Following Broadway's opening night performance of "Fiddler on the Roof," an old man who had fled a Russian shtetl — later abandoning his religion and Americanizing his name — came backstage to see his son, the show's director and choreographer. Throwing his arms around Jerome Robbins and weeping, he asked, "How did you know all that?"
One might put the same question to Alisa Solomon, author of the glorious "Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of 'Fiddler on the Roof.'"
In more than 30 years of reading, writing and thinking about theater as an actor, critic and fan, I've never read a book on the subject that taught or moved me as much — reflecting Solomon's ability to weave gobs of meticulous research into a compelling, beautifully written story about the musical she persuasively argues has seeped into our culture like no other, before or since.
In her introduction, Solomon notes that "the show's essential gesture is dialectical: it looks backward and forward." True to that insight, she bookends the middle section of "Wonders" — which takes us from the creation of "Fiddler" through its initial Broadway run — by opening with a section looking back toward writer Sholem Aleichem's creation of Tevye and concluding with a section exploring the ongoing relevance of "Fiddler" since its 1964 Broadway debut.
Long before "Fiddler," Sholem Aleichem had envisioned bringing the story of Tevye and his daughters to the stage himself.
It didn't happen, and Sholem Aleichem never made it big in New York theater. Solomon explains why: while honoring the old world he was from, Sholem Aleichem failed to acknowledge the pull of the new one.
Conversely, Robbins' "Fiddler" would, in Solomon's memorable phrase, devise a "forward-looking way of looking back." To adopt Tevye's own trademark weighing of opposites:
On the one hand, "Fiddler" embraces an idealized past: a legacy that Solomon — who, like Tevye, manages to be both tough-minded and emotional — suggests "might not have been acknowledged had it not burst." Anatevka became the "antisuburb" for American Jews concerned they were losing their identity as they assimilated.
On the other hand, "Fiddler" celebrates the new world to which Jews had emigrated, in which daughters might successfully bend tradition while honoring it — and, crucially, in which a people threatened with extinction not only survives, but also thrives.
Solomon also demonstrates how even in the decades before "Fiddler," the Americanization of Sholem Aleichem's stories — including dramatizations by blacklisted populists, during the red-baiting McCarthy era — made those stories both Jewish and universal. Recast, places like Anatevka embodied an idealized Jewish experience that could serve as a portal, allowing all Americans to recover a usable past even as they celebrated how far they had traveled and what they had become.
For theater geeks like me, Solomon's chapters on how Robbins and his design team squared that circle between Jewish shtetl and Broadway musical will be the highlight of the book: It's detailed and informed, reflecting Solomon's many years on the aisle as a theater critic.
But it's the stirring final section of "Wonders" that's likely to most grab the general reader.
There are chapters here on watershed productions of "Fiddler" in Israel and Poland, but the standout is a riveting account of a 1969 amateur production in a Brooklyn junior high, caught in what Solomon describes "as one of the ugliest conflicts New York City has ever known": the teacher strike pitting Jews and African-Americans against each other in a power struggle for control of the school system.
Solomon's story of how a dedicated white teacher and his nonwhite students forged their own Anatevka — amid the hate-filled assailants who tried to destroy it — is first-rate journalism. It's also a stirring testament to why theater matters — making it a microcosm of this thrilling, must-read book.
IF YOU GO
Who: Alisa Solomon
When: 7 p.m. Nov. 21
Where: Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave.