Tevye the Milkman paved the way

PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

In the musical version of Sholem Aleichem's Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, the poor, devout milkman sings a song wishing for wealth, which he envisions as a key to happiness, religious fulfilment and social mobility.

"If I were a rich man," sings Tevye, "I'd discuss the holy books with the wise men, seven hours every day and ... maybe have a seat by the eastern wall."

He goes on to imagine a palatial home, with one set of stairs just going up, one just going down and "one more leading nowhere, just for show," before breaking into a niggun (a traditional melody associated with shtetl life, nostalgic Yiddishkeit and ecstatic mysticism).

But Tevye, despite his piety, seeks a self-aggrandizing wealth that would have been far more familiar in the suburbs of New Jersey than the shtetls of Europe, according to Dr. Mark Slobin, professor of music and American studies at Wesleyan University.

Slobin lectured Feb. 5 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on How the Fiddler Got on the Roof. He credits American Jewish musical and theatre traditions as having a massive impact on American popular culture, especially through its depiction of immigrant identity. But Slobin said Tevye's invocation of a niggun-like riff is an example of the way Old World motifs were co-opted by New World values. The poor milkman may live in a time and place far from immigrant America, in an east European village where family and God still trump money, said Slobin, but his song is a variation on the striving American suburban dream that fuelled generations of immigrants in the early 20th century.

"This is an odd place to situate a niggun," said Slobin, whose books on the subject include Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants and Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World. Fiddler on the Roof, which was nostalgic reflection on shtetl life through 1960s eyes, probably bears no real similarity with the insular, deeply spiritual and poverty-ridden life of real European Jews in the 19th century.

"If I were a Rich Man" reinforces the schisms faced by immigrants, Jewish and otherwise, in adapting to their new environment while clinging to the familiar and traditional. Early in the 20th century, Jewish nostalgia for the Old World was invented, mostly, by generations who had no direct experience in Europe.

"It's very American to be nostalgic for the homeland," said Slobin. "The Irish, by this time, had been doing it for 80 years."

As American society was leaving its distinctive impressions on the Jewish imagination, the Jewish imagination was helping to create the phenomenon of popular culture. If "Yiddish popular culture" seems oxymoronic today, it was axiomatic a century ago.

"There were dozens of entertainment venues," Slobin said, from legitimate theatre to crass vaudeville, ethnic wine gardens and Lower Eastside holes-in-the-wall. New York City at the turn of the 20th century had more Jews than had ever been assembled in one place in history. Sheer numbers – and a little entrepreneurial spirit – turned the Jews of New York into a mass market for cultural products like stage plays, concerts and recorded music.

Jews were among the first to recognize the potential of recordings for musical applications. Among the first singing voices recorded when the technologies were becoming more accessible in 1902-'03 were cantors. At the same time, Greek, Armenian, Irish and other immigrant groups were recording their own musical traditions, which together formed a complementary quilt of American music and placed the immigrant experience at the centre of American popular imagination.

Slobin played recorded snippets of Yiddish songs, whose repetitive verses and familiar themes helped define what would become the larger American musical theatre and popular culture in general. There were songs about immigrant triumphs, but also of immigrant tragedies, such as a lament for those who made it to Ellis Island, but were turned back, and a hagiographic tune about Isadore and Ida Strauss, the owners of Macy's department store, who drowned in the Titanic disaster.

Nostalgia was partly a product of 1924 immigration restrictions, which suddenly stanched the flow of migrants from Europe and began the isolation between what had been trans-Atlantic Diaspora cultures, freezing in time the heyday of the American melting pot.

Events of the 1930s were a death knell for the Yiddish renaissance. In America, the end of mass immigration meant succeeding generations had only a passing familiarity with the Yiddish language, while the Holocaust nearly succeeded in extinguishing the language from the world, with all that entailed in human and cultural costs.

Yet the last gasp of American popular Yiddish culture was monumental. The stage musicals and the songs spawned were of Broadway calibre and some examples remain vital today. But, by and large, according to Slobin, the war and the Holocaust changed forever the course of Yiddish and popular culture.

"We get this great abyss ... that cannot be crossed," he said, referring to the post-war realization of the extent of the losses in Europe. "There's no home there. That Diaspora is gone. The Yiddish song becomes orphaned."

Yet, in the 1960s, as Holocaust survivors began to talk substantively about their experiences and discussion of prewar life became less taboo, Yiddish began a sort of re-evaluation and rebirth, though Yiddishkeit might be a better term. For all its iconic depiction of shtetl life, Fiddler on the Roof contains no Yiddish, Slobin noted.

Yiddish popular culture transformed itself one more time during the war era, as the Borscht Belt culture built on Yiddish idiom and style, albeit mostly in English, with a sense of caricature that continues to exert its own distinctive influence on American concepts of comedy. Fiddler on the Roof is, in a sense, a coming together of these strains of nostalgic, comic and folk traditions.

Jewish sensibilities in music, theatre and comedy added "ethnic spice into a prefab American nostalgic style," said Slobin, explaining that this evolved in unpredictable ways, such as young Jewish Americans aspiring to success as jazz musicians in a melding of the Jewish immigrant and African-American pop-folk strains, and the mandolin players who worked in both Italian and Jewish orchestras.

Slobin's presentation was the fourth annual Itta and Eliezer Zeisler Memorial Lecure, established by Betty and Irv Nitkin as a tribute to Betty Nitkin's parents. It is part of Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver's Jewish Studies Institute and an endowment at the University of British Columbia provides the funding for the series, which mandates two lectures by the guest speaker, one to students at UBC and the other to the community.

Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and commentator.

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