more, about the grand spectacle of the staging—and the consequent sense that Poland was for the first time living up to the demands of a big Broadway musical. And most of the critics took the opportunity—assisted by materials provided by the theater—to tell readers who Sholem-Aleichem was. While they made no direct comments about Poland’s eliminated Jews, these articles were among the first in a long while in the Polish press to use the word “Jew” in anything other than accusatory mode.

The production was invited to play for four nights in Warsaw in a 1,500-seat house at the mammoth Palace of Culture and Sciences (where Jerry Robbins presented his Ballets: USA twenty-five years earlier). By far the city’s tallest building, it loomed on the skyline as a blunt reminder of Soviet domination. Not only did a Jewish story unfold on the stage at the very heart of Communist officialdom, but outside on the plaza a big, brash banner promoted the show. Sławomir Kitowski, Gruza’s “publicity director”—an unusual job title in Poland in the 1980s—had erected Poland’s first billboard: a striking twenty-foot by thirty-foot poster showing a hollow-eyed fiddler perched amid a dozen dark rooftops that receded into a red sky. As the humble Jew looked out over wide Marszałkowska Street toward a new horizon, down below on Parade Square emerging capitalists plied their trade on a site more typically used for state propaganda pageants: scalpers sold
Fiddler
tickets at hugely inflated prices, accepting American dollars only.

Poland’s first billboard advertises Gruza’s production on Parade Square.

Fiddler
was cemented in the national repertoire as the production toured as Poland’s representative to European festivals. Only Szymon Szurmiej at the State Yiddish Theater resisted its seductions. He detested its “falsification” of the great
folkshrayber
.

As the Communist regime tottered through the 1980s, new productions cropped up and pirated videotapes of the film circulated underground, screened at private parties of youngsters looking, with an extra spur of teenage dissidence, to American pop cultural forms. After Solidarity’s victory in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s collapse shortly thereafter, the lid that had been loosened earlier flew off entirely. Public programs, college courses, commemorative events, and journals by and about Jews proliferated, especially as money started pouring in from Israel and the United States.
Fiddler
was revived with an increasing sense of mission.