arts & culture
I Shira Li Bartov | JTA.org
tamar Moses was 10 when he
watched “An American Tail” at his
Jewish day school in California.

He was struck by the 1986 fi lm, an
animated musical about a family of
Russian-Jewish mice who immigrate
to America. Even though he was
surrounded by Jewish classmates and
teachers, he had never seen a cartoon
with Jewish protagonists.

“Watching this mainstream hit
American animated movie where
the central character and the central
family were specifi cally Jewish — it
was unusual,” Moses said. “There was
something that felt inclusive to us
about that.”
Now a Tony Award-winning
playwright, Moses has adapted the
children’s classic for the stage. “An
American Tail the Musical” premiered
at the Children’s Theatre Company
in Minneapolis on April 25 and runs
through June 18. Along with writing
by Moses, who won his Tony for a
Broadway adaptation of the Israeli fi lm
“The Band’s Visit,” the new produc-
tion features familiar songs such as
“Somewhere Out There” and new
music and lyrics by Michael Mahler and
Alan Schmuckler (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid
the Musical”). The team hopes to tour
the show if it succeeds in Minneapolis.

The original fi lm created by Don
Bluth and Steven Spielberg follows
the journey of a young, tenacious
mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz.

Fievel’s family lives below the human
Moskowitz family in Shostka, a city in
the Russian Empire, in 1885. Spielberg,
who had yet to make “Schindler’s List”
or widely address his Jewish family
history, named the character after
his maternal grandfather — Phillip or
“Fievel” Posner — an immigrant from
Russia. 20
APRIL 27, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
Lillian Hochman will play Tanya and Matthew Woody will play Fievel in the
fi rst musical adaptation of “An American Tail.”
The movie begins with the
Mousekewitzes and the Moskowitzes
celebrating Chanukah when Cossacks
tear through Shostka in an antisemitic
pogrom, together with their animal
counterparts — a battery of evil cats.

The Mouskewitzes fl ee Europe and
board a ship to America, where Papa
Mouskewitz (voiced by Nehemiah
Persoff ) promises “there are no cats”
and “the streets are paved with
cheese.” But a thunderstorm at sea
washes Fievel overboard, leaving his
devastated parents and sister to arrive
in New York City without him. Although
they believe he did not survive, Fievel
fl oats to shore in a bottle and sets out
to fi nd his family.

Of course, he quickly learns there
are cats in America — along with
corruption and exploitation. Fievel is
sold to a sweatshop by Warren T. Rat,
a cat disguised as a rat. A crooked
mouse politician called Honest John
(a caricature of the real Tammany Hall
boss John Kelly) wanders Irish wakes,
scribbling dead mice’s names in his
list of “ghost votes.” But Fievel fi nds
camaraderie with other immigrant
mice rallying for freedom from the cats’
attacks and Warren T. Rat’s extortion.

He befriends Italian mouse Tony and
Irish mouse Bridget, who join the quest
to reunite his family.

The film’s metaphors will be
presented similarly in the stage
version, which is also set in the 1880s,
although Moses has expanded its lens
to the immigrant groups that populated
New York at the time.

“An American Tail” was part of a shift
in mainstream media toward Jewish
representation, said Jennifer Caplan,
an assistant professor of Judaic studies
at the University of Cincinnati.

“It came out in 1986, and then
‘Seinfeld’ premiered in 1989,” Caplan
said. “People point to 1989 as this
moment when representations of Jews
changed. There was this feeling in the
late ‘80s that people were looking for
new, diff erent, possibly even more
explicit representations of Jews.”
Yet despite the movie’s resonance
with children like Moses, some fi lm
critics complained that it wasn’t Jewish
enough. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger
Ebert gave the fi lm “two thumbs down”
on a 1986 episode of their program
“At The Movies,” calling it “way too
depressing” for children and arguing
that it “chickened out” of an explicitly
Jewish story. Ebert noted that while
most adults would understand the
Mousekewitzes were Jewish, the word
“Jewish” never appears in the fi lm,
potentially leaving young audiences in
the dark.

“This seems to be a Jewish parable
that doesn’t want to declare itself,” he
said at the time.

Unlike in Art Spiegelman’s graphic
novel “Maus,” where Jews are mice
and Nazis are cats, the cat-and-mouse
metaphor of “An American Tail” is
expansive. The cats represent a univer-
sal force of oppression — Cossacks
in Russia or capitalists in America —
while the mice encompass all perse-
cuted immigrants, regardless of their
religion, ethnicity or national origin.

Caplan admitted that some might
not have seen it as a Jewish story at
the time.

“In 1986, we’re right at the birth
of the multicultural push in American
schools,” Caplan said. “You’ve got kids
who are learning about the melting
pot. I think if you are not looking for
the coded Jewishness and you’re not
familiar with it, then this just seems like
a movie about immigrants.”
But Moses, who said the movie held a
“mystical place” in his imagination, did
not view the story’s broad allegory as a
shortcoming. Instead, he saw an oppor-
tunity to pull its continuous thread for
a message he hopes will feel relevant
today: that while immigrants discover
inequality and abuse in America, the
forces of injustice are changeable, and
that people can overcome life’s harsh
realities through “grit and hard work
and coming together.”
“That message is always timely,
but defi nitely coming out of the last
few years and the conversations that
America is having about immigration,”
Moses said. “I wanted to tell this story
that’s really a fable, so you can get at
these ideas indirectly as opposed to in
a dry, didactic way.” ■
Photo by Keri White
Animated ‘An American Tail’ About
Immigrating Russian-Jewish Mice
Now a Musical