SholemAleichem wrote stories by the bushel, but is best known for one set ofcharacters, the milkman Tevye and his family in a small Russian-Jewish villagein the late 19th century. Tevye found his way from the written pageand into film and onto the stage, took up singing on Broadway and found his wayback into movies in Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Although torn from theirancient village, the Hollywood ending was considerably more hopeful than whatAleichem had in mind.
Writer-directorJoseph Dorman explores the life of this writer, a leading figure in Yiddishliterature, in his splendid documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in theDarkness (out on DVD). Dorman eschews the current fashion of flashycomputer graphics and clumsy historical re-enactments in favor of archivalphotographs, a solid narrative and interviews with knowledgeable figures.Called "the Jewish Mark Twain," Aleichem was a keen satirist withunforgettable characters who explored the literary potential of Yiddish, alanguage that had been spoken by Eastern European Jews for a millennium but hadnever found a literary voice. Yiddish was still a flexible language, likeEnglish in Shakespeare’s time—its vitality unreduced to clichés and banalitythrough repetititon.
Bornin a Russian shtetl similar to the village depicted in Fiddler on the Roof,Aleichem was an eyewitness as the traditional culture of Eastern European Jewrydissolved under pressure from all sides. The forces of modernity in the form ofcapitalism made traditional cottage industries unsustainable; some embracedsocialism as an alternative, and Zionism beckoned those who dreamed of aPromised Land.
For many,America, not Palestine, became the place of promise. Russia's Jews had lived inpeace for centuries until the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, whenright-wing fanatics used Jews as a scapegoat for the country's ills andlaunched waves of pogroms, triggering a mass migration to the New World. Fiddleron the Roof ends with Tevye setting forth for America, but at theconclusion of Aleichem's short stories (his protagonist evolved in real timeover a 20-year period of writing), the milkman boards a train destined fornowhere. As the documentary explains, Aleichem was never entirely comfortablewith his eventual American home, where he was honored more in death than inlife. And yet, his writings would eventually become a touchstone for JewishAmericans seeking access to their roots.
Fiddleron the Roofdressed Tevye in nostalgia, but Aleichem wrote the original stories as historywas being made and imbued them with humor, pathos, psychological insight andwell-earned irony. They may be specific to the Jewish experience, but they haveuniversal significance for anyone trying to maintain continuity with theirhistory in an uncertain world where each of us must decide what to retain fromtradition.
