…with a glance at Schindler’s List (1993) and Shoah (1985)
[This entry is somewhat hustled out, subject to editing later. In some respects, it represents a sort of “catechism” of mine in that many of the concepts and assumptions here, a product of cultural and values-related learning over many years, ought to take fairly routine, “pious” spelling-out; they shouldn’t require tough/conscientious wrestling-with, as some of my other, more-complex entries have required. Yet this entry has turned out long, covering a lot of ground, and may contain dumb errors. Edit 10/16/14.]
The topic of movies with particularly Jewish-related themes—which, as it happens, have to do as much with awful, disserving history as well as especially ethnic concerns—seems like it could be risky for me. But you could consider it a way station to other blog discussion I may do, when it is relevant and I can contribute healthily. My book idea I’d previously mentioned, with the working title The Jewish Experience in America from a Protestant Perspective, isn’t some frivolously tossed-off sneering remark. The title itself is meant to reflect what I intend to be its component of humor; since so much about Jewish culture that gets promulgated in the U.S. media seems the province of Jews, why not have Gentiles do it on occasion, too? (Even one like me, who has had a lot of his schooling in religious and cross-cultural matters from autodidactic means and hard experience.)
The main thesis of the book, which itself is very much in the formative stage, is that, not least in the U.S., Jews, try as they might to be assimilated into Western culture, or to be embraced, while maintaining some version of their ethnic identity, ultimately live out a paradox that badgers their trying to be integral to “Western identity”: they act as they have long been, as a very self-protective ethnic minority. This is not something they can be blamed for, or that in itself (for any ethnic group) is so very bad. It is, obviously, in part an inevitable consequence of the history they’ve had, often involving expulsion, stigmatizing, harassment, and so on, for millennia. One way the paradox can be measured is that, as much as the Holocaust (or the Shoah, as some consider the more proper name) gets discussed in educational contexts, Gentiles can be turned off—they can feel, not being especially mean, that this is, with all else, Jewish self-promotion—because, in part, haven’t there been other instances of genocide, too? Against the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union? Against the Armenians in Turkey? Against the Tutsis by the Hutus (and vice versa) in the Rwanda/Burundi region? And so on.
This whole subject—of genocide—obviously is freighted with many aspects, brings strong emotions, is addressed by many voices, and so on. My thesis about the Jewish paradox itself, just mentioned, invites possible controversy on an admittedly complex issue. Plus, the fact that I meant my book to combine scholarship (whether from within the academy, or autodidactic) and personal reminiscences, and serious as well as humorous passages, suggests I could encounter strong criticism from different quarters.
I remember when I was interviewed in December 2002, for a newspaper article on depression and the workplace that appeared in the Daily Record (the main newspaper of Morris County, N.J.) in January 2003, the interviewer, an astute reporter named Lorraine Ash who conducted a very hearty two-hour interview with me and seemed genuinely interested to probe for various things, once made a remark that has popped up in my mind numerous times since. Sometimes it has rankled; sometimes it has just been food for intense, creative enough thought. When I mentioned the subject of one of my key nonfiction books that I’d been shopping around for some years, and which was handled by a literary agent at the time (but not placed with a publisher), she said something very blunt like “I wouldn’t find that interesting” or such.
Then, in turn, she told about a book idea that she had: something about what it would be like to experience pregnancy and the aftermath—the first year of having a child, or such. I forget what I answered, but what I have long thought I could have said was this: “Well, just on its one-sentence face, I’m not that interested in that idea for a book to read myself, but you know, what an author does is take an idea in which he or she has a keen interest and finds a way to make it interesting to others. (And so I might be interested in it depending on what you do with it.)” This is, in sum, what I think any author does. So though the marketing blurb for something may seem like a dud of an idea, just read the book, and you see why’s it’s interesting.
