Jewish Group
Related: About this forumA 'Tradition' Omission: I Had Never Seen 'Fiddler' Until Now.
At the relatively late age of 43 though basically a toddler compared to much of a recent audience for the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene production I finally saw Fiddler on the Roof.
We all have our cultural blind spots. Ive never seen an episode of The Simpsons, either, though I very much have always meant to. Some things just slip by. My failure to see Fiddler is only important in that it would be extremely on-brand for me to have seen Fiddler 35,000 times to have Fiddler be the only show Id ever seen. I grew up attending Jewish schools and in a home where my mother became Orthodox when I was 12, and where my mothers full-time mission became to guide my sisters and me toward her enlightenment. This worked on my sisters. It still works for them.
Me? I failed to observe, I criticized their observance, all of which my mother called my self-hating, when she was lightly chiding, and my anti-Semitism when she wanted me to feel the full disappointment of what my resistance represented. She felt that if I had no love for tradition, I would only subvert it that I would be responsible for the draining of what she most loved and found essential. We either replenish or we drain. My apathy was not replenishing.
I attended the show with my mother and one of my sisters Tracy, the one who loves musicals and my aunt, Lois, who has taken me to a majority of theater in my lifetime. I had not seen Bartlett Shers 2015 Broadway production, though my mother wanted to. I hadnt seen the movie, ever, no matter how many times I passed through a living room where it was playing on a TV. And I hadnt planned on seeing this, the version in actual Yiddish, either when it became a surprise hit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, nor when it moved uptown to Stage 42. . .
Sometime after the intermission, puddly from my tears, I began to relax. I am part of a long history, for better or worse. Why shouldnt I lean into the poignancy, made manifest on the stage, of a familiar struggle? Its not as if I have a choice. Why shouldnt I allow a beautiful show to be a comfort to me in my own endless panic about what modernity has wrought? Why shouldnt I yield to who I apparently was this whole time: a person who would eschew my culture, then become defensive about it, then realize one day that familiarity is what Fiddler is actually about. We grow old, our children are no longer babies, there is always someone menacing breathing down our necks and each time it is beautiful and each time it is horrible and each time it is a surprise and each time weve been warned. Tradition.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/theater/fiddler-on-the-roof-jewish-tradition.html?
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)Mosby
(16,350 posts)Not really a fan of musicals except for rocky horror and wizard of Oz.