#yiddish fiddler on the roof

[anonymousdandelion]

The fundamental difference between Fiddler on the Roof and Fidler Afn Dakh:

English Tevye: Tradition!

Yiddish Tevye: Got iz a foter un heylik iz zayn toyre!

[anonymousdandelion]

Courtesy of the lyrics to Fidler Afn Dakh (Yiddish Fiddler)

since the yiddish for little bird is faygeleh, whenever i think of chavaleh (little bird) from fiddler my brain replaces 'chavahleh' with 'faygeleh'

[unsolicited-opinions]

Abi Gezunt was released in 1938 in the Polish film Mamale, but the Barry Sisters (US artists, given names Minnie and Clara Bagelman) recorded their version in 1957:

I love the Barry Sisters version. For comparison, here's the 1938 original, performed by Molly Picon (US actor, given name Malka Opiekun) in the Polish film Mamale:

More on the Barry Sisters

More on Molly Picon

You've probably seen Molly Picon perform before. She played Yente the matchmaker in the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof.

[edenfenixblogs]

My post earlier today got L’Chaim stuck in my head. So I decided to finally listen to the Yiddish soundtrack to Fiddler. Holy shit. I was not prepared for how emotional it made me.

I played Hodel in the traditional stage show, so it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the story at all. But man. To hear it in the Yiddish…

I can’t even put it into words. It’s so vivid. In English it was easy to imagine these people as representations of my own relatives, which is of course the point. But in Yiddish…it’s almost like a science fiction look into an alternate future where Yiddish speakers weren’t all but wiped out and we had a thriving Yiddish-language culture in America.

It imagines a future where it wasn’t tragically obvious what happened to Chava and Fyedka’s children and grandchildren in Krakow.

It imagines a future where Siberia wasn’t as dreadful for Hodel and Perchik as we all knew it would be.

It imagines a future where maybe Tzeidel and her family were able to return to Anatevka rather than getting word in America about which of her sisters and sisters’ children and families didn’t survive.

I just…wow. I don’t have words for it.

[annebrontesrequiem]

Okay who was going to tell me that Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish is hands down the best new musical I've listened to in at least a year

[hanukkitty]

yiddish and yiddishkayt and ashkenazi culture feel so cozy in my soul. i'm feeling embarrassingly mushy about it

[zooptseyt]

Tevye's in Smash

[unganseylike]

whilst wandering the stacks in library at midnight procrastinating thesis i randomly came across a yiddish poetry section and read a v nice poem that was what i needed at that moment. but now i cant find it online and i cant imagine that ill randomly come across the right book and page again

[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…

[unsolicited-opinions]

I love this, @jewishgay4il, because some words can be all three!

Take "Chutzpah," for an example of a word which is Hebrew, Yiddish, AND English.

It's a word from Mishnaic Hebrew which is written the same way in Yiddish: חוצפה

The word has enjoyed such utility in the Anglophonic world that is has absolutely become an English Language cognate, appearing in all major English language dictionaries, including the OED.

Here are some broad strokes for those interested (I'd welcome additions/corrections if I get anything wrong here!)

Yiddish is mostly High German, with a lot of vocabulary borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, some Slavic influence, and a smattering of Romance languages, but spoken Yiddish can be mostly comprehensible to a native speaker of modern German. However, because Yiddish is written using Hebrew characters, written Yiddish is unreadable to native readers of German.

I remember being in Hebrew school, coming across a book written in Yiddish, and trying to sound out the words as I would with Hebrew. This baffled me until I realized it was using Hebrew characters to represent the phonemes for pronouncing Germanic sounds/words.

Okay, just a little trivia about a distant relative who was, it seems, beloved in US Yiddish culture: Zvee Scooler.

If you've seen the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof, you've seen Zvee. In this scene, Zvee plays the Rabbi of Anatevka, and offers a blessing for the Czar:

Zvee acted in both Yiddish and English theater, television, and film, but my grandmother told me she was especially fond of hearing her cousin Zvee on WEVD Yiddish radio as he presented, every Sunday from the 1930s until at least the 70s, a 10-minute Yiddish-language segment made up of news and commentary in rhyming Yiddish verse, called "Der Grammeister" ("The Rhyme Master") on the radio show, Forward Hour.

The Forward Hour was produced by The Jewish Daily Forward, a daily, socialist, Yiddish-language newspaper founded in 1897. In the 1920s the circulation of The Forward was greater than that of The New York Times.