And you can especially write an interesting book, I think, if you address both the negative experiences and the positive. Because that’s life anyway. So if I was to write a book about Jews, including from my experience with many of them going back to 1968, many of which are positive, I don’t care to hear from anyone, Jewish or otherwise, as to whether they would on the face of the idea have a lack of interest in my book or not. I would approach it to make it interesting, to myself first and then, hopefully, to others. If I was to write a rant about Jews, particularly how I have had more career setbacks and jolts from Jews than from people of any other ethnic group (and which of course would entail a minority of Jews I’ve dealt with, by no means all), I would not lack for material. But a rant would be like a stupid beer-ball blowout—it may serve a need in the short term, but you pay a painful price, and what lasting value does it have? But try to write your non-rant book with heart and balance, and make it an occasion for discovery for yourself as well as for the reader, well, then you have a chance of making something worth others’ time and maybe with some lasting value.
I think this is one way to understand what it means to write a Jewish-themed story for a general audience. In choosing the three movies I list above, it may seem like I am being coy, or cute, or harebrained—do I really know that much about Jews to group these three movies like that? Actually, this is meant to be a short review, and isn’t meant to be as jokey as, say, Woody Allen’s vignette in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) where his character, opting to become a Roman Catholic, piles up what he seems to think will pull off the trick: a crucifix, a loaf of white bread, and some mayonnaise.
I. Lanzmann’s Shoah and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
The original spur for my doing this review—which was originally more to focus on Schindler’s List and Shoah—is a remark made by Claude Lanzmann, who made the latter movie, in winter or early spring 2011. He made some grumpy remark (reported in The New York Times) related to the fact that hardly anyone (in the U.S.) was seeing (or apt to see) Shoah, and meanwhile Schindler’s List was…he had little good to say about it. In flavor, he reminded me of the kind of grumpily, volcanically opinionated type (among Jews) who was forever bearing witness in thoroughly uncompromising terms and would stand for addressing the horror of the Holocaust until he died, and he would not simply debate you but press upon you his undeniable vision…. This is a bit of a caricature, and I would say that we need Claude Lanzmann types to do the job he has; and he also reminds me of a philosophy professor I had in graduate school, Steven S. Schwarzschild, who makes for an interesting story I’ll tell another time.
I myself have seen Shoah, in a truncated version (I saw part or all of it) that was shown around 1985 or shortly thereafter. I would recommend it in the sense that, if you want to see a movie that gives important witness to the Holocaust, this is the definitive one. But I just as quickly realize that it would not be a widely seen hit by any stretch of the imagination. This would be not even among Jews, in the U.S. Don’t take my Gentile word for this; see, for example, this one among articles that have dealt squarely with this (you have to go digging for the blog entry for January 4, 2011) when it was more a “current issue” (and especially when you talk about the nine-hour version of Shoah, which I think only the smallest group of people would be willing to do). This particular item is a Jewish person writing; I think the unaptness to be popular of Shoah isn’t simply an opinion that is typically Jewish, Gentile, or anything else; it is a matter of basic marketing sense, to put that in the least uncomplimentary light.
There was an interview of Lanzmann that includes a dismissive remark of his on Schindler’s List: The interview, conducted by a British journalist, includes (with the writer’s own voice incorporated): “ ‘We are a strange people,’ Lanzmann once said. ‘A people who carry such a heavy past, ever-present, and are confronted with such a harsh present.’ It is a mistake to assume that a man [like Lanzmann] capable of the most sensitive understanding of the plight of one people must necessarily feel compassion for everyone. Nor is there a law that says compassion in one field cannot be transformed into belligerence in another.”
So obviously Lanzmann is a drink that is not everyone’s cup of tea. But we respect his uncompromising position, as a sort of curator of an important type of, generally speaking, bearing witness.
When it comes to Schindler’s List—I have seen the movie a few times, but not read the book—I would strongly disagree with Lanzmann on its being, for his type of purposes, a silly or unworthy movie. I think if you’re going to have U.S. cinematic treatment of the Holocaust, this is about the best way to do it—fashioning a story that includes not just an ashes-in-mouth depiction of pogrom-type or herd-into-gas-chambers horrors, but something else that gives us some healthy perspective of some kind.
