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#1
10-22-2006, 01:01 PM
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Fiddler on the Roof question
I love this movie. I love the music, I love the dream sequence, I love everything. When I was catching part of it this morning I noticed something odd.
Tevye, it seems, can't read Russian? When the constable comes to tell the Jews they must leave Anatevka, Tevye passes the notice to someone else to read. I think he also asks someone what the paper says instead of reading it for himself. Could it be that Tevye can only read Hebrew? In his "If I Were a Rich Man" song, he says discussing the Holy Book seven hours every day would be the sweetest thing of all, and of course, he frequently says "As the Good Book says," so that's why it occurred to me that Tevye can read Hebrew but not Russian. Thoughts? Also, how does the Broadway play compare to the movie? 
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#2
10-22-2006, 01:18 PM
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Fiddler is a musical, not a reality show. It doesn't need to be graphic--it needs to engage our emotions. And the play does that better than the movie--because a play forces you to use your brain more, to engage yourself with the actors. You watch a movie (it's a passsive experience, like TV.) But you attend a play--which is an active experience. (but I don't no nuthin 'bout that Russian/Hebrew literacy bit. It's an interesting question....)
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#3
10-22-2006, 01:43 PM
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I've seen it as a musical several times, performed by at lest 3 different sets of performers at various levels. Always enjoyable.
I've seen the movie twice, and it doesn't appeal to me as much. Mostly because of the song "Tradition", and the fact that the director has this (to me annoying) tendency to either zoom too close up-- so all we see is Tevye's head-- or too far out, so we see the scenery, but not really the actors. "Tradition", when I've seen it onstage, has all the people of the village walking/dancing in a large circle, with smaller circles in it, and there is just something about the people of the village showing how their lives interact, and intersect, mixed with that music which strikes me as really powerful, and totally wasted in the movie. As to your other question, my guess is Tevye can't read. I would not be surprised if he can't read Hebrew or Russian. But he's been raised on the Good Book, perhaps his father said those kind of things before him, he loves the idea of studying it, but I'm not really sure we have much evidence that he can read. It also strikes me that as a poor Jewish man from that era, it is not impossible that he did get enough education to read Hebrew, but not Russian.
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#4
10-22-2006, 01:48 PM
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IIRC, Russian Jews at that time tended to confine themselves to their own communities (partly because of—dare I say it—"tradition," and partly because of government policy). So I don't find it particularly surprising that Tevye, while he would almost certainly be literate in Hebrew, never learned Russian.
Second the motion on the play being better than the movie. And the books are better still (no prettying up the ending).
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#5
10-22-2006, 02:03 PM
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Tevye would have been able to read Hebrew and Aramaic because he would have studied Torah. It's quite possible that his wife and daughters were more literate than many of the Russian women of the time. Teyve and his family would have spoken a dialect of Yiddish, not Hebrew, which was not a spoken language in Europe at the time. Many religious Jews still speak Yiddish, because to them Hebrew is a holy language, not a daily use language.
Tevye probably spoke some Russian but may well have been unable to read it. Lives of Jews in that time and place were heavily circumscribed. His interactions with Russians or people from outside his stetl probably would have been minimal. He would not have been considered a Russian either by Russians or by his own community. I'm not sure where Anatevka is supposed to be located, but it may not even have been "Russia." It may have been a Russian-controlled territory where Jews were permitted to live, but not a town where "Russians" would live. Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer describes the many restrictions on Jews (including extremely limited access to cities such as Kiev) designed to keep Jews from mixing with the general population. To my mind, it was a pretty Apartheid-like setup. All of this parenthetically to say that when I'm asked to write my ethnicity on a form I say "Jewish." We were barred from participation in the greater part of Eastern European culture, and saying "Ukrainian/Austrio-Polish/Czech" seems a gross misstatement of cultural background.
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#6
10-22-2006, 02:55 PM
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I believe Anatevka is somewhere in the Ukraine. I apologize for mixing up Yiddish and Hebrew...I didn't know Hebrew is considered the holy language and Yiddish is the everyday language. So Tevye would have been able to read Hebrew, speak it and Yiddish, but not Ukrainian/Russian?
I'm assuming Fiddler is set sometime before the Bolshevik Revolution (Perchek gets arrested in Moscow and gets sent to Siberia) and I found it somewhat disconcerting that Chava and Vietka were going to Krakow. Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire in about about 30 years!
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#8
10-22-2006, 03:12 PM
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Won the nobel prize for literature, too.
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#9
10-22-2006, 03:15 PM
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Bear in mind that while Tevye quotes Scripture constantly, most of his quotes show that he doesn't really know what he'stalking about. Indeed, many of his favorite quotes are ones he seems to have made up himself! So, don't take it for granted that he can read Hebrew, either!
