feature
How I
the Late
Actor Topol
f you were born anytime before, say, 1975, you might
remember Israel not as a source of angst and tension
among American Jews but as a cause for celebration. In
the 1960s and ’70s, most Jews embraced as gospel the heroic
version of Israel’s founding depicted in Leon Uris’ 1958 novel
“Exodus” and the 1960 movie version. The 1961 Broadway
musical “Milk and Honey,” about American tourists set loose
in Israel, ran for over 500 performances. And that was before
Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War turned even
fence-sitting suburban Jews into passionate Zionists.

Turned Tevye
Into a
Zionist Andrew Silow-Carroll | JTA
18 MARCH 16, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
That was the mood when the fi lm ver-
sion of “Fiddler on the Roof” came out
in 1971. The musical had already been
a smash hit on Broadway, riding a wave
of nostalgia by Jewish audiences and
an embrace of ethnic particularism by
the mainstream. The part of Tevye, the
put-upon patriarch of a Jewish family
in a “small village in Russia,” was orig-
inated on Broadway by Zero Mostel,
a Brooklyn-born actor who grew up in
a Yiddish-speaking home. Ashkenazi
American Jews tended to think of
“Fiddler” as family history — what Alisa
Solomon, author of the 2013 book
“Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History
of Fiddler on the Roof,” describes as the
“Jewish American origin story.”
But Mostel didn’t star in the fi lm, which
landed in theaters while the afterglow of
Israel’s victory in its second major war of
survival had yet to fade. Famously — or
notoriously — the part went to Chaim
Topol, a young Israeli actor unknown
outside of Israel except for his turns in
the London productions of “Fiddler.”
With an Israeli in the lead, a musical
about the perils and dilemmas of
Diaspora became a fi lm about Zionism.

When Topol played Tevye in London,
Solomon writes,“‘Fiddler’ became a site
for celebration, drawing Jews as well
as gentiles to the theater — some for
repeat viewings — to bask in Jewish
perseverance and to pay homage to
Jewish survival. The show didn’t change,
but the atmosphere around it did.”
Topol died last week at 87, still best
known as Tevye, and his death reminded
me of the ways “Fiddler” is — and isn’t
— Zionist. When Tevye and his fellow
villagers are forced out of Anatevke
by the czarist police, they head for
New York, Chicago and Krakow. Only
Yente, the matchmaker, declares that
she is going to the “Holy Land.” Perchik,
the presumably socialist revolutionary
who marries one of Tevye’s daughters,
wants to transform Russian society and
doesn’t say a word about the political
Zionists who sought to create a workers’
utopia in Palestine.

“There is nothing explicitly or even
to my mind implicitly Zionist about it,”
Solomon told me a few years back.

And yet, she said, “any story of Jewish
persecution becomes from a Zionist
perspective a Zionist story.”
When the Israeli Mission to the United
Nations hosted a performance of the
Broadway revival of “Fiddler” in 2016,
that was certainly the perspective of
then-Ambassador Dani Danon. Watching
the musical, he said, he couldn’t help
thinking, “What if they had a place to
go [and the Jews of Anatevke could]
live as a free people in their own land?
The whole play could have been quite
diff erent.”
Israelis always had a complicated
relationship with “Fiddler,” Solomon told
me. The fi rst Hebrew production was



feature
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
Chaim Topol appears as Tevye in the 1971 fi lm
“Fiddler on the Roof.”
brought to Israel in 1965 by impresario
Giora Godik. American Jews were
enthralled by its resurrection of Yiddishkeit,
the Ashkenazi folk culture that their parents
and grandparents had left behind and the
Holocaust had all but erased. Israelis were
less inclined to celebrate the “Old Country.”
“Israelis were — what? — not exactly
ashamed or hostile, but the Zionist
enterprise was about moving away from
that to become ‘muscle Jews,’ and even
denouncing the stereotype of the pasty,
weakling Eastern European Jews,” said
Solomon, warning that she was generalizing.

