Fiddler on the Roof, which opened in 1964, for almost ten years the longest running musical in Broadway history, is so enduring in its appeal, that it is still playing somewhere in the world every single day, more than any other show.
This story about a family in flux between old religious and cultural traditions and new ways — in large part the changing social norms for women — has found a musical home in multiple cultures around the world. As one theater critic points out, each one feeling the story is specifically about them.
Fiddler has seen popular productions in Japan, Thailand, and the Netherlands — as well as in an all-black high school in Brooklyn at a time of enormous interracial tension there.
Everyone from opera legend Bryon Terfel to the Temptations straight out of Motown have covered the familiar songs.
Yes, this musical is a universal tale about families and societies in transition, but it is also a particular story about a particular place and time — the Pale of the Settlement of Imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Based on Tevye and his Daughters and other tales by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.
The Pale of the Settlement, where millions of American Jewish people can trace their ancestry, was a large territory of czarist Russia where Jews were allowed to live throughout the 19th century until restrictions were lifted after the revolution in 1917. The 1.5 million Jews that were confined within this territory were subjected to shifting, stringent anti-Jewish regulation: periodically eased, and then re-imposed, made harsher. Jewish rights to lease land and keep taverns were rescinded, and the Pale of Settlement reduced in size, forcing immediate exodus of Jews from centuries-old homes.
Following one period of relaxation of restrictions under Czar Alexander II, after his assassination in 1881, the persecution of Jews escalated: Jews were barred from villages and the ownership of agricultural land.
Government-sanctioned pogroms — from the Russian word meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” when peasant attackers looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property and raped women. When many individuals were beaten and/or murdered.
Inspiration for these vicious attacks: the ideology of anti-Semitism, which, we are told, blamed the Jews for weakened economic conditions and political instability — even diseases — in addition to the claim that the Jews murdered Jesus.
Fiddler on the Roof is also the haunting story of this — the precarious scraping together of a life under harrowing conditions in the fictional underfed, overworked, little town of Anatevka in the Ukraine. The constant presence of Russian Cossacks. The state sanctioned beatings and burnings. The forced departures.
And it well could be the story of my family and my husband’s family as well.
It is the story of my father’s father, Louis Greenberg, who was somehow allowed to leave Shepetovka, Ukraine — a Hasidic Jewish center where one of my great grandfathers was a rebbe, a Holy man — to go study at a Yeshiva, a Jewish learning center, in Kiev. His secondary school studies were cut short by a draft notice from the Russian Amy, that harsh mandatory 25-year military conscription forced disproportionately on Jewish young men.
His parents located landsmen, or town folk, who had already emigrated to Boston to sponsor him. Louis worked for them as a tailor and was able to bring the rest of his family over before legal immigration was slowed to a trickle in the next decade.
Those friends and neighbors left behind, who either could not or did not choose to leave, were slaughtered in the Holocaust — 4,000 or more of them.
It is the story of my grandfather Abraham Stein, orphaned by influenza at age seven in Warsaw, sent to be an indentured worker on a farm, leaving Poland ahead of more pogroms and persecution, able to get to London with his sister, and then to the US to work in the textile industry. Who founded a Jewish family in Adams, Massachusetts, whose multi-generational reunion I attended last summer.
And it is the story of my husband’s grandmother, Rose Berkovitz, who, when in the throes of advanced dementia, would wake up screaming about having been beaten, memories of a pogrom or pogroms in Romania from which she escaped when her father got to Chicago, worked and saved enough money to bring his wife and three daughters over.
It is not the story of Emma Lazurus, the Jewish-American poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, and humanitarian who wrote the sonnet The New Colossus, the words engraved on a bronze plaque inside the entry way to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free:
The wretched refuse of your teaming shore,
Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
But it was expressly for these Eastern European immigrants, refugees from oppression and violence, that her bold words of universal welcome were penned, and her brief life’s work of liberation was dedicated. For the Greenbergs, Steins, Berkowitzs, who made the journey across the Atlantic in steerage to safety, and through that one writer has described as “the awful banging shut of the Golden Door.” Arriving speaking only or mostly Yiddish.
Taking jobs as peddlers and tailors, launderers and produce sellers.
Whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now the teachers, doctors, social workers, lawyers, artists, musicians, business owners, mothers, fathers, Unitarian ministers three and four generations hence.
Emma Lazurus, in contrast, born in the middle of the 19th century in New York City, was a fourth- or fifth-generation American, descended from some of the first Sephardic Jewish immigrants to arrive in what once was called New Amsterdam. Feared as “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” and potentially an economic burden on the colony, they were only allowed to remain if they could prove they would not become a burden, “but be supported by their own nation.”
Emma had heard the stories of the Spanish Inquisition, and how the Jews first fled to what was then called the New World, to places like Brazil, but by the time she was born in 1849, hers was a beyond-comfortable and sheltered life.
Her father was a rich sugar refiner who biographers tell us ranked among the founders of the Knickerbocker Club, the elite social club to which multiple Vanderbilts and Franklin Roosevelt would later belong.
Her family owned a large home in the center of New York and a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and Emma received a classical education from private tutors.
Her immediate family, one literary historian discloses, was hardly known for its liberality. While relatives contributed to the Union cause during the Civil War, her father did not. While he was not among the New Yorkers who gave money to support the confederacy, his business depended on the slave-owning economy of the South, and his Louisiana business partner had been cited for abusing his slaves.