That said, whether or not Tevye himself had any real education, he plainly reveres and honors education, and saw to it that his daughters learned to read. (Chava is a bookworm who spends all her spare time at the bookseller's shop, which is how she meets the Gentile boy she eventually marries.) And he lets Perchik the radical student stay in his home, in exchange for whatever education he can offer to Hodel and Chava. My guess is, Tevye has little or no formal education, but holds knowledge in high esteem anyway. He has little real knowledge of the Holy Books, but dreams of being rich enough and educated enough to read them and discuss them in depth. And, of course, he wants his children to be far more erudite than he ever could be.
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#11
10-22-2006, 03:19 PM
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Also, is it really horrible for him to have five (!) daughters? Perchek seemed a little taken aback, and Tevye seems to acknowledge he's at a bit of a disadvantage. I think the older girls realize they won't be able to marry the man of their dreams because there will be no dowry (Matchmaker Matchmaker), although they all seem to manage it, probably because Tevye loves them so much. With the exception, of course, of Chava, who while she did marry her love lost her family in the process.
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#12
10-22-2006, 03:29 PM
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Interior Minister (later Prime Minister) Pyotr Stolypin wanted to initiate major land reforms, among other projects. He realized that he needed the backing of the Jewish Western bankers (chiefly the Rothschild family), so he opened emigration to Jews who chose to do so. Stolypin didn't do this out of any sense of altruism; rather, he did so to curry favor with the bankers whose money he needed to finance his projects. It was basically, "If you want to leave, fine. Get the hell out." The Jews of the time were basically forced to live in the Pale of Settlement. This was an area that covers roughly the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic countries. They lived in shtetls and, as other posters have said, had very limited contact with ethnic Russians. The extent of the Russian Tevye and his family would have known was limited to basic conversation with whoever ethnic Russians they had contact with, probably officials and soldiers; it certainly wasn't their lingua franca. Tevye would have learned some Hebrew during his yeshiva education; I doubt Golde or the girls would have had the opportunity to learn much beyond the standard blessings that all women have to know. Yiddish was definitely the lingua franca of shtetl Jews. I don't think my great grandmother ever learned to read or write English. If she couldn't deal in Yiddish, she wasn't interested. Robin
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#13
10-22-2006, 03:40 PM
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A word of warning, though: while the ending of the play and movie is not exactly upbeat, it's positively Utopian compared to the original.
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#14
10-22-2006, 03:51 PM
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#15
10-22-2006, 03:57 PM
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I think he did read Torah, based on the tremendous value associated with this in his cultural tradition. That he gets it wrong makes him no different from many literate people I know who mis-cite or misinterpret the Bible to prove their point.
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#16
10-22-2006, 04:33 PM
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The following is from the Wikipedia entry on Isaac Asimov:
> Asimov was born around January 2, 1920 (his date of birth for official purposes > the precise date is not certain) in Petrovichi shtetl of Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR > (now Russia) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, a Jewish family > of millers. They emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. > Since the parents always spoke Yiddish and English with their son, he never > learned Russian. Asimov (who grew up in a situation like _Fiddler on the Roof_ but twenty years later) said in his biography that his parents could speak and read both Yiddish and Russian (and learned to speak and read English when they moved to the U.S.), but they only spoke Yiddish to him (and later English). Asimov said that he regretted not also learning to speak Russian. Yiddish is close enough to standard German that he could pick it up fairly quickly.
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#17
10-22-2006, 06:19 PM
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My grandmother's family could speak several European languages before she emigrated in 1910, but her father was the important rabbi in town and they were comparatively affluent--they lived in a brick house and there were only 5 children.
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#19
10-23-2006, 01:20 AM
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#20
10-23-2006, 01:31 AM
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And Tevye has 6 daughters, btw. Well, 7, but one is only mentioned and never heard from again. One assumes she had as miserable a life as her sisters, though. She probably died of cholera or something.
They're depressing stories.
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#21
10-23-2006, 06:41 AM
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Another thing that occurred to me...Tevye is a poor milkman, but I'm assuming he makes a living delivering dairy supplies to his community. Now, Tzeitl was to have married Lazarwolf, and in fact, Tevye announced it quite publicly in the bar. What would it have done to his credibility as a businessman to have reneged on that agreement, especially with the richest man in town?
In the book there were six/seven daughters? I'm going to have to look for those stories.
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#22
10-23-2006, 07:04 AM
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#23
10-23-2006, 07:11 AM
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#24
10-23-2006, 07:24 AM
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 I've never heard the term. The fact that Italian/Iberian (as well as many North African, and possibly Greek and Turkish) Jews speak what I generally know as Ladino or Spaniolit is, of course, true. Is this (Sepharadita) a different name for them, that I am unaware of?
