TEVYE SERVED RAW AND WITHOUT SHMALTZ
Isabelle Rozenbaumas
Since I was in my early teens, theater has always been about the real life. France was the place to be if you wanted to immerse yourself into theater in the 60’s. It was the great era of the “théâtre populaire”, the “elitist theater for all” promoted by Antoine Vitez. In the first grades of high school, students of 12 or 13 years old were given season tickets not only for the Sunday matinees, but also for evening performances that would allow them to escape from home and tackle the Parisian night while going to the Theater. My theater was the Théâtre de l’Est Parisien, located in the still working class district, the 20th Arrondissement, and then led by Guy Rétoré. This was the place where I discovered Sophocles, Molière and Shakespeare, Brecht, Tchekhov, Goethe and Racine, Ionesco and Beckett, and later Thomas Bernhard. But not Sholem Aleichem whose name I don’t even remember having heard then.
This rigorous and almost ascetic theater probably cultivated or addressed my taste for sober, dry and even austere relationship to the text. “Teatro povero” was unknown to me at this time as were the Russian theater of Constantin Stanislavski, or Grotowski’s physical theater that were not popularized in France in these years. I don’t remember having laughed a lot during these performances, but I do remember going out from the theatre almost farshikert with words, intelligence, vision, passion, love, desire, political views, and all these connections that make you think of thousand things that you want to know and explore, and leave you thirsty, hungry and open for new real life adventures.
NO SHMALTZ FOR ME
Except for my plate where cream, butter, oil, and all fish schmaltzy are welcome, when it comes to show business I would preferably avoid any needless fat. I am trying to prepare the reader for a difficult confession. I never got to fully appreciate musicals. Not because I don’t love music and dance, on the contrary, but because of the almost unavoidable swelling of everything relating to the expression of emotions musicals most often display. Pathos is not something I give easily in. The second obstacle for me to really enjoy musicals is the systematic use of clichés pertaining to the genre, cultural common places that are consistent with the pathos previously mentioned and that magnify everything false in believing and preconception. I will not enter in the subject of American musicals as a Jewish cultural genre, neither in pondering on what is a Jewish musical. Enough to know that when, years ago, my husband very sweetly invited me for one of my birthdays to a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, he had to endure my sharp tongue, critiques coming from a now old Yiddishist, a purist that only the authentic Golda and the certified Tevye could have satisfied.
The most embarrassing part of my confession is still to come. As far as I remember, it has always been a painful experience for me to see caricatures of Jewish traditional males aka “ frume yidn fun a mol” shaking in rhythm their peyes and the corners of their frog coats – sometimes with talleysim and tsitsit involved (for the same price) – while dancing in choreographies halfway between Russian folklore, mimic Hassidic dance and some sluggish kazatshok. How excellent the performance, and most often, actors and dancers on and off Broadway are pretty professional, my heart was not melting and the image shared by the authors, the producers, and apparently the public of shtetl life got me distressed. Everything tuned to my expectations seemed originated directly from Sholem Aleichem's keen observation. The only such dance that has brought me a good laugh is the parody of Rabbi Jacob, directed by Gérard Oury. Parody has always something very serious.
A SERIOUS WOMAN – OR Sheyne-Sheyndl a feminist role-model
In search for the voice of the genuine characters created by Sholem Aleichem in his popular short stories, I would once a year since I live in New York try to attend his yortsayt, the annual celebration in his honor where, to fulfill his will, one of his stories is read amid other talks. So when I sat down in the modest Playroom Theater to see Tevye Served Raw and read in its presentation program that this performance has grown from the yearly readings Shane Baker, Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman, who wrote and directed this show, have presented in this context I was in the same time comforted about the loyalty to the language, the characters, the prose of Sholem Aleichem and curious if not anxious of some static and non theatrical exercise. Because, after all, I love the fever and excitement of singing and dancing on stage and long for humoresque or dramatic reinvention of everything written in Yiddish.
What I saw was unexpected. Not that the actors were dancing or having much movement on the scene, but they genuinely impersonated plausible characters that sounded not only like the humorous characters immortalized in the canonic texts of the father of the Yiddish literature, but like the human beings full of wit that we have had the ineffable grace to know, Allan Rickman’s father or my own mother, and all these figures that Sholem Aleichem had carefully observed, loved and from which he has derived archetypes and not stereotypes. Overloaded with stereotypes gigantic vessels are at Titanic risk. In keeping the stage at human size, theater speaks to our uniqueness.
