#Sholom Aleichem

[shtetlcore]

It’s Yentl’s dream to study the holy texts. Dressed as a man named Anshl, she goes to yeshiva to do just that. But is his secret safe?

Asa is a young man who’s just arrived in Warsaw. Yeshiva-educated, but a Spinozan. And Hadassah, the granddaughter of the illustrious Moskat family, is very beautiful.

[movie-titlecards]

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

My rating: 9/10

This is very, very good, but I still think that "Lazar Wolf" sounds like the villain in some obscure 70s tokusatsu.

[travsd]

Sholem Aleichem on Stage and Screen

I came across this photo of Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovich, 1859-1916) months ago and held on to it ’til now because I was kind of awestruck by how contemporary he looks. It’s not just this photo, I’ve come across dozens of pictures of him that evince the same quality. Appearances are superficial, and yet it may be that he embodies something eternal that others have wished to emulate. I…

[conjcosby]

Stardate: 2024.11.20 ▪️ That's the wisdom for the day. Hope it's meaning is heard. 🙏 #SholomAleichem #Wisdom #Meaning #QuoteOfTheDay #QOTD

[essaressellwye]

So the Mark Twain/Sholom Aleichem thing, but both Jews

I know I've been over this but man HRT is good stuff. I wanna shake the hand of whoever invented it. It's a crime that I don't know who that is actually. They're more important than Einstein

[plausible-fabulist]

So... have I mentioned I'm about to release a 450,000-word Jewish historical fantasy interactive fiction game? Here's an interview I did with my publisher, Choice of Games, about it.

[rootlessneopolitan]

having a jew moment (crying over tevye and chava again)

[gliklofhameln]

Theatre Poster • Jewish Museum London

It’s Hard to be a Jew (Yiddish: Shver tsu zayn a yid) is a 1920 Yiddish-language comedy play by Sholom Aleichem about the difficulty of Jewish-Gentile relationships in the Russian Empire. It was premiered in New York in 1920, and later performed at the Grand Palais Theatre on Commercial Road, London.

During the first half of the 20th century, Yiddish theatre in London was a vibrant and popular tradition; it was of great social and cultural importance to the growing community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

[truthinlifetarot]

Quotes You Need 👂🏾Pick A Card

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Pile 1: Zuko and Uncle Iroh

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." -Dale Carnegie

"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand." - Harry Truman

“It was when I realized I needed to stop trying to be somebody else and be myself, I actually started to own, accept and love what I had.” – Tracee Ellis Ross

Pile 2: Aang and Zuko

"To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself." - Anne Rice

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” - Corrie Ten Boom

“Whining not only makes you ugly, it lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.” - Maya Angelou

Pile 3: Appa and the Gang

"I get way too much happiness from good food." - Elizabeth Olsen

“The day he left me was the day I died. But then I was reborn as a witch.” - The Love Witch

"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor." - Sholom Aleichem

[pargolettasworld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwOu_rVbCKg

Last week, I enjoyed one of the most EPIC Chanukah presents I have ever received, a ticket to see “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish.  Friends, it is an astonishing show.  See it if you can -- it’s playing in New York at New World Stages until January 1, 2023.

It’s amazing what a language change can do for a show.  Nothing else is really all that different from a common-or-garden “Fiddler” production.  Even the English supertitles are the original script and lyrics of the show.  But the language change.  It makes all the difference, and I still haven’t quite gotten my head completely around why it’s such a profound experience.  I’ll try to explain, but this may end up getting a bit longer than the average “hey, listen to this cool piece of Jewish music” post.  So . . .

“Fiddler on the Roof” is one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all time.  It’s been around for about sixty years, and no one’s gotten tired of it.  High schools stage it.  People literally all around the world love the story of Tevye and his daughters and their friends in Anatevka.  (I’m told it’s especially popular in Japan.)  And pretty much the reason that people give for this is:  “The story is so universal!  Everyone knows about generation gaps!  Everyone can relate to Tevye having this kind of generational conflicts with his daughters and learning about love!”