The debate on which is better cinematic treatment—Shoah or Schindler’s List—has certainly aroused a lot of talk. The amount of discussion/controversy comparing the two films hits you like a brick in the forehead if you Google “claude lanzmann schindler’s list.” There are several pages of relevant results. They suggest that discussion would be daunting for me—I would be a pipsqueak to try to be equal to it.
All I’ll say is that, if you want to see how a movie can treat the Holocaust, Schindler’s List is worth a look (and remember, among director Steven Spielberg’s movies, especially his more acclaimed ones, it is not by any means among his biggest hits in terms of box-office receipts [see, for an update, my review of Schindler's List on my other blog, in mid-October 2014]). Controversy is so apt to arise regarding this topic, or any aspect of it, that people (as I’ve heard firsthand and otherwise seen written in a letter to the editor of a major publication) have criticized its main character Oskar Schindler—more exactly and to the point, the real-life correlate—as if he was only working to save about 1,000 Jews because he made money doing it. I think this misses the point big-time. Claiming to be a businessman, using a large number of Jews as factory workers, and while acting as if his motivation was making money was obviously good cover for what he ultimately did, no question: save 1,000 Jews within Germany’s territory while World War II was on. Even if his motives were mixed or ambiguous early on—it is interesting that, apparently, at every other time than when he was sheltering the 1,000 Jews, he was not a successful businessman—the fact that he ultimately resolved to do what he could to save the Jews within his responsibility—at obvious risk to his own life—shows how heroic he was being. To me, there should not be much controversy on this.
The more valid question may be Lanzmann’s—is this the only way you can depict the Holocaust? Were there so many Oskar Schindlers in Germany
And I think how Schindler is portrayed, by the large Irish actor Liam Neeson, is canny: visually and in some acting ways he is somewhat opaque, if a formidable mover-and-shaker of some kind: he is shown the way an Oskar Schindler can only have been, a big galoot of a German who could get a large bunch of people into motion in line with his project, which is the only way a Schindler could have operated, even if he was hoodwinking the Nazis in the process. I think this also says something complimentary about the Germans, that not only did you have insidious Nazi functionaries, but courageous souls who knew how to work within the awful regime at hand to work to a higher cause. And it says something wise about the broader issue of how a magnanimous person can function sanely in a temporarily insane society.
II. Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof is a tough bird to have to analyze today—offering layers of meaning to have to explain similarly to another story that is a “child of its time,” The Crucible (see my May 5 blog entry).
Thumbnail sketch of historical aspects. Fiddler was probably the hugest stage hit of the 1960s; it ran for thousands of performances. Numerous of its sources are well known; the story is stitched together from smaller stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. Jerry Bock wrote the music, and Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics. Jerome Robbins created the original choreography. Zero Mostel (see my April 13 entry on the movie The Front) apparently crafted definitive aspects of the original stage version of Tevye the milkman (see the Wikipedia article on the movie); perhaps people who saw him on stage always remember his version as the definitive Tevye. Herschel Bernardi (see my The Front entry) also performed as Tevye at some point.
My own personal history with Fiddler. Herschel Bernardi recorded versions of Tevye’s singing parts that were included on an LP—my family had a copy of this, I think; and I vaguely remember his “If I Were a Rich Man” being on the radio in about 1967. By the 1970s, to me, Fiddler on the Roof was—I might exaggerate a tiny bit here—one of the most familiar cultural things I was aware of that had singalong songs, and a certain piquant flavor due to the poignant story and cultural trappings it brought. In 1978, my high school’s drama club mounted a stage version of Fiddler, in which I served as part of the “stage tech” crew. While other students took on the colorful roles of characters in the play, I was among the unseen noodges who helped build scenery and, when the play was performed, moved scenery around in enough shadows to keep us, hopefully, largely unseen by the audience. By 1978, I was familiar enough with the play via both the recordings I noted above and the film version, which I had to have seen either in the theater or on TV (probably the latter) in the mid-1970s, that what I learned during the mounting of the play in 1978 was many of the details—lyrics, bits of the story….
