‘Fiddler’: A little schmaltz as a tonic for grief in spite of the tragic tones lurking in the background

Tevye: A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask ‘Why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous?’ Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition! (Fiddler on the Roof, IMDb)

Roger Ebert didn’t think much of Fiddler on the Roof, which I finally got around to watching this week. When the movie came out in 1971, his review in the Chicago Sun-Times was a classic example of damnation with faint praise. “I suppose ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is just the movie that lovers of the stage play were waiting for,” he wrote, “and since Fiddler is the most popular stage musical in history, that’s something, all right.” To that, as if it weren’t clear enough, he added:

But would it be heresy on my part to suggest that “Fiddler” isn’t much as a musical, and that director Norman Jewison has made as good a film as can be made from a story that is quite simply boring?

Ebert didn’t use the “S-word,” but it’s clear enough he thought the movie was schmaltz. I can’t disagree. But if it’s schmaltz, it’s good schmaltz. I’m reminded the word comes from the the Yiddish term for a type of rendered chicken fat, and (if I’m not straining too hard for a bad pun), chicken soup is good for you.

Sometimes you just need a little schmaltz.

Looking back, it seems like I’ve been in mourning one way or another since the night of Nov. 5, when Georgia and North Carolina were called for President-elect Trump. Like so many who fear for the future of our country, I felt a profound sense of grief, not only for what might have been — but also for my sense of who we are as Americans.

It wasn’t just the election. For years now, I’ve been grieving on so many levels, from the ongoing global crisis of confidence in small-d democratic government, and the tragedies in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine; to the mundane but deeply personal. To top it off, my parish church community, where I might ordinarily turn for comfort, is rocked now by a bitter personality conflict; my instinct, under the circumstances, is to want to be conciliatory and helpful rather than to seek help.

And then, at the deepest and most personal level, Champie (aka Champaign, aka “Hissy-Britches”), our 18-year-old cat who saw Debi and me through often difficult times in all of our lives, died over the weekend.

Debi posted a lovely tribute to the little guy titled a “A prayer of thanksgiving for a beloved little friend.” (You can read it HERE. While you’re there, take a look around. She calls her blog Seriously Seeking Answers, and it’s a “spiritual journey in which I explore religion, personal choices and the meaning of life with fellow travelers. Plus a few recipes.”) One comment sang to me: “I am so sorry. What a wonderful story of love and redemption, though!”

And that’s when I thought of Fiddler.

Somehow I missed it when it first came out. I was in grad school then, and more into books than movies (for one thing, they were cheaper). But I knew it was one of the all-time great musicals. Based on a series of short stories by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, it’s a romantic comedy about a milkman named Tevye in Tsarist Russia (now Ukraine) and his three marriageable daughters. And a celebration of Jewish life before the Russian pogroms of 1905. Tradition! Tradition!

So when Debi suggested the other night we find a movie on the internet, I thought of Fiddler. A story of love. Check! And redemption. Check. What happened to the shtetls, the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe before they were changed by modernity and wiped out by the Holocaust, is tragic. But the Jewish immigrants who fled to the US from Poland and the old Russian Empire gave rise to a flowering of American literature, not to mention comedy and music, from Gershwin to Leonard Cohen, a flowering of all the arts. So, yeah, I’m going to count an iconic Broadway play and movie as a story of redemption, too. Check!