The English version of the Forward started in 1990. Since 2019, The Forward publishes only online, in both English and Yiddish.

Jewish culture is...infodumping about Jewish culture...?

not knowing if some words you say are hebrew, english, or in yiddish

.

[thewynne]

Are there like... any indie rock bands that have a song or two in Yiddish

[anonymousdandelion]

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate the fact that, in the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof, in "Shadkhnte, Shadkhnte" ("Matchmaker, Matchmaker"), the line which in the English version is:

"For Papa, make him a scholar"

becomes

"Der Tate, darf oyf a minyen"

or, in other words:

"My Dad needs him for a minyan"

[traumaticemphaticfantastic]

I have been concocting a new art style over the course of this year! But don’t worry, this style isn’t replacing my old one, it is actually just a secondary art style for when I feel like I want to try something different or need a different “Vibe” as it were. And today I want to present to you the first two true pieces that I completed with the finalized aesthetic!

The first piece (Left) is called “Mr. Velt-Wide” and it is meant to be a more positive or playful take on the diaspora, as I am a part of the diaspora and I quite enjoy it! The piece depicts a Jewish man wearing all black holding a suitcase with a Magen David on it, he is tipping his hat and winking at the observer, a big smile on his face, as he balances on a globe of the Earth, taking one big step from one continent to another. Behind the man is the Moon and the void of space with a few stars dotted about, and in big stylized text it says “Mr. VELT-WiDE.” The word “Velt” in Yiddish translates to “World” and is derived from the German word “Welt.”

The second piece is titled “Jewish Man 1” and is a simple portrait of a young Jewish man, he has a beard and a darkness surrounding his eyes, his styled to look old-fashioned, with one of those old-style blazer jackets with the leather elbows, I was inspired to give him this particular jacket because I rewatched Fiddler On The Roof and saw Perchik (Who’s my favourite character) wearing one. As for the rest of the outfit, the man wears a simple vintage cap, a white button-up shirt, and his pants and shoes are more stylized, coloured in black and with no separation of the pant leg and shoes. The man stands on an impressionistic, almost abstract snowy background and surrounding his head is a rather messily painted black square, he stares into the camera, a neutral, if not solemn look upon his face.

I’m quite happy with these two pieces, and with the style I have created. I would like to credit the artist Eugene Ivanov on the stock photo website dreamstime.com (Sorry for not adding the link to his page the feature is not working for me right now) and also thank him for his amazing selection of incredible Jewish art, it inspired a lot of this art style for me and his work is just leagues better than anything I could come up with myself.

I hope you like these pieces as much as I do, I’ve actually made a few more in this new style very very recently that I’m just so excited to show off so keep an eye out for that! But anyways, that will be all for today! Be well all of you, good morning, afternoon, evening, or night!

[pargolettasworld]

Seeing Yiddish Fiddler back in December really brought home how much of the show is inherently a translation. It translates (the lighter of) Sholom Aleichem's rather dark Tevye stories about a man struggling with poverty, modernity, and antisemitism into a charming stage musical filled with dancing Jews. It translates their Yiddish into English -- and the translation back into Yiddish is really unexpectedly powerful! It translates the sound of klezmer into the Broadway idiom, what @lunetta-suzie-jewel called "caffeine-free diet klezmer."

It even translates Jewishness itself for a gentile audience -- how many times during the first act (i.e. the act that everyone remembers) does Tevye break the fourth wall to explain Jewish life and customs to the audience? This isn't just a case of "American-born Jewish show creators trying to deal with their own feelings of alienation from the world of their ancestors." This is outright sitting down and explaining to non-Jewish audience members basic aspects of Jewish life that, even if you're an Americanized, culturally alienated 1960s Jew, you'd at least recognize and wouldn't need to be told what they are.

Below the cut, a description of a bit of stage business in Yiddler that pulled that metaphorical curtain away, probably one of the best directing choices in the whole show.

Yiddler is set on a pretty bare stage -- the scenery is mostly furniture that the actors carry on stage themselves. There are sepia-toned banners on each side where the subtitles are projected (in English and Russian), and a similar sepia-toned panel draped over the back of the proscenium that partially veils the band. On that back panel is written, in fairly large letters, תורה. Which is "Torah" in Hebrew, pronounced "Toyre" in Yiddish. As Tevye explains within the first five minutes of the show, the Torah (or, in the English original, the "Holy Book" -- there's that translation thing again!) is the absolute centerpiece of Jewish life in Anatevka. Everyone's lives revolve around this text, and Tevye's dream in "If I Were A Rich Man" is to have unlimited free time for Torah study. Given the audience demographics for Yiddler, I'm pretty sure that most of its audience understood this reference as soon as they entered the theater.

