By Steven Jonas
Two days ago I saw the Yiddish-language version of the classic Broadway musical, "Fiddler on the Roof."
I had been fortunate enough to have seen the original production, with
the great Zero Mostel playing the lead character, Tevye, on Broadway in
the 1960s. I had also seen the movie that was made of it in 1971 as well
as the recent revival on Broadway. The Yiddish version was
first created in Israel, back in the 1960s. It has been performed
infrequently since then, never in the United States. In the various
English-language productions that I have seen, "Fiddler" has always
been a mixture of
musical comedy, dance (particularly in the recent Broadway revival) with
some drama. In Yiddish, the show becomes quite something else again.
I
do not, unfortunately, speak Yiddish. The last of my ancestors to
arrive in the U.S., my maternal grandfather Jacob Kyzor, came here from
England in 1895. His parents were Russian Jews how somehow got to the
East End of London in the 1860s, but Grandpa Jacob did not talk about
them. They presumably spoke Yiddish and Grandpa presumably did too. But
by the time I knew him, in the 1940s, he spoke only (unaccented)
English. His wife, Grandma Lil, was the descendant of Sephardim who
arrived on these shores in 1849 from Holland, so there was no Yiddish
there either.
As
for my father's side, his grandfather and grandmother arrived from
Poland (the city of Wroclaw, in those days Breslau in the Prussian
Empire) in 1867. They presumably spoke Yiddish, but the language did not
make its way down neither through my paternal grandfather Henry nor his
wife, Rena, a German Jew (and they certainly did not speak Yiddish).
Why do I go through all of this family history? Because while I do not
speak Yiddish and am an atheist and a member of the City Congregation
for Humanistic Judaism in New York City, I have a very strong Jewish
identity inherited from my father Prof. Harold J. Jonas. Regular readers
of mine will perhaps remember a recent column which consisted primarily
of a republication of a paper of his on the problem of the Jewish refugees from the Nazis in Europe in 1939, with no place to go.
For
the "Fiddler"-in-Yiddish audience, which consisted almost entirely of
Russian and English speakers, there were very well-done Russian and
English super-titles. It happens that I speak some German so I did
understand a word of the Yiddish here and there. As to the nature of the
show, as I said above, in English it is "a mixture of musical comedy,
dance (particularly in the recent Broadway revival) with some drama." In
Yiddish, for me at least it is quite something else again. It becomes a
tragedy with some humorous highlights. Why? Because in Yiddish, for
many of us, even non-Yiddish speakers, a language of impend doom, the
story is driven towards its tragic ending. That is, on three days'
notice all of the Jewish families have lived in the fictional village of
Anetevka in Ukraine for several centuries, are given notice to leave,
on the order of the Czar. It was to be forcibly implemented by groups of
Ukrainians (presumably ancestors of the Nazis who fought alongside the
Wehrmacht in World War II and currently form part of the U.S.-supported
Ukrainian government.)
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Source: OpEdNews
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