A Kaddish For “Fidler Afn Dakh” on Faith, Family and Theater
Noah Golden
Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba.
On January 5, the Yiddish-language production of "Fiddler On The Roof" (translated as "Fidler Afn Dakh"), produced by The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine and directed by Joel Grey, will close Off-Broadway. The sleeper hit, which started at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in July 2018, transferred to the larger Stage 42 in February 2019. The run has been extended five times. It is perhaps not customary to say the Mourner's Kaddish for the closing of a musical, yet it feels appropriate. I've said the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, hundreds of times. I've recited it awkwardly in Sunday School classes, said it with a matzo ball-sized lump in my throat during the funeral of loved ones and passively at Yom Kippur services where I was more fixated on the upcoming break-fast than I was the list of recently passed congregants being read aloud. Although I don't speak Hebrew and can't understand a word I'm saying, I can recite the Kaddish as easily as the pledge of allegiance. What’s one more? A show like "Fidler Afn Dakh" deserves a Kaddish. It deserves one because so rarely does a revival actually do the act of reviving; because the 1964 musical, which at its core is about cultural displacement, tolerance and refugeehood, has never felt more relevant; because Yiddish is a beautiful, funny, expressive language you never get to hear spoken. But it's deeper than that.
You know that dream where you're in some foreign place – the summit of a snowy mountain, maybe, or a fancy corner office – and Kevin is there, although he doesn't look like Kevin, and so is your former camp counselor, except she's a bear who still kinda resembles your camp counselor? Despite all the artificiality, there's often a feeling of safety and familiarity in the landscape. You may be on a freezing summit or at a corporate meeting, but damn if it doesn't have the same layout as your childhood bedroom. Everything has that air of long-lost comfortability like suddenly smelling the perfume of a dead loved one. You are home. That's what "Fidler Afn Dakh" was like for me.
It was like seeing into a time machine. Not so many generations back, my family lived in Anatevka. The village had a different name and slightly different location, but my ancestors came from small shtetls in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine. Some died in pogroms, some were tortured, and some made it onto a boat that laboriously took them to the New Country so that I could sit in a plushy, air-conditioned Manhattan theater and watch a musical about their lives, performed in the same language they spoke. I have videos of my grandparents talking in Yiddish to each other and laughing at albums by Mickey Katz, a Yiddish musical comedian who happens to be Joel Grey’s father. I have a prayer shawl and tefillin, a samovar and pair of candlesticks brought over by long-dead relatives who, in faded pictures, are dead-ringers for any number of "Fidler" cast members.
When I say the Kaddish for "Fidler Afn Dakh," I’m also saying Kaddish for them.
"Anatevka, Anatevka, intimate, obstinate Anatevka, where I know everyone I meet. Soon I'll be a stranger in a strange new place, searching for an old familiar face from Anatevka."/"Anatevke, anatevke, ful mit harts, troyerik shvarts, anatevke, s'iz mir bakant do yeder shteyn. Vi a fremder in der fremd bin ikh shoyn bald, vel ikh zukhn a bakant geshtalt fun anatevke."
Although I write columns and do interviews for OnStage, I'm primarily a theater critic. All of us lucky enough to have the title knows that writing a review is a bit like wearing one of those old, cardboard 3D glasses. You look out of the right eye and the world is all blue – that's the theatergoer in you, bringing a lifetime of personal experiences and preferences – but if you choose the left, everything is red – the analytical, studied theater scholar and technician who wants clean blocking and perfect vocal technique. You can write a review of a show you only watched out of one eye, but the result will always be lopsided. It's only after opening both eyes that the blue and red disappear and you're able to see the screen in vivid, lifelike detail and write a balanced article. Because I didn’t attend “Fidler” as a critic or with press credentials, I did not file a review for OnStage, although other colleagues did.
If I did, I would have said that the blue eye was fixated on the personal bonds I have to Anatevka, but the red eye was kept equally rapt. Folksbeine has produced a wonderfully crafted show that side-steps the broad characterizations and dime-store, fake-beard Judaism that can plague many productions. The hard-working, talented ensemble is superb, as is Steven Skybell, hands down the best Tevye I've ever seen. If "Fidler Afn Dakh" played on Broadway, there is no doubt Skybell would walk away with a Tony. What pleased both my red and blue eye most was that Joel Grey staged the musical with a specific simplicity. We do not see the houses of Anatevka on the barren stage, only sheets of Torah scroll hanging on the back walls and a smattering of battered-looking wooden furniture. They are more than enough to tell Tevye's story. Set pieces aren’t automated and the only projections are for subtitles. It is theater and storytelling at its humblest and most, well, traditional. It does wonders in giving "Fiddler On The Roof" an authenticity, emotional piquancy and intimacy I've never seen before. They make you look anew at everyday objects, which is the kind of theater and the kind of religion I gravitate towards.
