More from my "Jewish Post" articles....
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“Fiddler on the Roof” was on TV a couple of weeks ago. I
suppose the last time I watched Fiddler all the way through was probably in
1975 when my sister played Hodel in the Gordon Bell High School musical
production, and I was honestly surprised (!) at how good the Norman Jewison
version was by comparison. Yes, Topol was actually a better Tevye than Gordon
Bell’s Paul Bachin, whom I found so convincing at the time when he growled,
“would it have been so terrible if I had been born with a SMALL FORTUNE?”
Topol was great! As a died-in-the-wool Yiddishist, I thought
I would be put off by the Israeli accent, but he totally made it work. Zero
Mostel? Forgive me, but after Topol, I can’t even look at Mostel without seeing
Bert Lahr in his place as the Cowardly Lion, standing up to the Russian Mob and
mincing away: “Put em’ up, I dares ya! Put em up!”
More significantly, I thought I would be offended by
Hollywood’s sanitized version of shtetl life, but instead I found a great deal
of historical truth in the overall portrayal. I can quibble with the facts and
details, but allowing for a reasonable amount of poetic license, almost nowhere
did I find myself saying: “now that
couldn’t have happened!” Quite the contrary.
And yet, through no fault of Hollywood, Fiddler leaves out
one huge aspect of Jewish life that we ought to know something about. The
problem is that Sholem Aleichem created a fictional character called Tevye the
Milkman (Tuvia der Milchiger) who was “blessed” with five daughters and no
sons. So Fiddler is written around the fascinating theme of how those daughters
get married off; but it tells us nothing about what life was like for boys growing up. I know something of
shtetl life from my extensive readings in the original Yiddish, especially thememoir of Falek Zolf which I translated into English some years ago. Zolf’s
childhood was dominated by learning, first in the talmud-toyreh, then the kheder;
eventually, at the ripe old age of eleven, when he had mastered everything the
small-town melamed could teach him
about Jewish Law, he was packed off to become a yeshiva-bokhur, first in Brisk and later in faraway Slobodka.
Zolf’s story is peppered with folkloric expressions that I
could never have translated without extensive help from Rabbi Weizmann, who
never turned me away when I showed up at his office in the Bnay Avraham with
bundles of transcriptions that I was working through. The funny thing is that
the questions I had were of a nature that any twelve-year old boy in Old Russia
could have answered with ease. I thought maybe it would be fun if I listed some
of them here for your enjoyment in the form of a little pop quiz on Jewish Law
and Tradition. Here they are:
1. What is the
deal with the shor she-nagakh es ha-porah?
2. What is the
opposite of ha-yadayim yedey eysav?
3. What is the
controversy over the beytzah she-noldah
be-yom tov?
4. What is the
difference between a shtut milguf and a shtut
milbar?
5. What is the
solution to the problem of shnayim
ukhzin be-talis?
6. Where would
you apply the doctrine of kol dalim gavar?
And lastly, a bit of a trick question:
7. Who was Baba Kama?
I’ll give you my answers (with commentary – it’s all about
the commentary!) next week. If anyone wants to weigh in on these with their own
perspective, you can email it to Bernie and he’ll forward it to me. Knock
yourselves out…
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