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

vulgar comedian who pandered to the uneducated plebs”). To further the cause, he edited what he hoped would be a yearly anthology, modeled on Russian literary annuals and their Hebrew imitators, highlighting the finer Yiddish writers. The first edition of Di yidishe folks-bibliotek: a bukh fir literatur, kritik un vissenshaft ( A Jewish Popular Library: A Book of Literature, Criticism, and Scholarship ), published in 1888, ran some six hundred pages and included works by Mendele Mocher-Sforim and I. L. Peretz (the literary giant’s first publication in Yiddish); it also featured Sholem-Aleichem’s own novella Stempenyu . (When he lost his enormous inheritance in the stock market in 1890, abandoning volume 3 was the least of his worries; he had to flee Kiev for two years to escape his creditors.) In that same period, he wrote a pamphlet attacking the leading proponent of shund , Nokhum Meyer Sheikevitch, who cranked out preposterously plotted romances under the name Shomer. Five years before George Bernard Shaw famously coined the term “Sardoodledom” to ridicule the vacuous star vehicles scribbled by the French playwright Victorien Sardou, Sholem-Aleichem delivered a similar verdict against Yiddish prose potboilers in his essay “ Shomers mishpet ” (“Shomer’s Trial”). Stempenyu was meant to demonstrate how real Yiddish books should be written. In case the example of the novella wasn’t enough of a clue, Sholem-Aleichem included a pompous preface written in the form of a letter to Mendele Mocher-Sforim, whom he greatly admired.
    Addressing Mendele as the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Sholem-Aleichem explained that what distinguished a Jewish novel was its expression of the national characteristics of Jews, which differed from those of other people and, in fact, could not be conveyed in a standard romance. In a Jewish novel, the thwarted lovers had to put their values above their happiness, or, rather, find their happiness in the fulfillment of their values. As in Jewish life, he argued, in a Jewish novel duty should prevail—and pay off. Rokhele does fall in love with Stempenyu—his sublime fiddle playing transports her, his mystifying musician’s slang excites her (Sholem-Aleichem included a glossary), and he is gorgeous and solicitous, to boot. She sneaks away from home, heart aflutter, to meet him for walks and conversations. In the end, however, she not only stays faithful to her husband but awakens his devotion and lives happily ever after. Stempenyu gets his just deserts: he is left pining for Rokhele in his miserable marriage.
    When he thought of adapting Stempenyu for the Yiddish stage some half a dozen years after its publication, Sholem-Aleichem expected it to offer the same chastening lessons to the theater that it had tendered to Yiddish fiction. Besides, the main characters seemed made to order for a dashing male actor and a pretty ingenue. And music was absolutely essential to the plot, so songs wouldn’t have to be interspersed at random, as was so common on the Yiddish stage; they could be fully integrated in an artistic way.
    Thus, with great self-assurance, in that fall of 1905, he sent the script from Kiev to an acquaintance in New York, a physician and anthropologist named Morris Fishberg, who had offered to represent him when they’d met in Warsaw some six months earlier at the rapturously received premiere of Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt . He asked Fishberg to bring this surefire hit to America’s two leading actor-managers of the Yiddish theater, the grand and graceful impresario Jacob P. Adler and the heartthrob of the ghetto Boris Thomashefsky. Having received no reply after a few weeks and ever more eager for a cash advance, Sholem-Aleichem followed up with a second letter on October 8. He reminded Fishberg that he should already have received Stempenyu, or the Jewish Paganini , and told him that a second script was on its way. He added a portentous postscript. Admitting he