To a certain extent, this is true.  Sholom Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the dairyman and the fates of his five daughters* were translated from Yiddish into English and then carefully massaged into a show made by Jews, about Jews, but for di goyim.  That bit is important.  “Fiddler” tastes recognizably Jewish, but it’s all translated.  The score has dollops of klezmer, but it’s still pretty Westernized, and it’s often sung with a Western Broadway bel canto vocal style.  Tevye spends a lot of time in the first act explaining things to the audience, and the entire point of the song “Tradition” is to introduce a largely goyish audience to the world of Jews living in a Ukrainian shtetl in 1905.

The characters in this show are, in essence, my family.  My zayde was born in a shtetl in Ukraine, around 1910.  He’s roughly the generation of Tzeitl and Motl’s baby, which would make the younger characters about the age of my great-grandparents.  This (adjusting for generations) is also true of just about everybody who created “Fiddler,” right up to most of the current cast in the Yiddish version, many of whom are Jewish.  It’s all prettied up and sanitized for Broadway, but “Fiddler” is a show about Jews that is made by Jews, who are descended from people very much like the characters in the show.

I think it’s the translation that makes people think that the story is “universal.”  The show was originally in English . . . already a translation from the culture that it depicts.  As it traveled around the world, you had old-fashioned people in (mostly) funny, old-fashioned costumes, talking about this odd culture that not many people knew that much about, and talking about it in [insert your language here].  Of course it was “universal.”  There’s a layer of particularity that it’s really hard to get past in translation.

Oddly enough, it took one more translation to get the show beyond that barrier, and that was translating it back into Yiddish, the language of the original stories, and the language that the characters in the show are  speaking through the Translation Convention.  The Yiddish script is expertly done.  If you know a little Yiddish (as I do, and as more of the audience for this show than you’d expect does), you’ll catch a whole world of nuances about how the characters relate to each other, to the Divine, to the Torah, and to their Christian neighbors.  Where the original script uses “the Holy Book” a lot, the Yiddish script uses “di Toyre.”  The original script has to work with the fact that English uses a generic for “person,” but Yiddish uses “a Yid” as much as “a mensch.”  This, for instance, adds a whole new layer to one of Tevye’s conversations with the gradavoy, the policeman who is Tevye’s friend . . . but only sort of, because Tevye is a Yid and the gradavoy is not.

The show now sounds Jewish in a way that it kind of didn’t when it was in English.  It’s less “universal” now.  It’s specific.  It’s Jewish.  The story isn’t just about love and a generation gap -- it’s about a minority culture under a specific kind of threat, and you can hear that.  You can hear it in the emotional pitch of the dialogue.  You can hear it in Fyedka’s halting attempts at speaking Yiddish to Khave.  You can hear it when the Russian characters actually speak Russian.  The language now matches the musical vocabulary a bit better, too.  The klezmer and hazzanut flavoring comes out a bit stronger in Jewish.**

And there’s something else, too.  None of the actors are native Yiddish speakers.  They’re all smart cookies, and they’ve been carefully trained to act in Yiddish.  But if you’ve ever listened to native Yiddish speakers, you can tell that none of them are native Yiddish speakers.  Like my family, theirs changed languages upon leaving Anatevka and going to the various places the characters discuss in the final scene of the show.  On that stage, in the carefully enunciated Yiddish of the Anglophone actors, you can hear the postlude to the show. 

It’s sad to see the characters having to leave Anatevka and split up and go to New York, or Chicago, or Warsaw, or Krakow, or (as it was then) Palestine.  But in this consciously Jewish staging of it, you find yourself thinking thirty, thirty-five years into the future.  Though they don’t know it, they’re getting out of Ukraine while the getting is good.  You find yourself paying attention -- where is this character going?  Will that be a good choice?  Will this choice help the character to survive what’s coming for them all?