"If I were rich I'd have the time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray.”/"Ven ikh bin raykh, hob ikh zikh tsayt un ikh gey dray mol a tog in shul arayn."
My grandparents belonged to the same orthodox synagogue their entire adult lives, one they helped found in the 1950s. In its heyday, the temple was large and overflowed with young Jewish families who sent their children to Hebrew school, joined social clubs and built a community together for over 40 years. But eventually, through politics and merges, the membership dwindled and the core parishioners moved the synagogue two doors down, from a sprawling campus to a converted, residential home. Walls were knocked down. A makeshift bema was put in, furniture and artwork were donated. Room by room, a house became a house of worship. The mish-mash of styles and limited resources gave the synagogue a lived-in, nomadic quality as if the puzzle pieces could be dismantled as quickly as they were put together and rearranged somewhere else. By the time I was born, this was the synagogue I attended with my grandparents when we’d visit for holidays or routine Shabbat services.
When they’d bring me to the synagogue, I was almost a novelty, like when someone takes a particularly well-behaved dog to work. Besides an occasional guest, the Friday night service was almost exclusively made up of a dozen or so men in their seventies and eighties who had been coming to the synagogue weekly for as long as they could remember. They were like barflies for G-d, alternately reciting Hebrew devotions in breakneck spread and treating the temple like a divine clubhouse.
Between prayers or during quiet moments of contemplation, conversations would happen in the loud, hoarse stage whisper favored by the hard of hearing. One would stop mid-Sh'ma to tell his neighbor about an upcoming knee replacement. Another, a Holocaust survivor with a thick accent and even thicker glasses, would bring his mail. He would look up from his stack of letters a few times during the service, lifting his head to pray and then burying his face back in the latest edition of The Jewish Ledger. A third interrupted the rabbi so he could clear the pew and go to the bathroom. Even when reciting the traditional Hebrew text together, the men all read at different speeds and cadences, each in their own world.
Some might find this behavior rude – my grandfather did shush his fellow parishioners with almost the same frequency at which he prayed – but it had the opposite effect on me. These men weren't rude to G-d or each other; they were treating the synagogue like a friend's house, which in a way it was. HaShem had, for the most part, been good to them, His house was their house. If they wanted to daven and chant, good, if they wanted to chat and kvetch and check the mail, that was fine too. The men treated G-d like a friend and their friends like a G-d. A stranger would turn the pages of the siddur in your hand to make sure you were on the right page and leave his pew to update a handmade sign where page numbers dangled lazily from metal binder rings. Another would poke you in the shoulder when you needed to stand and then sit and then stand again. During a part of the high holiday service where someone had to stand in front of the open ark for a long time, the job was split up into five-minute shifts and orchestrated by a congregant who used an old egg timer to keep track. When they couldn’t make a minyan, the core ten men needed to begin a service, someone would walk down the street and knock on the door of a member or two. Without fail, this would result in the quorum being met, the late addition arriving breathless with his dinner napkin stuck in his waistband and a few pieces of supper still in his beard.
It was all worlds away from the reformed synagogue where I had a Bar Mitzvah, which was a big, beautiful temple with hundreds of members. There were two chapels, with a raised bema, ornamental tapestries, a booming organ and stained-glass windows. On one Saturday morning in late June 2003, the pews were filled with friends and family – Jews and gentiles, gawky boys and girls with braces and gangly, disproportionately growing limbs, great-aunts and uncles with walkers and voices smoky from too many cigarettes. They waited for me as I sat in the rabbi's office. My feet dangled from the stiff-backed chair and I thought my thirteen-year-old heart would give out from the nervousness. But I eventually left his office and started the ceremony, reading aloud from the Torah and reciting prayers that nearly everyone in the world who calls him or herself a Jew has read. The words my grandfather spoke and his father before that, in a ramshackle synagogue in a small Russian village not unlike Anatekva and back and back and back. The words shared by Bar Mitzvah boys in Sacramento or Shanghai or Spain or Siberia. By saying those prayers, I was inducted in some ancient club. Their traditions were now mine. In that moment, I felt a part of something bigger than myself, a tiny leaf on an infinitely large tree whose branches grew endlessly backward and forwards.
"Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years. One season following another, laden with happiness and tears."/"Tog-ayn, tog-oys, tog-ayn, tog-oys, dos iz dayn basher. Loyfn di yorn nokh anander, trogn zey freydn mit a trer."
