Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon (review)

Abstract

WONDER OF WONDERS: A CULTURA L HISTORY OF FIDDLER ON THE ROOF By Alisa Solomon. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. 448 pp.This year marks the 50th anniversary of the phenomenon that is Fiddler on the Roof. Since its first Broadway production in 1964, Fiddler has seen dozens of iterations, several of which are the subject of Alisa Solomon's new book, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. In it she traces the cultural history of Tevye and his daughters from the original Yiddish stories by Sholem Aleichem, to the making of the musical directed by Jerome Robbins, to the 1971 movie staring the Israeli Chiam Topol in the role of Tevye, stopping along the way to discuss a more contemporary amateur production in Poland, as well as the racially and ethnically fraught 1968 Brownsville, Brooklyn performance starring black and Hispanic middle school students. Solomon uses these productions to demonstrate how Tevye the milkman became a cultural icon and why Fiddler on the Roof has managed to speak to disparate communities in the throes of cultural transition.What weaves Solomon's chapters together is her well-articulated idea that the musical is not only a story about adaptation and survival, but also that the show itself is a beacon of the adaptive process. Solomon explains, for example, that while the escapist approach taken up by the Broadway musical offered a postwar audience a palatable and relatable Jewishness, the 1971 film, in the wake of changes taking place in America that demanded direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues, was made to focus on the violence of the story and evoke the imagery and emotions connected with the Holocaust. What is more, Solomon shows that Fiddler's staying power and world-wide popularity has as much to do with its universal themes-generational conflict, communal cohesion and breakdown, tradition-as it does its catchy tunes. She devotes two chapters to foreign productions: the Hebrew-language production which starred Topol for several years, whose robust, sabra-infused performance, Solomon asserts, allowed an Israeli audience to view the once disdained Eastern European Jewish past of persecution with respect, while still maintaining national pride; and an open air production in Poland, which treated the musical as both a Jewish historical document and as a vehicle that would allow Poles to address and commemorate their absent Jewish communities.At times, especially in the early chapters of the book, which are stuffed with behind-the-scenes details culled from various interviews, letters, and memoirs, Solomon tends to mythologize the making of the Broadway musical itself, in much the same way that the Broadway musical helped to mythologize the Eastern European shtetl. …