Her father’s wealth and connections enabled Emma to publish two volumes of poetry as a teenager, corresponding extensively with Unitarian transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson — as a mentor and teacher — traveling to Concord to meet him and others in his circle. And while he did not include any of her poems in an anthology he edited — much to her chagrin, she did continue to visit him and his family, and walked around Walden Pond with Unitarian minister and Thoreau biographer William Ellery Channing, who gifted her with a copy of his book and Thoreau’s pocket compass used on his walking excursions.
Even as a young adult she wrote prolifically: a novel about Goethe, essays, translations, some of her work winning international acclaim.
Her journey from a largely indifferent and barely affiliated Jewish woman was one of awakening:
In the 1870s, when word began to come of anxious times for Jews in Germany where there were increasingly anti-Semitic speeches and broadsides, petitions to repeal newly granted civil rights and on the streets of Berlin, Jews being mocked and assaulted.
And in New York and other places in this country, stories of Jews being denied entry to hotels and clubs.
By the 1880s, she had learned of the miserable and terrifying plight of the Jews in Russia, and the mass exodus that would follow, thousands each month. One and a half million in total. While she might well have been able to “pass” as an assimilated, protected Jew from an accepted old family, at a moment in America’s social history when many Jews sidestepped or finessed their identity, as writer Esther Schor observes, Emma Lazurus declared herself to be Jewish.
Having been exposed to Unitarianism and the emerging secular Ethical Culture Society, she came to return to a progressive Judaism, whose teachings she saw as placing great importance on the just treatment of immigrants, with its sacred book, the Torah, commanding no less than 36 times concern for the stranger in our midst.
Increasingly, her writing, including letters to and articles for major newspapers, reflected a more explicitly Jewish affiliation with an overriding concern for the plight of the second and then the third great wave of Jewish immigrants — whose religious practices, culture, and fortunes were far different than her own.
“Until this cloud passes,” Lazurus wrote, “I have no thought, no passion, no desire, save for my own people.”
Emma’s changing attitude, her embrace of the cause of the just and humane treatment of immigrants, was not only evident in her writing. It was reflected in her work with, and financial support of, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid society, her visits to the Schiff Refuge — a refugee camp on Ward’s Island.
She taught them English, trained them for jobs, and found them employment. And advocated for them in the mainstream media.
Emma Lazurus was 34 years old when she wrote The New Colossus, a sonnet of radical welcome, in 1883 as part of a fundraiser for installing the Statue of Liberty. To raise money, many well-known American writers such as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were asked to write something. She very reluctantly wrote her contribution to the effort.
While at the time of her writing this famous poem on immigration, the gift from France to the United States of the Statue of Liberty had nothing to do with immigrants, Emma saw the huge woman bearing a torch in New York harbor — the Mother of All Exiles — as watching for and over the newly arrived, offering them and all of those to come an unequivocal welcome.
Her poem was the only one read during a large celebration to raise money for the pedestal.
Three years later, in 1886, the statue was packed in 214 crates, shipped across the Atlantic, and installed. Sadly, Emma died a year later at only 38 years old from Hodgkin’s Disease. She did not live to see her poem given a permanent home on the statue’s pedestal 20 years after she wrote it.
Nor did she live to see her aspiration that “until all are free, none of us are free,” come to pass.
Scholars of Emma Lazurus’s work and life differ about whether her fervent activism on behalf of refugees and émigrés was limited to the suffering of fellow Jews, however different in background from her — or whether, indeed, as biographer Esther Schor believes, Emma’s bond and duty was to all who might be seeking safety and opportunity here.
There is no indication, for example, that she ever spoke of the Chinese Exclusion Act that had more immediate impact on the far shore of the Pacific Ocean.
But if the words of her famous poem bear proof, they say:
From her beacon hand glows world-wide welcome.
This poem, that on the occasion of the 50th birthday of the mounting of the Statue of Liberty, was printed in school textbooks and children around the country were taught to recite it.
This poem, whose last five lines were set to music by songwriter Irving Berlin and sung on Broadway.
This poem, which still graces one of the world’s most famous statues, with millions of visitors each year.
This poem, which has lately been used by those who would further limit the kind and number of émigrés we allow to squeeze through an ever-narrowly-opened Golden Door. Who cynically speak only of the conditions of the welcome for newcomers (Europeans who were in some way sponsored) the year long ago when Emma Lazurus wrote what was then and is still a prophetic call:
The call to take up the obligation to bring liberty to others.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that Emma Lazurus worked with began with the mission to help refugees because they were Jewish, when no one, or almost no one, else would give them assistance.
Today, this same organization, still called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, continues to help refugees, no matter what their religion, ethnicity, or nationality: because WE are Jewish they declare, and because protecting those who must flee persecution to save their lives is an outgrowth of their Jewish experience and a reflection of their Jewish values.
The gunman who invaded, shot, and killed worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh this past year did so as much, if not more, out of his hate for their support for this agency, helping some of the 70 million people worldwide forced to leave their homes, than out of his hatred for Jews. Who were fighting this administration’s attempts to systematically dismantle America’s refugee program and turn prejudice into policy.
Out of their shared Jewish belief in Tikkun Olam — repairing the world.
Hear, again, Emma’s enduring sonnet:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free:
The wretched refuse of your teaming shore,
Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
In the words of biographer Eve Merriam:
Be not afraid of this darkness, I lift my lamp, the lamp of liberty, the steady glow of love. Shadows disappear; the door is opened wide; light shines in, golden with future promise… Here and now, the golden door of dream leading to deed, of freedom blazoning clear and bright, forever, for all.
(Delivered to Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville on March 15, 2020. Audio courtesy of UUCJ.)