What Yiddish literature does better than any Jewish literature in any other language is to paint the conflict between tradition and modernity in its own cultural idiom and on its own terms. From the profusion of Sholem's stories, the performance presents a number of scenes that the audience of Fiddler on the Roof is probably not familiar with. I will only insist here on the place of women in these stories, be it one of Tevye’s daughters who crosses the Rubicon and converts to Russian Orthodoxy to follow her amoureux, questioning her father’s faith in such way that Tevye upholds a dialogue on the universal and the particular in Judaism, or be it Sheyne-Sheyndl, the brain that allows Menachem-Mendel's business failures to develop into literature, as did probably his wife Olga for her Shalom Rabinovitz, the author of these stories. Allen Rickman embodies here a Tevye torn apart who would soften the most hardened daughter seeking for escape from the weight of tradition and narrow family stranglehold. And as independent and enamored a daughter can be, the perspective of killing her mother of sorrow may retrospectively cool down the self-righteous zeal for leaving home with the love of one’s life.
Once married, if you (already) accept (or return to) the Jewish kingdom of marriage, being a Sheyne-Sheyndl makes you the real balebos, the only master and commender, the rebbetse and the wise man. Because marrying a Jewish man in the world of Sholem Aleichem is to marry a luft mentsh. I feel myself quite divided, deeply identifying to both of them.
CHOREOGRAPHY OF TRANSLATION
As the three actors are incredibly talented, each one plays in a different register. Yelena Shmulenson that we have seen with Allen Rickman in the prologue of the Coen brother’s A Serious Man has a transformist quality under the same outfit that is the print of a great artist. But the bravura piece of the show is the collective juggling with translations, due to Allen Rickman and Shane Baker who is also not a novice, as he is the genial Yiddish translator of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Here, you have to be three to dance tango. Beside a limited number of skits subtitled on a screen, the introduction of a translating ghost on stage is a coup de génie. The echo, the third voice of the dialogue translates or interprets, or interjects, or intersperses the Yiddish text that is already highly referential, second degree, humorous and striped with Sholem Aleichem's usual Hebrew Scripture quotations (sometimes made up) in a playful and even sarcastic English – "into slangy, pungent English at top speed” writes Miriam Rinn in the Jewish Standard.
The day I saw the performance, Shane Baker, with his usual hilarious pince-sans-rire deadpan style, grabs the journalist Jordan Kutzik of the Forverts from among the public, and sits him down between Yelena Shmulenson and Allan Rickman to read the aleph beys, so that they can recite and throw at each other’s face the Yiddish glossary Sholem Aleichem recorded (as a child) of his stepmother’s curses and insults, “A Stepmother’s Trash Talk.” Not without the Targoum given by a supplementary voice (Shane) in English. It’s not that much an impressive alphabetical list of affronts, sayings and curses, it’s an acrobatic ballet of languages, of bons mots, gibes and an eloquent if modest demonstration of what the power of theater (and marriage) is. The metamorphose of words into living, vibrant characters that affect your life … or had affected it.
Useless to say that I nurture two dreams, first one is to see the first performance of Fiddler on the Roof staged fifty-four years ago with Zero Mostel and second to see the first ever staged Yiddish production, Fidler afn Dakh by the National Yiddish Theater - Folksbiene. And then I can peacefully disintegrate for not being enamored with (Jewish) musicals or write another daring confession.
Links to press articles including my friend Rokhl Kafrissen's piece in TabletMag
https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/tevye-served-raw-makes-a-tasty-dish/
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/sholem-aleichem-beyond-fiddler/
NO SHMALTZ FOR ME
Except for my plate where cream, butter, oil, and all fish schmaltzy are welcome, when it comes to show business I would preferably avoid any needless fat. I am trying to prepare the reader for a difficult confession. I never got to fully appreciate musicals. Not because I don’t love music and dance, on the contrary, but because of the almost unavoidable swelling of everything relating to the expression of emotions musicals most often display. Pathos is not something I give easily in. The second obstacle for me to really enjoy musicals is the systematic use of clichés pertaining to the genre, cultural common places that are consistent with the pathos previously mentioned and that magnify everything false in believing and preconception. I will not enter in the subject of American musicals as a Jewish cultural genre, neither in pondering on what is a Jewish musical. Enough to know that when, years ago, my husband very sweetly invited me for one of my birthdays to a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, he had to endure my sharp tongue, critiques coming from a now old Yiddishist, a purist that only the authentic Golda and the certified Tevye could have satisfied.
The most embarrassing part of my confession is still to come. As far as I remember, it has always been a painful experience for me to see caricatures of Jewish traditional males aka “ frume yidn fun a mol” shaking in rhythm their peyes and the corners of their frog coats – sometimes with talleysim and tsitsit involved (for the same price) – while dancing in choreographies halfway between Russian folklore, mimic Hassidic dance and some sluggish kazatshok. How excellent the performance, and most often, actors and dancers on and off Broadway are pretty professional, my heart was not melting and the image shared by the authors, the producers, and apparently the public of shtetl life got me distressed. Everything tuned to my expectations seemed originated directly from Sholem Aleichem's keen observation. The only such dance that has brought me a good laugh is the parody of Rabbi Jacob, directed by Gérard Oury. Parody has always something very serious.