When I see the film today, so much of it is as familiar as the Pledge of Allegiance or an Irving Berlin song like “God Bless America,” and yet, as often happens with re-watching an old film on something you should know well, you pick up on details you never knew well before, or you appreciate “old familiar” things anew, from an older person’s perspective.
Also, my own experience with Jewish ethnic realities in the 1960s-70s is complex, and can only be sketched in a tiny way here. My own family, while my father was from German stock, had some “indoctrination” into Jewish ways in the minor sense of a family we were friends with in the late 1960s, the Heynes, who later ran a bakery in our town for about 30 years. Carl Heyne, the paterfamilias (who helped my father on a house-building project my father helmed), had a Jewish mother and a German father who converted to Judaism; both the parents of his wife Doreen were born Jewish. That “family-historical fact” was the first root of what I would develop as a very widely informed consciousness of Jewish values and manners. What also helped, in an indirect sense, was my own tendency to decline to identify with German ethnic background: my mother is not at all German, and my immediate family, after my father’s death, was more apt to have humorous irony about Germans than to adopt the identity in some way. (In part this reflected idiosyncrasies of my mother’s.) I also had a sense from about age seven not to identify with any ethnic group and to think of myself as “American” only. Along with this, I had a sense that, given the Holocaust, which was the sort of thing I kid could grasp as a historical mooring without too much trouble, I couldn’t have unadulterated respect for the Germans. (My attitude in this regard has changed slightly over the years; but my “ethnic position” is such that, after all these years, if I were to visit a European country, Germany would not be at the top of the list; meanwhile, my sister and all my cousins who are children of my father’s brothers have been in Germany at different times for different reasons—which doesn’t necessarily reflect ethnic pride on their part, I think.) All this relates indirectly to the fact that my sympathy toward Jewish experience was inevitable from an early age. (This whole area invites elaboration.)
And among the writers who had an early impact on me, before I left town for college, were Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller. One of the more important psychologists I would discover in college was Viktor Frankl, some of whose teachings derived from his experience in a concentration camp. (Of course, once I started in college in 1980, and I semi-jokingly told a Jewish peer there that I knew some Yiddish, or such, from having seen Fiddler on the Roof and I was responded to with a kind of cool irony, I was—certainly not only on the basis of that—on my way to a large journey of discovering a wealth of things about Jews, not all positive.)
Broader historical aspects of the story. Part of what makes Fiddler a bit of an odd cultural artifact is that its story is not of the Holocaust, though in some obvious ways it metaphorically depicts things like the coming Holocaust, or historical things that give some relatively remote predecessors of the Holocaust. For instance, when you see the film, you get the sense that the Russian authorities who harass the Jews, and eventually get the citizens of the shtetl Anatevka to move, are like Nazis, but they aren’t quite. The story takes place before World War I, say around 1905 or 1910; and the location seems to be in, or close to, what was called “the Ukraine,” a territory within Russia that contained its own (Gentile) ethnic group, the Ukrainians, whose language is very similar to Russian but is not exactly that. Ukrainians’ identity as separate from Russians’ is such, and the historical fact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was such, that in the early 1990s “the Ukraine” became one zone of the Russian empire that wasted no time becoming a separate country and thereby became the heftiest new country in Eastern Europe, with a population of about 50 million, representing the greatest single loss to the Russian Federation in terms of economic might.
So, while government functionaries in the Ukraine in the early 1900s, such as the heavies in Fiddler were modeled on, may have actually been ethnic Russians, if Anatevka was in the Ukraine, that shtetl wasn’t exactly chafing under Russians, but in a sense the larger Gentile population around it (mostly Ukrainians, some Russians) was close enough to Russian in general attitude and social standing—so that to say the Anatevka Jews were “encircled by not entirely friendly Russians” is historically not quite accurate, but close enough for the vague story purposes of Fiddler. Much less were the Ukrainians, or the Russians, of about 1910, Nazis, though the threat posed by the Russian government to Jews was real enough, with pogroms and such being a fact (and writers like the Jewish short-story writer Isaac Babel show some of the harsh realities within that historical framework).
