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Fiddler's bottle dance and the transformation of "tradition"
Abstract
The Bottle Dance in Fiddler on the Roof was inspired by what the director/choreographer Jerome Robbins called "field research" at Orthodox Jewish weddings. Reshaped and expanded by Robbins's masterful showbiz sensibility, it became a show-stopping number - and, thus transformed, filtered back out of the musical into Jewish celebrations to confer "tradition. "
Although it claims little historical connection to klezmer music or Yiddish culture, the city of Berlin has hosted one of the most dynamic klezmer scenes of the past 20 years. This article analyses ways that place has been made to function as a meaningful unit in the music and lyrics of several artists living and working in Berlin, localising the transnational klezmer revival discourse by rooting the city in their music. Building on Adam Krims’ theory of ‘urban ethos’, I explore how the contemporary city is emplaced in its klezmer music, arguing that these processes of signification allow us to hear contrasting articulations of Berlin. The native Berliners ?Shmaltz! frame their city as an escapist gateway, the American songwriter Daniel Kahn sees a site of painfully unresolved history and the internationalist Knoblauch Klezmer band locate Berlin as an embodiment of playfully multilingual performativity.
This article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the Shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of Shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the Shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.
in the early to mid-twentieth century, modern dance played a critical role in assimilating Jewish bodies into the majority and replacing negative images with positive ones. in contrast, postmodern dances by Jewish choreographers have rejected universality for specificity, investigated the politics of difference, and issued sharp social critiques. still, most do not delve too deeply into stereotyping. this essay considers how three contemporary dance and performance artists—Lawrence Goldhuber, Rebecca Pappas, and Steven Cohen—use spectacle, degradation, and irreverence to make corporeal and performative interventions in a bodily history of anti-semitism, and to consider the impact of this history on their own bodies and identities. Goldhuber's When the World Smells Like Bacon (2001), Pappas's Thumbnail (Monster 0) (2006), and Cohen's Cleaning Time (Vienna): a Shandeh un a Charpeh (A Shame and a Disgrace) (2007) viscerally confront difference, victimization, and power through public acts and radically Jewish physicalities.
Practically everyone has seen the prize-winning musical about the loveable people in that little village in Old Russia called Anetevka [sic]. Well, as far as we're concerned, 'Fiddler' made a GOOF!" Mad magazine's irreverent parody of the Broadway show (1964) and film (1971) "takes this famous musical about the problems of people who had nothing, and updates it with a version about the problems of people who have everything--mainly America's Upper Middle Class." 1 This 1973 spoof ends with the people of Anatevka arising from the depths of an American Jewish unconscious to haunt the nightmares of their dysfunctional descendents. Don't blame us for your problems, they say. Fiddler on the Roof, as theatre, cinema, and comic, is a prime example of how the popular arts of American Jewish ethnography have been used to imagine Europe. Before the Holocaust, anthropologist Franz Boas tried to protect Jews from ethnography, because he saw cultural difference as a liability in the fight against anthropological theories of race. During the same period, progressive social worker Boris D. Bogen used the popular arts of ethnography to celebrate Jewish cultural diversity in the service of a more humane approach to Americanization. For Bogen, the Jewish diaspora offered a model for American cultural diversity. After the Holocaust, the relationship between professional and popular uses of ethnography shifted. Boas's worst fears had been realized. Race science had been the handmaiden to genocide. Denying Jewish cultural specificity and avoiding ethnography had not worked in the way that Boas hoped. What role might ethnography now play in the wake of the destruction of European Jewish communities? For the first time, American anthropologists, several of them students of Boas, made East European Jewish culture the subject of sustained research. 2 The 1 Mort Drucker and Frank Jacobs, "Antenna on the Roof," Mad 1, 156 (January 1973), 4. This comic strip appears in the "Fiddler Made a Goof Department" of the magazine. 2 Many of Boas's students were Jews, but they had chosen to study the Winnebago (Paul Radin), Ojibwa (Ruth Landes), Pueblo (Ruth Bunzel), and Dahomeyans (Melville and Frances Herskovits).
To assess the consumer culture of American Jewish immigrants of a century ago, we might therefore turn to Yiddish folkways to assess what notions of consumption these immigrants brought with them. Yiddish folklore references consumerism extensively. Consider but one example: the familiar saying Toyre iz di beste skhoyre , "Torah is the best merchandise". This and other proverbs reflect the extent to which consumerism was a foundational practice in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews made their living as makers or sellers of things. American Jewish consumer culture employs the social practices of buying and giving to negotiate across cultural boundaries. This is exemplified by greeting cards and other phenomena that address the so-called December Dilemma - i.e., the coincidence of Christmas and Chanukkah and the challenges this poses, especially to people in interfaith relationships and families. Keywords: American Jewish immigrants; consumer cultures; December Dilemma; Toyre iz di beste skhoyre