A SERIOUS WOMAN – OR Sheyne-Sheyndl a feminist role-model
In search for the voice of the genuine characters created by Sholem Aleichem in his popular short stories, I would once a year since I live in New York try to attend his yortsayt, the annual celebration in his honor where, to fulfill his will, one of his stories is read amid other talks. So when I sat down in the modest Playroom Theater to see Tevye Served Raw and read in its presentation program that this performance has grown from the yearly readings Shane Baker, Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman, who wrote and directed this show, have presented in this context I was in the same time comforted about the loyalty to the language, the characters, the prose of Sholem Aleichem and curious if not anxious of some static and non theatrical exercise. Because, after all, I love the fever and excitement of singing and dancing on stage and long for humoresque or dramatic reinvention of everything written in Yiddish.
What I saw was unexpected. Not that the actors were dancing or having much movement on the scene, but they genuinely impersonated plausible characters that sounded not only like the humorous characters immortalized in the canonic texts of the father of the Yiddish literature, but like the human beings full of wit that we have had the ineffable grace to know, Allan Rickman’s father or my own mother, and all these figures that Sholem Aleichem had carefully observed, loved and from which he has derived archetypes and not stereotypes. Overloaded with stereotypes gigantic vessels are at Titanic risk. In keeping the stage at human size, theater speaks to our uniqueness.
What Yiddish literature does better than any Jewish literature in any other language is to paint the conflict between tradition and modernity in its own cultural idiom and on its own terms. From the profusion of Sholem's stories, the performance presents a number of scenes that the audience of Fiddler on the Roof is probably not familiar with. I will only insist here on the place of women in these stories, be it one of Tevye’s daughters who crosses the Rubicon and converts to Russian Orthodoxy to follow her amoureux, questioning her father’s faith in such way that Tevye upholds a dialogue on the universal and the particular in Judaism, or be it Sheyne-Sheyndl, the brain that allows Menachem-Mendel's business failures to develop into literature, as did probably his wife Olga for her Shalom Rabinovitz, the author of these stories. Allen Rickman embodies here a Tevye torn apart who would soften the most hardened daughter seeking for escape from the weight of tradition and narrow family stranglehold. And as independent and enamored a daughter can be, the perspective of killing her mother of sorrow may retrospectively cool down the self-righteous zeal for leaving home with the love of one’s life.
Once married, if you (already) accept (or return to) the Jewish kingdom of marriage, being a Sheyne-Sheyndl makes you the real balebos, the only master and commender, the rebbetse and the wise man. Because marrying a Jewish man in the world of Sholem Aleichem is to marry a luft mentsh. I feel myself quite divided, deeply identifying to both of them.
CHOREOGRAPHY OF TRANSLATION
As the three actors are incredibly talented, each one plays in a different register. Yelena Shmulenson that we have seen with Allen Rickman in the prologue of the Coen brother’s A Serious Man has a transformist quality under the same outfit that is the print of a great artist. But the bravura piece of the show is the collective juggling with translations, due to Allen Rickman and Shane Baker who is also not a novice, as he is the genial Yiddish translator of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Here, you have to be three to dance tango. Beside a limited number of skits subtitled on a screen, the introduction of a translating ghost on stage is a coup de génie. The echo, the third voice of the dialogue translates or interprets, or interjects, or intersperses the Yiddish text that is already highly referential, second degree, humorous and striped with Sholem Aleichem's usual Hebrew Scripture quotations (sometimes made up) in a playful and even sarcastic English – "into slangy, pungent English at top speed” writes Miriam Rinn in the Jewish Standard.
The day I saw the performance, Shane Baker, with his usual hilarious pince-sans-rire deadpan style, grabs the journalist Jordan Kutzik of the Forverts from among the public, and sits him down between Yelena Shmulenson and Allan Rickman to read the aleph beys, so that they can recite and throw at each other’s face the Yiddish glossary Sholem Aleichem recorded (as a child) of his stepmother’s curses and insults, “A Stepmother’s Trash Talk.” Not without the Targoum given by a supplementary voice (Shane) in English. It’s not that much an impressive alphabetical list of affronts, sayings and curses, it’s an acrobatic ballet of languages, of bons mots, gibes and an eloquent if modest demonstration of what the power of theater (and marriage) is. The metamorphose of words into living, vibrant characters that affect your life … or had affected it.
Useless to say that I nurture two dreams, first one is to see the first performance of Fiddler on the Roof staged fifty-four years ago with Zero Mostel and second to see the first ever staged Yiddish production, Fidler afn Dakh by the National Yiddish Theater - Folksbiene. And then I can peacefully disintegrate for not being enamored with (Jewish) musicals or write another daring confession.
Links to press articles including my friend Rokhl Kafrissen's piece in TabletMag
https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/tevye-served-raw-makes-a-tasty-dish/
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/sholem-aleichem-beyond-fiddler/
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/sholem-aleichem-beyond-fiddler/