It’s clearly a romcom, with a story line in which unlikely young lovers get together and prevail against their elders, a cliche that’s been delighting audiences literally for millennia. I especially liked this exchange between a young revolutionary suitor named Perchik and Hodel, Tevye’s second daughter:

Perchik: There’s a question… A certain question I want to discuss with you.
Hodel: Yes?
Perchik: It’s a political question.
Hodel: What is it?
Perchik: The question of… marriage.
Hodel: Is this a political question?
Perchik: Well, yes. Yes, everything’s political. Like everything else, the relationship between a man and a woman has a socioeconomic base. Marriage must be founded on mutual beliefs. A common attitude and philosophy towards society…
Hodel: – And affection?
Perchik: Well, yes, of course. That is also necessary. Such a relationship can have positive social values. When two people face the world with unity and solidarity…
Hodel: And affection?
Perchik: Yes, that is an important element! At any rate, I… I personally am in favour of such a socioeconomic relationship.
Hodel: I think… you are asking me to marry you.
Perchik: Well… in a theoretical sense… yes. I am.
Hodel: I was hoping you were.

Don’t ask why this political junkie identifies with Perchik! Full disclosure: Rather than transcribing from the video, I’m lifting quotes from IMDb. And a spoiler alert: Perchik will be arrested in at a demonstration against the Tsar in Kyiv and sent to Siberia, where Hodel will join him. The personal, the political and the often tragic history of 20th-century Eastern Europe mix, often uneasily, throughout the movie.

So, like so many of the best comedies, Fiddler is set against a tragic backdrop. It’s also what I would consider an elegy, looking back on the destruction of traditional shtetl life in Eastern Europe. I think Joel Samberg’s review, reprinted on the My Jewish Learning website, catches the tone and message of the movie so well, it’s worth quoting at length:

The townsfolk of Anatevka, a Russian shtetl, or poor, tiny village, try to “scratch out a simple little tune without breaking their necks.” Tevye’s horse, though, breaks its leg, his daughters begin to break tradi­tion –and his wife, Golde, would like to break his neck when he gives in to his daugh­ters’ marital whims.

But Tevye is not a broken man–a poor man, yes, but not a broken one. He has faith in his faith, and everything he does, includ­ing the songs he sings, speaks to that faith. He dreams of being a rich man so that he would have more time to sit in the synagogue and pray. He talks and even argues with God, coming to some very special re­alizations along the way. When his eldest daughter, Tzeitel, and her beau, Motel the tailor, tell him that they have given each other a pledge to marry without using a matchmaker, Tevye suddenly realizes that they are indeed using a matchmaker–the same one used by Adam and Eve–and he takes comfort in that.

But that doesn’t mean Tevye’s religion isn’t good for a laugh line, as in this exchange with Mendel, son of the rabbi in Anitevka:

Tevye: As Abraham said, “I am a stranger in a strange land… “
Mendel: [the rabbi’s son] Moses said that.
Tevye: Ah. Well, as King David said, “I am slow of speech, and slow of tongue.”
Mendel: That was also Moses.
Tevye: For a man who was slow of tongue, he talked a lot.

It’s like a vaudeville shtick! I found it endearing, but Roger Ebert isn’t entirely wrong when he says Fiddler is so polished, so packaged, so distanced” from life in the shtetl, “that it’s become just another pleasant product of American entertainment industrialism.” Ebert’s word picture of Tevye is quite different from that in My Jewish Learning:

Now, “Fiddler” begins with a hymn to tradition, and then the three daughters proceed to differ with tradition by marrying the wrong sort. Instead of waiting for the matchmaker to fix them a match, the first marries a poor tailor, the second marries a Marxist and the third, God forbid, marries a goy. We know this is going to take place a long time before it does; we meet all the boys early on, and somehow we catch on from all the close-ups of loving eyes that there’s no way these couples are going to be kept apart, tradition or no tradition. […] Each couple comes to the father. He is shocked, enraged. He walks off a distance and has a long talk with god about on the one hand yes and then on the other had no. The punch line is that he accepts the tailor and the Marxist but draws the line at the goy.

But there’s always that backdrop of tragedy, of loss and forced displacement. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Nakba, the forced dispossession of Palestinian Muslims and Christians when Israel was created in 1948. The wounds are deep, and common to so many.) One more bit of dialog that stands out to me: It comes when Tzeitel’s husband Motel the tailor rushes up to the rabbi as the villagers are getting ready to leave Anitevka (again I’m lifting the quote from IMDb):

Motel: Rabbi, we’ve been waiting all our lives for the Messiah. Wouldn’t now be a good time for Him to come?
Rabbi: We’ll have to wait for him someplace else. Meanwhile, let’s start packing.

