As I write it’s on TCM again. I’ve seen it loads of times, both the movie and in live production, and a question just now occurred to me.
Golda finds Tevye to tell him that their daughter Chava has run off with a Russian soldier, and married him. The soldier is Russian Orthodox, and it was the priest who married them. So, does that mean that Chava would have had to have become a Christian, be baptized, before the priest would conduct the marriage?
I know Tevye disowned her but was it because her husband wasn’t Jewish, or because Chava converted?
He disowned her because her husband wasn’t Jewish.
I’m not sure if you need to convert to Russian Orthodox to be married by a Russian Orthodox priest, but that didn’t matter; Tevye had disowned her whether she converted or not.
She may, or may not keep her Jewish faith. It kinda doesn’t matter, her being a woman, and all. Her opinion on any subject doesn’t matter much to the people of Krakow, where she and her husband go. The Russian lown leader even implies this. He expected Tevye and his family to stay, given his daughter has married a Russian.
But it’s not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of community. Chava would be living with the Russians now, and abandoning her fellow Jews. Even if her children would be technically Jewish, they would be raised outside the Jewish community, among other Christians. They’d go to church just like everyone else around them, and chances are that they’d be baptized.
The concept of religion as a personal preference didn’t exist then. Either you were part of of one community, or you were part of another.
To be married in the Eastern Orthodox faith, you have to be baptized. I don’t know how stringent the requirements were in 1905 Russia, but I would assume that Chava got dunked at some point. (And I do mean dunk, since Eastern Orthodox still practice immersion baptism.)
Don’t forget, the Russkie is also a cossak. Wasn’t he one of the guys who trashed the wedding?
Chava isn’t just marrying outside the faith. Tevya might have forgiven that eventually But she’s marrying the oppressor–the guy who beat the crap out of his friends. (And I always thought Chava was kind of douchy for that. If it had been 40 years later and a country over, she’d have happily married a Nazi)
In Jewish law, the grandchildren (and she herself) would remain Jewish even if she did some rite of conversion to another religion. There is no way in which a person born Jewish according to Jewish law will ever be seen as a non-Jew in the eyes of Jewish law.
Agreed. In the musical and movie (I don’t know about the original Aleichem stories or any dramatic works that came out of them before Bock and Harnick) Fyedka wasn’t antagonistic to the Jews of Anatevka (remember that he was one of the congratulatory Russians in the “L’Chaim” number), and actually moved himself and Chava out of the village when the edict was read, in sympathy with them.
Also, considering Chava’s loyalty to — and desperate desire to remain a part of — her family, it’s not bloody likely she’d have anything to do with someone who’d helped wreck her sister’s wedding.
It’s been a ridiculously long time since I read the Tevye stories (and BTW, if you think the movie ended on a down note, it’s sunshine and lollipops compared to the source), but I don’t recall Fyedka being mentioned until he and Chava became involved.
I think Fyedka was supposed to be a pretty decent guy himself, it was Chava’s conversion/abandonment of the community that led to Tevye disowning her. It wasn’t him as a man, but the fact that he was part of the oppressive society that kept beating on Tevye over and over. Conversion wasn’t just required by the Orthodx church, but by law in Russia at the time. They couldn’t have married if she remained a Jew.
Chava and Fyedka are “modern” people, marrying for love without regard to community divisions - we sympathize with that. Tevye is desperately un-modern (Tradition!) trying to hold on to what makes him a man, a Jew and everything else he holds dear.
I always interpreted it to mean she converted. In the short stories she definitely did. (IIRC, her’s is one of the few stories to have anything like a happy ending; leastwise since Tevye disowns them if he turns out to be a wifebeater or a cannibal or whatever we don’t learn about it.)
I always loved the scene of Golde going into the church, so confused and out of place but at the same time very proud and strong.
Fyedka wasn’t a soldier but a civilian bookworm. In the movie he wears a grey peasant’s blouse, however, as do the soldiers.
Question: would they have anything like a courthouse marriage (i.e. legal but totally secular) in a small village in Russia at the time?
I think he’s saying the fiddler is a metaphor for the precariousness of the Jewish community in pogrom-era Russia.
[Milhouse]But after that, it’s smooth sailing for the Jews, right?[/Milhouse]
In the most recent Broadway revival of Fiddler (the one with Alfred Molina and Harvey Fierstein) there was a change to the end. It was divisive among fans, some of whom disliked it and some of whom hated it; I think towards the end of the Firestein run they changed it back to the original.
In any case, at the end the Fiddler does not go with Tevye and family; instead he gives his fiddler to a little boy who leaves. Basically, the fiddle is tradition in this one, the Fiddler is the Jewish experience in Russia, or… whatever you want to make of it. In any case, people preferred the fiddler going as he always had.
One of my favorite spoofs on YouTube: Avenue Jew (featuring stars of both Avenue Q and Fiddler)