It has been nearly twenty years since that day and over ten since my grandparents died. With the end of my Hebrew school career and the end of my grandparents’ lives, I stopped going to synagogue, except usually once a year on the High Holidays. I don't keep kosher or observe the sabbath or keep my head covered or pray or include Judaism in my daily life. I don't really believe in G-d either. Maybe I’m too practical. Maybe I can’t wrap my head around how an all-loving deity can inflict such pain on His children. Maybe my life is just full enough without His presence. I’m perfectly happy with the spiritual part of my life, but it’s hard not to feel like an imposter at a synagogue, prayer book in hand, saying words I know by memory but not by meaning, praying to an almighty I don’t think exists. And yet there's a comfort in it, a rush of that feeling I got at my Bar Mitzvah. A belief that everyone around me are my people. That I am home. Even if I do them infrequently, these are my traditions.
That uncanny sense is harder to reach in the packed, Hillel services I've gone to the last number of years, one that takes place at a large, handsome, 18th-century church on the Yale University campus where the Kol Nidre is played by a quartet of classically trained musicians and the parishioners don't really talk to each other. I haven't gone back to my grandparents’ temple in years. The building is there, services still go on, but a new rabbi has taken over and all the regulars have passed away, their pews now filled with younger, more religious men who wear long black coats and don't bring their mail. As my grandfather would say, nothing lasts.
Yet I felt that way at "Fidler Afn Dakh" – that sense of belonging, of comfort, of being part of something bigger. It was in the cadence of the Yiddish dialogue, the words recognized from my grandparents’ vocabulary. It was in the story of family and tradition, how the real rituals of culture lye not within the specificity of the actions but with the way those actions give us hope and strength. It was in my fellow matinee audient members who, as far as I could tell, were largely older Jewish couples and their families. It was in how those tables and chairs were used in the exact same fashion as at my grandparents' synagogue, recycled artifacts repurposed to tell a story and keep tradition alive. "Fidler Afn Dakh" is fantastic, but never tries to reach the level of polish that many big-budget shows that play down the street do. This isn't the synagogue I was Bar Mitzvahed in with their automatically retracting curtains and custom murals. The production team knew the same thing the people who created my grandparents' shul knew, that flawlessness can sometimes take us away from G-d, that making something amazing out of nothing is far more spectacular than flashy, new technology. It was all there in that play. Although, it’s not the only show to give me that feeling.
“When Moses softened Pharaoh’s heart, that was a miracle. When G-d made the waters of the Red Sea part, that was a miracle too. But of all G-d’s miracles large and small, the most miraculous one of all is that out of a worthless lump of clay — G-d has made a man today.” / “Ven pare hot derloybt tsu geyn, dos iz a nes geven. Ven got hot geshpoltn dem yam af tsvey, dos iz a nes geven oykh. Fun di ale nisimelkh, kleyn un groys, dos greste fun ale niflo’oys iz geshen tsu mir, zay got gebentsht — host fun mir gemakht a mentsh.”
I said before that I don't believe in G-d, which is true, and that while I feel strongly like a cultural Jew, I don't think of myself really belonging to any religion. Maybe that part is wrong. I do belong to a religion, the religion of theater. That may sound like a joke, but I'm not so sure it is. What is religion, but a series of rituals and beliefs shared among a disparate population?
Those of us who make theater or are routinely involved in it, whether as a writer or ardent supporter, have our own customs and traditions. We have our own houses of worship, where we gather to listen to or perform familiar hymns. There is a whole dictionary of terms specific to our faith and texts that we all seem to spontaneously know (“What a to-do to die today,” anyone?). There are sacred writings from prophets like Shakespeare and Sondheim. There are schools to teach the next generation of clergy and societies that aim to connect congregants and spread our teachings to the masses. There are superstitions and beliefs, whose origins are not fully known, yet are almost always followed. We put out ghost lights and abstain from saying The Scottish Play out of fear of divine retribution. There are laws and rules we must follow – Thou Shalt Not Touch Thy Fellow Actor’s Prop. We congregate to find like-minded souls. I could walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world and be able to recite the Kaddish with the congregants, but I could also walk into a performing arts school in dozens of countries and join them in singing “West Side Story” or “Wicked.” Without saying more than a few words, I would know that they are my people.
But those are just window dressings. You could say the same thing about a lot of interests that unite people from hot sauce lovers to model plane enthusiasts. There is one crucial difference, though. The reason I say theater is my religion is also the reason Tevye clings to his Judaism. Whether deity or belief system you subscribe to, we use stories to make humanity better. To help us understand our lives. To teach us. To give us empathy for people different than us. To divert us. To make us think. To sustain us. To give us hope. To connect our past and present. To unite us.
We tell these stories because it is tradition.
Allegory, drama, scripture, midrash, passion plays, musical, parable. Adam and Eve, Tevye and Golde. These are stories about our lives. Stories that turn our lives into art. If that isn’t something to worship, I don’t know what is.
“Tradition. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as...a fiddler on the roof.” / “Traditsye. Ven nit undzer traditsyes, voltn undzere neshomes shoyn fun lang getsaplt vi…a fidler afn dakh.”