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February 13, 2004
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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