Roof Without a Fiddler

If I've looked at the calendar correctly, tonight at sundown sees the beginning of the new year in the Jewish calendar, marking Rosh Hashanah and leading up to Yom Kippur. With that in mind, I wanted to post about a movie that TCM ran last year in the run-up to Hanukkah but that I couldn't quite save for that long since YouTube's cloud DVR gets rid of movies after nine months: Tevya.

I assume most people have heard of the Broadway musical turned into a movie, Fiddler on the Roof. It tells some of Sholem Aleichem's stories about Tevye, a dairyman living in one of the shtetls, Jewish villages in what are now places like Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland, but at the time would have been in the Russian Empire with the heavy influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Sholem Aleichem himself grew up in this environment, speaking Yiddish, and wrote a whole bunch of stories about Tevye, a lot more than are used in either movie. Eventually, however, Sholem Aleichem emigrated to New York to escape the pogroms; one can presume that a lot of the stories are based on what Sholem Aleichem knew.

Now, I have to admit here that I haven't seen Fiddler on the Roof in full; I find the whole "Tradition" number right at the beginning of the movie to be off-putting enough that combined with the long running time I've never actually sat down to watch the whole thing. Reading synopses, however, the musical and the movie Tevya tell different stories from the set of stories Sholem Aleichem wrote about the character. Tevya, of course, is also not a musical and is a much less happier story. Finally, the other important thing to note is that it was made in America in Yiddish. Up until World War II, there was a reasonably thriving community of Jews who had emigrated to America from Eastern Europe, where Yiddish was a lingua franca among the Jews. Like many immigrants, they kept using the language in their new country, and there were newsapers and even a Yiddish-language stage theater scene. (Sidney Lumet's father Bruch was a prominent performer in the Yiddish theater.)

As for the story, in Tevya, the dairyman lives in a small mostly Jewish village with one daughter Chavah, and another daughter Zeitel who has already married and moved in with her new family, although she returns for a visit with her children. Chavah as fallen in love with Fedya, which is a problem, since Fedya is... a Gentile. Tevya knows that someday the Gentiles are liable to turn on the Jews, and even asks Chavah which side she'll take when it comes down to that. Chavah doesn't care and marries for love, leading Tevya to declare her dead to him.

Father and daughter find themselves unable to reconcile and go through one heartache after another, until the Tsar declares a pogrom and orders the Jews to go somewhere else. This is what might finally bring the father and daughter back together, but it is of course in the tragic sense that they have to leave the only home they really knew for an uncertain future.

The Yiddish theater was based out of New York, so the indoor scenes were filmed at the old Biograph Studios in New York with the place of the Jewish village being taken by a farm somewhere out on Long Island. This being before World War II and the move to suburbia after the war, Long Island was a much more rural place so they didn't have to go so far to get to the farms, even if the farms don't really look like eastern Europe.

Tevya is a reasonably well-made movie, at least for its budget. Since the Yiddish theater was very much a minority thing, it, like all the other minority cultural movements of that time had much smaller talent pools and budgets than anything Hollywood -- even Poverty Row -- could get. If you've seen Fiddler on the Roof, then I think you'll definitely want to see Tevya to compare and contrast. But even if, like me, you haven't seen the musical, Tevya is still worth a watch.