That notion of the “muscle Jew” is echoed
in a review of Topol’s performance by New
Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that
he is “a rough presence, masculine, with
burly, raw strength, but also sensual and
warm. He’s a poor man but he’s not a little
man, he’s a big man brought low — a man
of Old Testament size brought down by the
circumstances of oppression.”
Mostel, by contrast, was plump, sweaty
and vaudevillian — a very diff erent kind
of masculinity. The contrast between the
two Tevyes shows up in, of all places,
a parody of “Fiddler” in Mad magazine.

In that 1973 comic, Mostel’s Tevye is
reimagined as a neurotic, nouveau riche
suburban American Jew with a comb-over,
spoiled hippie children and a “spendthrift”
wife; Topol’s Tevye arrives in a dream to
blame his descendants for turning their
backs on tradition and turning America
into a shallow, consumerist wasteland.

A kibbutznik couldn’t have said (or sung)
it better.

Composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon
Harnick and book writer Joseph Stein set
out to write a hit musical, not a political
statement. But others have always shaped
“Fiddler” to their needs.

In the original script, Yente tells Tevye’s
wife Golde, “I’m going to the Holy Land
to help our people increase and multiply.

It’s my mission.” In a 2004 Broadway
revival, staged in the middle of the second
intifada, the “increase and multiply” line was
excised. In a review of Solomon’s “Wonder
of Wonders,” Edward Shapiro conjectured
that the producers of the revival didn’t
want Yente to be seen as “a soldier in
the demographic war between Jews
and Arabs.”
Topol himself connected “Fiddler” to
Israel as part of one long thread that led
from Masada — the Judean fortress where
rebellious Jewish forces fell to the Romans
in the fi rst century CE — through Russia and
eventually to Tel Aviv. “My grandfather was
a sort of Tevye, and my father was a son of
Tevye,” Topol told The New York Times in
1971. “My grandfather was a Russian Jew
and my father was born in Russia, south of
Kiev. So I knew of the big disappointment
with the [Russian] Revolution, and the
Dreyfus trial in France, and the man with
the little mustache on his upper lip, the
creation of the state of Israel and ‘Masada
will never fall again.’ It’s the grandchildren
now who say that. It’s all one line — it comes
from Masada 2,000 years ago, and this
Tevye of mine already carries in him the
chromosomes of those grandchildren.”
The recent all-Yiddish version of “Fiddler
on the Roof” — a Yiddish translation of an
English-language musical based on English
translations of Yiddish short stories —
readjusted that valence, returning “Fiddler”
solidly to the Old Country. It arrived at a
time when surveys suggested that Jews
50 and older are much more emotionally
attached to Israel than are younger Jews.

For decades, “Exodus”-style devotion to
Israel and its close corollary — Holocaust
remembrance — were the essence of
American Jewish identity. Among younger
generations with no fi rst-hand memories of
its founding or victory in the 1967 war, that
automatic connection frayed.

Meanwhile, as Israeli politics have shifted
well to the right, engaged liberal Jews have
rediscovered the allure of pre-Holocaust,
pre-1948, decidedly leftist Eastern European
Jewish culture. A left-wing magazine like
Jewish Currents looks to the socialism
and anti-Zionism of the Jewish Labor
Bund; symposiums on Yiddish-speaking
anarchists and Yiddish-language classes
draw surprisingly young audiences. A
Yiddish “Fiddler” fi ts this nostalgia for the
shtetl (as does the “Fiddler” homage in
the brand-new “History of the World, Part
II,” which celebrates the real-life radical
Fanny Kaplan, a Ukrainian Jew who tried to
assassinate Lenin).

Topol’s Tevye was an Israeli Tevye: young,
manly, with a Hebrew accent. Mostel’s
Tevye was an American Tevye: heimish,
New York-y, steeped in Yiddishkeit. It’s a
testament to the show’s enduring appeal
— and the multitudes contained within
Jewish identity — that both performances
are beloved. ■
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 19