A '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. I’ve 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 I’d ever seen. I grew up attending Jewish schools and in a home where my mother became Orthodox when I was 12, and where my mother’s 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 Sher’s 2015 Broadway production, though my mother wanted to. I hadn’t seen the movie, ever, no matter how many times I passed through a living room where it was playing on a TV. And I hadn’t 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 shouldn’t I lean into the poignancy, made manifest on the stage, of a familiar struggle? It’s not as if I have a choice. Why shouldn’t I allow a beautiful show to be a comfort to me in my own endless panic about what modernity has wrought? Why shouldn’t 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 we’ve been warned. Tradition.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/theater/fiddler-on-the-roof-jewish-tradition.html?
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