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#25
10-23-2006, 07:45 AM
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There is a legend that when Mark Twain was introduced to Sholom Aleichem, the latter said "People say I'm the Yiddish Mark Twain," to which Twain replied "And people say I'm the American Sholom Aleichem."
True or not, it's a cute story.
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#26
10-23-2006, 08:18 AM
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Every time he has to climb a ladder Halfway up his teeth begin to chatter Then his heart begins to pitter-patter So he comes back down. High on rooftops, fiddlers should beware Just call him Fiddler on the Chair.
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#27
10-23-2006, 08:26 AM
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It's been a long time since I read the stories: I did thumb through a couple before writing this, but I don't pretend complete expertise.
On Yiddish (the common language): He would certainly speak Yiddish; that would be the language of the Jews speaking together. Whether he could read or write Yiddish, that would depend on what kind of education his parents could have afforded. IIRC, some of the stories are set as letters from Tevye to Mr Sholem Aleichem (in Yiddish) which implies that he could read and write in Yiddish. On Hebrew (the language of the Holy Books): Studying would have been oral, textbooks were costly, so he might or might not read Hebrew. He would certainly not know modern conversational Hebrew -- that's a later revision of the language. He would have been taught prayers and bible quotes in Hebrew; in my quick thumb-through, he quotes (or misquotes) Rashi, a biblical commentator. One of the running jokes, in story, play, and movie, is how he mangles them: he's sort of a walking example of "a little learning." His longing for studying with the learned men every day is his dream, and doesn't mean that he had studyed much in the past. The goal of learning was very important, but the families financial situation would presumably have restricted him. At the other extreme, the character Lazar-Wolf in the story clearly hasn't studied anywhere near as much as Tevye. ASIDE: I only have English translations of the stories that are in the form of letters from Tevye to Sholem Aleichem, when he mangles biblical texts, I don't know if he's quoting in Hebrew or transliterating into Yiddish. If he's quoting in Hebrew, then he could obviously read and write it. On Russian: This would be the language for dealing with the non-Jews. Since Tevye (and the one daughter) obviously do deal with non-Jews, they do speak Russian. I don't think that the example of Isaac Asimov (quoted from Wikipedia by Wendell) is pertinent: he left Russia at age 3, so not knowing Russian isn't indicative of much. The evidence from the stories, play, and movie is that he did speak Russian. Whether he could read and write Russian, however, is a different issue: the movie chose to make a point of saying no, he can't read or write Russian. The play (and I think the stories) don't address the question.) My feeling: The character Tevye of the stories is reasonably well-educated, even if he misremembers (or misuses) bits. He is also a great story-teller, as the stories are told in first-person narrative. I think it most likely that he could speak at least Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish; that he coudl read and write Hebrew and Yiddish, but unresolved whether he could read or write Russian.
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#28
10-23-2006, 08:56 AM
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Don't forget that Russian and Hebrew have two different alphabets (apparently, Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). So it isn't like you could phoentically "read" Russian if you could read Hebrew or Yiddish like you can read Spanish if you know the English alphabet and speak Spanish.
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#29
10-23-2006, 09:34 AM
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#30
10-23-2006, 09:36 AM
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#31
10-23-2006, 09:39 PM
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C K Dexter Haven writes:
> I don't think that the example of Isaac Asimov (quoted from Wikipedia by > Wendell) is pertinent: he left Russia at age 3, so not knowing Russian isn't > indicative of much. You misunderstood what I wrote. Asimov's parents could read and write Russian. Asimov would have learned to read and write Russian if his family had not left Russia. Asimov learned to read and write Yiddish because that was the language that his family spoke nearly all the time at home in Russia (and perhaps some when they came to the U.S.). There was apparently a lot of interaction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish population. Asimov probably heard some Russian spoken outside his home in the three years before his family moved to the U.S., but he didn't hear enough of it to learn much in that time. My point was exactly that the Jewish population in that area mostly did learn to speak and read Russian in addition to learning to speak and read Yiddish at home. This is actually a very common experience in most of the world. The Jewish population of that area were mostly bilingual. I've heard claims that most of the population of the world is bilingual, speaking both a home language and another language that allows them to speak to the dominant ethnic group of their country.
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#32
10-24-2006, 06:50 AM
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Ah, sorry, Wendell, I misunderstood your point.
And I'll add that my wife's grandmother was from a well-off family from a part of Poland near the Russian border (the territory switched ownership several times over the centuries between Russia and Poland). She arrived in America (prior to WWI) speaking Yiddish, Polish, Russian and French (the language of the well-to-do.)( She learned English immediately she arrived here. So, yes, it was (and still is) fairly common to speak different languages for different situations.
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