“Every single day through the last seven decades…Fiddler, by all accounts, has been on stage somewhere in the world”
When the creators of Fiddler on the Roof—book writer Joseph Stein, composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and director/choreographer Jerome Robbins—set out to adapt Sholem-Aleichem’s Yiddish tales about a beleaguered milkman with three marriageable daughters, they didn’t expect to make a splash, much less a fortune. They were motivated by simple love of the material. The stories were just so warm and human and emotional,” Harnick once told me, “that they cried out for music.” As the artists searched for a backer, one after another rejected the “property” (as potential Broadway shows are known) for being likely to appeal only to a narrow audience. One naysayer, referring to the nationwide Jewish women’s organization, famously asked, “What will we do when we’ve run out of Hadassah groups?” Too bad he didn’t invest!
Opening on Broadway in September 1964, the show swept the Tony Awards that season, winning in nine categories, and it ran for a then record-breaking 3,242 performances (and has been revived on Broadway five times). Every single day through the last seven decades (except during the COVID lockdown), Fiddler, by all accounts, has been on stage somewhere in the world, from Caracas to Klaipeda, in schools, community theaters, or professional venues.
A major reason for its abiding popularity is obvious: it’s a great show with memorable songs, exciting choreography, and endearing characters. But that doesn’t account for the myriad ways Fiddler has seeped into many cultures, glowing with radiant meanings that far exceed the satisfactions of even the best Broadway blockbusters. Fiddler was the first work of American popular culture to offer a general, post-Holocaust audience an affectionate image of the Yiddish Old Country, proudly celebrating the world Ashkenazi Jews had come from. For Jewish Americans from that back- ground, the show was an exhilarating coming-out party. Spectators wrote to the producers to thank them for making them unashamed to be Jewish. At that time, it was nothing less than astonishing to see characters on a popular stage lighting Shabbos candles or getting married under a chuppah; until then, such images belonged only to specific communal Jewish spaces, unless they were being played for laughs in mainstream venues.
Fiddler helped frame postwar Jewish identity and memory in the United States, and beyond—and the way non-Jews understood them. At the same time, running on a parallel track of universality, the show spoke as deeply to all kinds of audiences—to anyone familiar with the tensions between steadfastness and flexibility, cultural pride and adaptation, the agonizing loss and hopeful possibilities of change. Which is to say, everyone. Joe Stein loved to tell the story of attending the first production in Tokyo, where a producer asked him how Americans could understand the show since it was, after all, “so Japanese.” The show’s essential gesture is dialectical—on the one hand, on the other hand, as Tevye often says when he considers his wrenching options. Having transported old Yiddish stories into the form of amid-century musical, Fiddler is a work of cultural adaptation—and it is about cultural adaptation. And it thus remains open—indeed, inviting—to every generation to engage it anew.
Alisa Solomon is the author of the award-winning book, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, and a professor at Colombia University.