But in the end, Fiddler is a comedy. I was an English major, and I’ve studied rom coms going back to Plautus, who was yucking it up with Roman audiences around 200 BCE. The kids always outwit their foolish elders, and young love always wins out. Certainly Tevye’s daughters and their young men do. But now that I’m an elder myself, I appreciate it that Tevye and his wife Golde also find love. In a memorable scene (which I’m also quoting at length from IMDb):

Tevye: [in song] Do you love me?
Golde: [speaking] I’m your wife!
Tevye: [speaking] I know!
[in song]
Tevye: But do you love me?
Golde: [singing] Do I love him? For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him. Twenty-five years, my bed is his…
Tevye: Shh!
Golde: [singing] If that’s not love, what is?
Tevye: [singing] Then you love me!
Golde: I suppose I do!
Tevye: Oh.
[sings]
Tevye: And I suppose I love you too.
Tevye, Golde: [singing] It doesn’t change a thing, but even so… After twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.

There’s some wisdom of the elders here, I think.

So, in the end, I was left with a question. Ebert thought Fiddler was expertly produced but boring. Philip Roth, the Jewish novelist, was even more dismissive — he said the Broadway play was shtetl kitsch. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker (quoted in Wikipedia) called it “an absolutely smashing movie; it is not especially sensitive, it is far from delicate, and it isn’t even particularly imaginative, but it seems to me the most powerful movie musical ever made.” So who’s right?

On the one hand, Fiddler is definitely schmaltzy. On the other, I mourned for Anitevka, no matter how kitschy, by movie’s end. On the other hand […] at this point I imagine Tevye breaking in and saying it’s all commentary. “Go and study,” he’d add, wrongly attributing the saying to Solomon or the Psalms of David instead of Hillel.

Go study. Already I’ve ordered a Penguin translation of Sholem Aleichem’s stories; along with Tevye’s daughters, includes stories in the voice of Motl the Cantor’s Son, who moved from Tsarist Russia to New York City. Who knows? The fictional Motl might have wound up near 63rd Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, where my father grew up.

In the meantime, Debi and I have noticed three half-grown feral kittens who seem to have taken up residence in the crawlspace beneath our sunporch. They look healthy, and we suspect they belong to someone and they’re working the neighborhood. But we’re leaving food out for them anyway.

Links and Citations

Wiliam Brangham, “New book examines how autocracies are getting stronger and trying to end democracy,” PBS News Hour, Aug. 1, 2024 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-book-examines-how-autocracies-are-getting-stronger-and-trying-to-end-democracy.

Shoshannah Brombacher, “On One Foot,” Jewish Stories, From the Midrash, Chabad https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/689306/jewish/On-One-Foot.htm.

Holly Taylor Coolman, “What happens now: Hope and resistance after the election,” America, Nov. 7, 2024 https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2024/11/07/hope-resistance-trump-election-249210.

Roger Ebert, “Fiddler on the Roof,” Jan. 1, 1971 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fiddler-on-the-roof-1971.

“Fiddler on the Roof,” IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067093/.

Andrew Roth, “If Trump wins the election, this is what’s at stake for US foreign policy,” The Guardian, Oct. 26, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/26/trump-presidency-foreign-policy-gaza-israel-ukraine.

Joel Samberg, “Fiddler on the Roof,” My Jewish Learning, 70 Faces Media, New York https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/fiddler-on-the-roof/.

Joellen Zollman, “What Were Shetls?,” My Jewish Learning, 70 Faces Media, New York https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shtetl-in-jewish-history-and-memory/.

[Uplinked Dec. 2, 2024]