Metaphor in Fiddler on the Roof: Chapter 3 Part 5 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Thou hast chosen us from among the Nations–Why did you pick on the Jews? –Yiddish Proverb

In Fiddler on the Roof life = a fiddler balanced on the roof. The Jewish characters assume he will manage to stay there forever. (From a vantage many decades later, however, the audience is aware that time is his invisible enemy, dooming him to fall.)
In Anatevka, the site of the musical, both Christians and Jews repress time in ways that make their conflict inevitable. The Hassidism of the latter is a Kabbalistic version of Judaism that developed largely in the Middle Ages and thereafter. As already mentioned in regard to Pi, its theorizing reached into stage seven. A pervasive reminder of this in the movie is the metaphor of life as a teetering musician (since music formed a major part of that mysticism). At stage two, Tevye, however, responds to that dancer as a mere Trickster (rather than as a harbinger of a chaotic cosmos). Tevye’s faith rests in the stage-two unthinking taboos of “Tradition.” Shouted by him, that word introduces a series of still photographs, showing the symbols of the faith as timeless givens to preserve Anatevka–the village that was.

Yiddish Narratives

Under the nom de plume “Sholem Aleykhem,” Sholem Rabinowitz wrote eight stories and a play about Tevye, his milkman. Rabinowitz used the dairyman’s name for a fictional character, despite the protests of the real Tevye (Waite-Goldberg 144). Presumably, the name was itself significant, or Rabinowitz might have been more considerate. Seth Wolitz notes that “Tevye” contains the root “Tov,” meaning “good” (Wolitz 517). In all stages of the Tevye saga, the milkman is called “good” by various characters. Indeed, he figuratively represents a virtuous but unfortunate individual. The allegory resembles Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” another character whose very name betokens virtue, and also suffers for it. A bureaucrat, Rabinowitz was satirizing his stage-two neighbors from his own stage four. An embodiment of stage two, Tevye perceives his misfortunes as God’s “mischief,” as if the Divine were a Trickster.

Although such faith is very primitive, Tevye maintains it so staunchly and courageously that Rabinowitz probably alludes through him to the Jewish legend of the lamed-vav, 36 saints whose persevering virtue preserves the whole globe from God’s Fiery Wrath. Only He knows their identities. Any righteous born loser (schlemiel ) such as Tevye may be one of them (Gittlemen 60). Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown ended by losing “Faith,” his wife. Even more disturbing, Tevye’s daughter “Schprintze” (hope) commits suicide (Butwin and Butwin 85). Yet, unlike Goodman Brown, Tevye maintains his pious optimism–a truly saintly perseverance.
Some Tevye stories are built on Biblical typology. Characteristically, immediately after he prays that God’s messenger, the Messiah, might enter on a white horse, the constable arrives on one and exiles Tevye from his home. In a further irony, the constable’s command, “Get thee out” (also the title of the story) quotes God’s words to Abraham, beginning his tribe’s wandering that has been almost the perpetual condition of the Jewish people (Butwin and Butwin 90). More surprising, when Tevye’s daughter abandons her Christian husband and returns to Judaism, her reconciliation with her father adapts Christ’s parable of the Prodigal except that a daughter is substituted for a son and Judaism for Christianity (Wolitz 521-22).

Expression of time, place, and religious ideology is also affected by language, in this case Yiddish. Rabinowitz, for example, calls Tevye Der Milkhiger, literally “the Milky One” (Waite-Goldberg 144). This whimsy involves a religious metaphor underlying the collapse of Tevye’s plan to wed his eldest daughter to the town butcher. As Wolitz explains, “...the Lazar-Wolf-Tsaytl marriage was doomed from the start, for in Jewish kosher food laws you cannot mix dairy (Tevye the dairyman) with meat (Lazar-Wolf the butcher)” (Wolitz 518).

The metaphors uphold the Law: the goodness of the faithful, the blessedness of accepting misfortunes as divine tests, and even the rules of kosher cooking, which set the Jews aside as a Holy People. The tone is sprightly. It mediates between village piety and slightly more-worldly readers. The former is respected for fidelity to Judaism, but deprecated as countrified and quaint.

Already in Rabinowitz’s tales, a tension arises between fidelity and assimilation. He was a rabiner, not a rabbi, but a government-appointed, semi-religious official, mediating between Hassidic Jews and the larger society. Since so many of the lines of Fiddler on the Roof (both staged and filmed) come from his stories, his relatively conservative version of the struggle between tradition and progress mixes with significantly different later changes.