The fact of Russian harassment of Jews foreshadowing the Nazi Holocaust in certain broad terms but not really in historical terms provides a certain “framework of sympathy” for the Anatevka Jews for Fiddler’s audience; but it needs to be kept in mind by educated viewers of this play that the bearish Russia providing some of the background of the story was not exactly the Nazi horror to come. Meanwhile, historical realities add to the dark complexity of all this, really offering a story of the phases of difficulty that various populations went through in the twentieth century: a commenter on the DVD making-of documentary for Fiddler says that when such shtetl Jews in real life (like the fictional Anatevka Jews) dispersed, some could have ended up in safety in the U.S. or elsewhere in Europe, but some could have ended up in the gas chambers at the hands of the Nazis. This latter historical eventuality is due to the fact that, once World War II had started, the Nazis were occupying territories of the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, and at their hands Jews were shipped off to concentration and death camps as part of the Nazi “project.” And quisling governments in places like Romania, and what became Yugoslavia, and elsewhere had their own Nazi-sympathizing components that also shipped Jews to camps.
All this gets into complex and dark history I didn’t mean to get into so much here (see my April 16 entry, specifically a dry litany of numbers of dead in World War II, which I related to the movie The Front; that entry also has historical sources that can support at least some of my claims here).
In any event, the historical roots of Fiddler are interesting, and what’s even more interesting that in fashioning this iconic play, with its so-familiar songs and characters, there wasn’t an attempt to actually address the Holocaust as full-on as, much later, was the point of Schindler’s List or Roman Polansky’s The Pianist (2002). I suppose it’s safe to say a money-paying 1960s audience wasn’t ready for this at all. (Those World War II vets who wanted to see the many war movies that were churned out through the 1950s and 1960s had plenty to choose from, but by and large those were about American heroism, not about the gross realities of the Holocaust.)
Where we are today. All of this shows the historical setting of Fiddler. In a way, the play parallels the historical facts, and the willingness of middle-class audiences to deal with some of the horrors, of the twentieth century. The Jewish people behind Fiddler—such as its writers and its actors like Zero Mostel—knew they could go all out in turning out a kind of richly ethnic revue, but they also knew they would work within very firmly, safely defined limits. The result is that, today, 40 years after the release of the movie, and about 50 since it first appeared on Broadway, we have a cultural artifact that has its charms but also is dated in some ways…to put it mildly. But how today’s viewers react to it may be a function of cultural background, and in a sense of political inclinations, such as those fiercely defending Jewish prerogatives.
That plus the cultural sensitivity of a Gentile like myself, for whom in some vague sense Fiddler was a sort of “religious schooling” without knowing it was such at the time, look at the movie now with a fancy task of unpacking a range of things: the time-bound concepts of the movie itself, and one’s own changed perspective on the story and its many assumptions. Plus, my personal experience with Jewish associates—at college, work, or otherwise—since 1980 has been complex, rich, and not always pleasant.
So when I come to this movie today, I look at it in a range of ways that in some respects may make me seem like a jaded Jew being somewhat appalled at what seems like an old “Jewish minstrel show,” a kind of Amos and Andy about Jewish shtetl life. (It amazes me when some Jewish friends find out how much Yiddish I know; and my secret response to this is, Do you Jews want to be assimilated into, or embraced by, Gentile culture or not? Why should it shock you I know so much Yiddish?) But my experience is such that I say the movie can’t be so readily dismissed, but I do feel that, if young people were to view it today, it should be accompanied by a big effort to put it into historical perspective where its many assumptions are analyzed, and not merely in a mealy-mouthed, superficially philo-Semitic way.