So the word is there, in the background, hovering over everyone as they live out their lives and the plot of the first act of the show, which is kind of a triple romantic comedy. No one mentions it, no one notices it . . . after all, it's not part of the characters' world to have the word "Torah" floating over them; that's for the audience.

But then. The first act ends not just with Tzeitl and Motl's wedding, and the mixed dancing, but with the pogrom that breaks up the wedding party. None of the onstage characters are killed, because it's not that kind of show. But, in Yiddler, the last thing the Russian characters do before the lights go down on the first act is to go to the backdrop and literally rip the word "Torah" right in half.

That got horrified gasps from the audience. It was a legitimately shocking moment. And, I thought, a brilliant way to show the violence of a pogrom in a show that leaves very little room for that kind of reality. And here's the best part: After intermission, you come back for the second act. And the backdrop has been repaired . . . with big, obvious stitches that are visible all the way in the back. The word "Torah" has a big scar over it for the rest of the show.

No one in the theater the day that I saw the show missed a single bit of that message.

If I wasn't getting ready for Shabbat and had the spoons for it I'd talk about how "classic" Jewish productions like 'Yentl' and 'Fiddler' deliberately present a sanitized and idealized version of Shtetl life and Jewish culture and history, when in reality living in the Shtetls was a life of poverty and constant terror and people weren't dancing around petting chickens and goats all the time and singing and actually pogroms happened all the time and children often died or were kidnapped before they reached adulthood and sometimes Jews were just outright forced to leave their villages and leave all their possessions behind and all the while in the Shtetls they were treated as the permanent underclass, underneath even the gentile serfs and had constant restrictions on their dress, their food, and their economy. This contributes to a warped view of Shtetl life even within Jewish communities, where they romanticize the "good old days" of the Shtetl before the Holocaust when in reality there were never any "good old days" because the Shtetl itself was a symbol of forced social isolation and oppression, and antisemitism always existed in Europe long before the Holocaust. And because most of the Jews who've lived in these conditions have died, new generations of Jews are growing up with a distorted narrative of their own history.

[eretzyisrael]

by Shiryn Ghermezian

Anti-Israel protesters in London were accused of antisemitism for harassing theatergoers who were attending a production on Monday of the famed 1964 musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”

As seen in videos shared on social media, the protesters held Palestinian flags and gathered at a cafe next to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Some of them confronted patrons of the theater and one male protester, who had a black and white keffiyeh draped on his shoulders, yelled at theatergoers “Bye Zios!” Another male protester shouted “Palestine will live forever,” told “Fiddler” ticket holders “you are an embarrassment to England,” and criticized one Israel supporter for being “a Zionist.”

The performance reportedly proceeded as planned after the protest at the cafe.

“Fiddler on the Roof,” which has also been adapted into a film of the same name, has no connection to Israel. Its protagonist is a Jewish milkman named Tevye who wants to preserve his family’s traditions in a tiny village, also known in Yiddish as a shtetl, in imperial Russia in 1905 while aiming to marry off his five daughters, who each challenge his traditions. “Fiddler on the Roof” features the famous songs “If I Were A Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Matchmaker,” and “Sunrise, Sunset.” The theater’s content advisory warns audiences that the play includes “themes of displacement and some scenes of violence and antisemitism.” All but two of the characters in the play at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre are Jewish.

The production is playing at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre from July 27-Sept. 21.

“The play has nothing to do with Israel. It has nothing to do with Zionism. Targeting a symbol of Jewish culture shows that these people hate Jews,” the Combat Antisemitism Movement wrote in a post on X/Twitter.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

Bucky's favourite musical is the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof, Fidler Afn Dakh. He excitedly dragged Steve to the off-Broadway revival multiple times, always coming away from the experience ecstatic, and flooded with memories of attending Yiddish theatre performances before the war.

He has all the songs memorized, and often sings them as he goes about his work, sometimes he's even accompanied by the soundtrack. His favourite song is Nismimlekh-Veniflo'oys (Miracle of Miracles), which he lovingly sings to Steve (in whole or in part) almost every day.

His favourite actor in the musical, though, goes to the man who plays Motel in the film adaption. As a gay Jewish man, Bucky feels a deep connection to Leonard Frey, and Leonard's Motel reminds him so much of a younger Steve.