Broadway Musical

The musical’s principal addition that found its way into the movie was the sustained metaphor of a Fiddler on the Roof, perceived only by Tevye and the audience. The Fiddler acts as a transition between the scenes. In this role, he substitutes for “Sholem Aleykhem,” the narrator of the stories, but with a significant difference: the Fiddler plays instead of speaking. He employs “nigunim –wordless Jewish spirituals ... a practice of the Khassidim [Hassidic Jews] in their mystical approach to the Godhead”(Wolitz 526). It implies that musical patterns underlie life and join it to the divine–an idea with resonances of stage seven, which is equally flexible in finding the patterns of chaos.

After deciding on this sustained metaphor, Jerry Robbins and the rest of the team accepted Chagall’s 1908 painting of it as its definitive representation, used on posters advertising the drama (Stone 17). It shows the Fiddler (ecstatic life) on the rooftop serenading a corpse (death)–appropriately since (aside from non-linear equations) stage seven can only be expressed in paradoxical metaphors.

In musical and film, Tevye explains the trope of precarious balance thus: “in our little village of Anatevka, you might say that we are all fiddlers on the roof trying to scratch out a simple tune...And how do we keep our balance? Tradition!” Tradition is the vehicle of inertia that must decline, so that the characters may reach at least the stage of the New York audience.

For this, Christianity appears more sympathetically in musical and movie than in the stories. In the dramatized betrothal scene, gentile and Jew dance together. Rabinowitz gives Tevye’s Christian son-in-law the symbolic name “Galegan (Russian for hooligan)” (Wolitz 519). In musical and movie, however, Galegan is a sensitive, handsome, intelligent Judeophile. For Rabinowitz, the daughter can only be forgiven if she abandons her husband. This requirement was not liberal enough for Broadway, but no one at first knew what should take its place. Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for Fiddler recalls: “I think it was Joe [Stein] who came up with that extraordinary solution of having Tevye say, ‘God be with you!’ to the air. He says the words but not to the daughter” (Stone 15).

Hollywood Extravaganza

Extending this liberalism, Golda goes to a Christian church to find what has become of her third daughter. Set to one of John Williams’ more-dissonant themes, a close up shows a glowering icon. Autumn leaves fall in the background. Deeply embarrassed to be there, she enters the interior gloom of the church, which mirrors her own despair at losing a child to Christianity, but as Wolitz remarks, no Hassidic Jew would have entered a church in the first place (Wolitz 531). Despite his name, the movie’s director, Norman Jewison, is a Methodist, who could hardly be expected to appreciate all details of Hassidic life. He and his staff based the look of the film on considerable research, and modeled the coloring on that of Chagal. In academy-award winning cinematography, Oswald Morris shot through nylon stockings “to accent the earth tones” (Eastman 105). Nevertheless, their overriding concern was that the characters be comprehensible to multi-ethnic moviegoers. Consequently, the cinematic Golda must love her daughter enough to overcome aversion for Christianity.

To guide the audience toward emotional understanding, the very seasons empathize with the characters. These decline from the simple joys of spring and summer to the third daughter’s autumnal apostasy and the family’s expulsion in winter. Jewish festivals punctuate the sequence with an emphatic convergence of religion, period, and the idealized space of Anatevka. Above all, the mood is nostalgic like the song, “Sunrise, sunset,” which muses over the quick passage of time. Tevye longs to move more deeply into sacred (a)temporality. To him, the greatest joy of being rich would be spending seven hours a day (the sacred number) discussing the scriptures–a perpetual Sabbath. Winning the audience’s sympathy for this alien way of life gives them a taste of at least stage six.

Although the film’s nostalgia paces any resistance to change in the audience, as period piece the movie also wakes the audience’s awareness of time. They know that Anatevka has fallen but that exile in America is almost a happy ending. Themselves probably either emigrants or the descendents of emigrants, the audience accept the characters as quasi-ancestors, reminders that their families have survived–and this survival betokens future continuity despite enormous change. Consequently, more clearly than the preceding ones, this film functions as a therapeutic metaphor: one that reconciles humanity to adaptation and growth amidst twentieth-century catastrophes.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 6

OPEN THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN THRESHOLD SYSTEMS MAIN PAGE IN A NEW WIHNDOW