The movie in itself. The film was produced at a time, according to the making-of doc, when the movie industry was in crisis—finances across studios were tight, and this supposedly was the only big-budget film being produced in its time, which would have been 1970 (for a 1971 release). Actually, if we look at the historical account of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [end note 1], the movie industry was on the cusp of becoming a thing, for a decade, of director-artists redefining movies—in the ways of Coppola, Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, and many others—while production/funding was unusual (for instance, Apocalypse Now, as I hope to write on soon, was weirdly funded like a cross between a self-financed indy and a giant-budget extravaganza, an arrangement that ultimately broke Coppola as the big name he had cultivated for himself in the 1970s, putting him on the artistic and business-related defensive for some years after). Fiddler on the Roof seems surprisingly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now in its production arrangement: the Mirisch Production Company, a sort of independent firm that had success in the 1960s with films including some of the Pink Panther romps and other, more respectable ones, was the producing entity behind director Norman Jewison, who had the role of both producer and director for Fiddler, giving him unusual freedom—until he started going over the large budget, which apparently was meant to be no more than $9 million. The distributor was, I believe, to be United Artists, which not only helmed numerous significant movies of the 1970s but also got financing for Apocalypse Now started (Coppola’s first big shot of money was the foreign distribution rights, at about $7 million, for that film).
Jewison is a Canadian who had worked in films in TV and movies through the 1960s, and had started at Universal. He directed such notable films as In The Heat of the Night (1967), which won one or more Oscars, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. (Jewison would later direct Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, and released in 1987.) Jewison, despite what his name sounds like, was a Gentile; there is a funny moment in the making-of doc where Chaim Topol, the actor who played Tevye, notes that Jewison knows even more about Judaism than he does (Topol was born in Tel Aviv); then he is asked about a “rumor” that he was trying to convert Jewison to Judaism. Topol responds that he has a running joke that if Jewison converts, Jewison will also change his name to “Norman Christianson.” (Jewison comments at another point in the doc that he finds Judaism a “very personal” religion.)
Joseph Stein—who, as it happens, was friends with writer Joseph Heller (see Heller’s memoir No Laughing Matter [1987])—wrote the screenplay.
The movie, which was filmed on location in Yugoslavia and also on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios in Britain, is very well crafted, I think. The scenery, costumes, Yugoslavian countryside—all add nice ethnic and historical color and flavor, and show the meticulous production work that was done. John Williams, the famous composer who has provided essential underscore music to Spielberg’s films since the 1970s, adapted the Fiddler stage music and expanded it a bit to more movie-like proportions. The original Russian-inflected music has enough character (with minor chords and a certain offbeat modal flavor while having majesty); I recall from the 1978 production I was involved in that the music, played by a tiny theater orchestra, was still fulsomely inflected and tasty enough with few instruments. But in Williams’ hands, it sometimes reaches a sort of stirring Russian-classic quality at times that doesn’t seem to make the movie a self-parody or an overblown cultural artifact: the potential of the music to flesh out what turns into a kind of local-color opera is shown to favorable enough results. Isaac Stern’s violin solo toward the end of the opening credits spells things out in an even more virtuoso way. Perhaps younger viewers who are not as familiar with the play and its music as older ones, who view this film, might say, “Well, it’s all well crafted, but doesn’t it seem to go a little far stretching out a sort of minstrel show?”
Now, to the details, which really are the proving ground for how winning and convincing this film is, and an important root of its value.
Topol’s performance as key. If this film is to succeed with any audiences today, it would be on the basis of the character of Tevye, who is the most complex character (the others largely are types, pretty two-dimensional). And Tevye’s inner character is the battleground in the most personal sense for the conflicts of the film’s story, which center on tradition versus changes coming amid personal mores and societal trends. As it happens, to me, the aspect of this film that stands the test of time the best is Chaim Topol’s performance as Tevye. If you don’t simply dismiss Tevye as an emblem of everything that is wrong with the film—he is a sort of Jewish Stepin Fetchin in a vast, grotesque minstrel show—you have to admit that Topol roots the film admirably.