In the theater -- that living, breathing art form that is real people doing real things in a room filled with other real people -- you see the results of those choices.  The characters on stage are embodied by their descendants.  Anatevka is no more.  That culture was murdered.  The descendants grew up in a different language.  But tonight . . . ah, tonight, at the theater, Tevye and Golde, Tzeitl and Motl and Hodl and Perchik, and Bubbe and Zayde and Feter and Tante and Kuzyne, and the whole mishpoche, they’re all there.  On stage.  In the room, speaking not just from 2022, but from 1964, and from 1905 as well. 

This “Fiddler on the Roof” isn’t universal.  It’s Jewish, and it’s family in a really personal way.  I didn’t expect that one change to have such a big effect on me.  I really didn’t.  But it’s huge.  It felt like the old warhorse of a show changed from a presentation into an invitation.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you.  I’ve written all of this, and I still don’t think I’ve quite managed to express what it was like to sit and hear “Fiddler” in Yiddish.  But I’ve at least given a bit of what it was.  It was intensely personal, in a way that I had been told it might be, but I didn’t really know what it meant until I was there.

It’s a wonderful show.  Go see it.  Even if you think you’re overly familiar with “Fiddler on the Roof,” go see it.  You’ll be surprised.  And if you aren’t . . . well, it’s still a really good performance of “Fiddler!”

*Which aren’t quite as charming as they are in the musical.  Tzeitl and Hodl get endings that are . . . ambiguous at best, Khave’s story is completely open, and there is a reason that the show doesn’t even touch what happens to Shprintze and Beylke. **”Yiddish” literally means “Jewish” in Yiddish.  In a taped interview with my zayde made when I was a baby, he tells my parents about how, back in the Old Country, he and all the other Jews in the shtetl spoke “Jewish.”

[oldshowbiz]

Experiment in Television presents This Is Sholom Aleichem (1969) written by David Steinberg, directed by Ernie Pintoff, and starring Jack Gilford, Nancy Walker, Davey Burns, Dom DeLuise and Rodney Dangerfield.

[thenosyjournal]

Astrakhan series (Sherlock BBC), by Iwantthatcoat

I'm still very much into Sherlock (BBC) fic. I like how robust the source material is, likely because it's been so heavily adapted over time. I daresay it's an inexhaustible well for creativity. Seems so, anyway. I'm really enjoying Iwantthatcoat's Astrakhan series, in which Sherlock and John are now Shelach and Ivan. The stories are a rich crossing over of Sholom Aleichem, Ashkenazi Jewish customs, and different landscapes. I like this Jewish Sherlock very much. He crackles with intelligence and warmth in a different way from his personality in other fics, but is still recognizably our sleuth. The storytelling interests me, because the style does not hide an author or narrator. We get a bit of both, courtesy of the reveal of a stepping back from the surface of the story to say things like "And now, because I am an omniscient narrator and I can do these things, I’ll tell you what is going on with our small-time real estate broker" in the flow of the story. It's sort of like the conceit in The Princess Bride. The grandpa's narrative voiceover becomes audible as he's telling the story, and he also speaks as himself. As audience members, we perk up and remember that we're experiencing a story and a storyteller telling us a story.

[glosackmd]

INDIA10810 by a Psychiatrist's view Via Flickr: Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor. - Sholom Aleichem in Ajmer Photography’s new conscience linktr.ee/GlennLosack

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers Yiddish story teller Sholem Aleichem, on his birthday.

"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor."

-Sholom Aleichem

[plausible-fabulist]

Two days left for the introductory sale of The Ghost and the Golem, my 480,000-word Jewish historical fantasy game!

(I've been saying 450,000 words, but I just went & recounted. It's now a full novella-length longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

[moviereviews101web]

Fiddle on the Roof (1971) Movie Recommendation

Fiddle on the Roof – ABC Film Challenge – Oscar Nominations –  F – Fiddler on the Roof – Movie Recommendation Director: Norman Jewison Writer: Sholom Aleichem (Screenplay) Cast Topol (Flash Gordon) Norma Crane (They Call me Mister Tibbs!) Leonard Frey (The Boys in the Band) Molly Picon (The Cannonball Run) Paul Mann (America, America) Plot: In pre-revolutionary Russia, a Jewish peasant…