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

“should have told you this before,” he noted that his work possessed no spectacular effects. “I will never permit myself to give in to American taste and lower the standards of art,” Sholem-Aleichem vowed.
    Then his world turned upside down. Reactionary resistance to Russia’s October Manifesto took the violent form of attacks on students, workers, and Jews. Some five hundred Jews were murdered by mobs in Odessa as police stood by. And in Kiev, Sholem-Aleichem and his family had to flee their apartment in a building most of whose occupants were Jewish—a likely target—and take shelter in the Imperial Hotel.
    From there, Sholem-Aleichem wrote to Fishberg “with trembling hands.” At first he took heart in seeing armed soldiers on the streets, who would surely help. “And they really did help,” he reported, “but not us. They helped loot, beat, plunder, steal. Before our eyes, before the whole world’s eyes, they helped smash windows, crash through doors, and break locks, and they lined their own pockets. In front of our children, they beat Jews to death—women and children—and shouted, ‘Money! Give us your money!’” He decided he should come immediately to America with his family to “sit out these evil times.”
    Two days later, still holed up in the Imperial Hotel, he wrote to Fishberg once more. “I send you the fifth act of Stempenyu ,” he said. “A new act instead of the earlier one.” In the rewrite, Sholem-Aleichem made a drastic change: he killed off his protagonist, even though, he told Fishberg, “a Jewish heroine seldom poisons herself on account of love.” But what choice did he have if he wanted to satisfy American tastes? From the confines of a hotel room in a city full of shattered glass, its streets strewn with a hundred dead bodies, the lofty standards of art seemed a lot less urgent than only three weeks before. “What can one do,” Sholem-Aleichem asked Fishberg, “when America commands?” It wouldn’t be the last time that the works of Sholem-Aleichem were adapted with an eye toward New York showbiz.
    Willing as Sholem-Aleichem was to “give in to American taste” after all, there wasn’t any follow-up from the impresarios in New York. Fishberg managed to secure a commission for him from the daily paper the Yidishes tageblat for a series of dispatches on the situation in Russia—some forty “pogrom letters” that ran between November 1905 and January 1906—but Fishberg sent not a word about the prospects for Sholem-Aleichem’s scripts.
    In this fraught period—the rhetorical pogrom letters reveal the author as bitter and traumatized—he wrote a fifth Tevye story, as if the hopeful hero’s confrontation with the harrowing world were now necessary, a compressed means of chronicling a foreboding new chapter in the history of the Jewish Pale. In “Khave,” published in the spring of 1906, Tevye is as chatty as ever, but the story of the apostate daughter who abandons her home, her faith, and her people to marry the Ukrainian, Fyedka, adds a new, almost overwhelming current of anguish. Sholem-Aleichem shows Tevye heartbroken, bewildered, and at loose ends; he follows the precepts of his faith but finds no solace in them. By story’s end, he wants to make himself disappear. He implores Sholem-Aleichem, “Don’t make a book out of this, and if it should happen that you do, write like it’s someone else, not me.”
    The Yidishes tageblat had promised Sholem-Aleichem $600 for the pogrom reports but turned over only $250, so Sholem-Aleichem embarked on yet another reading tour to make ends meet. The highlight of the trip was a stop in London in July 1906, not only because of the ardor of the fans who greeted him but also because he had a chance to see Jacob Adler onstage and even to meet “the king of the Yiddish actors,” as he put it, when Adler called on him “to pay his respects” and to ask whether Sholem-Aleichem “with his golden pen would write for