Chaim Topol seemed to director Jewison to be ideal for the role (he is billed as “Topol” in the film credits; I prefer to give his whole name, partly because I associate the name “Topol” with a brand of toothpaste an unpleasant college roommate used). Topol had performed in the role on stage, according to his Wikipedia biography; Jewison, according to DVD commentary, wanted a European actor for the role; when he heard about Topol and went to see him in Britain, where he was performing, Jewison knew no one else could take the role. Part of the reason given that Topol was chosen over Zero Mostel (pretty much said in commentary on the DVD)—Mostel being famous for the American version of the play in New York—was the risk of Mostel’s personality overshadowing others in the filming, or Mostel the familiar actor distracting from other performances and the story (I am interpreting in my own clumsy way; see the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the film).
In any event, I think Topol is the right choice and gives a very hearty performance, fleshing the role out about as well as you could want an actor to, and his ethnic flavoring (he was born in Tel Aviv) really adds to it, I think. I feel that if Mostel were in the role, he might have made it more cartoonish, a little too broad and maybe watered down, and somehow not believable; Topol makes the movie role believable.
Other roles. I watched the first hour of the film on July 19; I’ve seen the film numerous times over the years, including within the past year or so. Today I would say that the performances (except for Topol’s) seem surprisingly stagey for a movie, but aren’t so bad, usually, for that. What makes for a sort of confusing situation in analyzing the roles is this: Were Russian Jews, if they could speak English, so apt to be a little self-dramatizing in expressions, thereby nullifying the stagey aspect of these roles? Or, on the other hand, does the staginess draw out the cartoonish potential for Yiddish inflections, idioms, grammatical rearrangements, and personal styles, to the extent that it highlights the minstrel show quality of the movie?
One of the more important roles, that of Golda, played by Norma Crane, comes off as a sort of hard nag; you wonder if this was the best that could have been done with her.
Performance quality aside, perhaps the most offensive role is that of Yenta, the matchmaker, who seems—in character or performance—like nothing so much as a broad caricature. (Meanwhile, the concept of the yenta remains very relevant today, meaning a nosy parker, a busybody, someone who is minding others’ business in a way she [or he] shouldn’t be. I will return to this concept in a future blog entry.)
The lyrics of the songs can range from generally inoffensive to, for my taste, embarrassingly trite and mawkish, like those for “Sunrise, Sunset,” which seem like a Gerber’s strained-peas version of the message from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
One plus for the film is that story aspects and certain Jewish usages or concepts tell to be spelled out pretty accessibly, so that a child (age eight or above?) could pick up on what’s going on without too much trouble.
I think if this film were to be used in an educational effort, so that young viewers could appreciate the film but also “bracket” some of its more offensive qualities, viewers could be introduced to such things as the expression “Mazel tov,” what Torah scrolls are about, how rabbis held esteemed roles in shtetls, and all that sort of thing. For some of this, the film could teach you about it as much as an outside source. For other elements, an outside source might help you interpret what the film is doing with them.
If you watched the film A Serious Man (2009), written and directed by the Coen brothers, and you saw what was done with rabbis, a bar mitzvah, “Mazel tovs,” and so on in that film, it would pose an interesting contrast with Fiddler. (Ironically, A Serious Man is set in 1967, when Fiddler was a big hit on Broadway. And of course no mention is made there of Fiddler.) Speaking to the tradition-bound side of Judaism, a lot of the concepts and terms that turn up in the Coens film also bobble up in Fiddler, with the context shedding a different light on them; it could be remarked that “Mazel tov” has been said in all kinds of contexts, ironic or not, “cool-humored” or not, yet has maintained a certain absolute status.
If Claude Lanzmann were brought to discuss Fiddler, and he had more of a sense of humor about himself, what might he say? “Oy, that kitsch! Ay gevalt, such kitsch I have never seen! Am I right? Of course, right!”
##
End note 1.
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
