Nostalgia for the slaughterhouse

• Published date: 29 April 2022

Guess who wanted to play Tevye? None other than Frank Sinatra! Guess who directed the movie with Topol? Norman Jewison—who laughingly tells us that, despite his name, he's a "goy!" But the "goy" and his team magically transport us back to the shtetl we still seem to long for, and his fiddler is even more haunting than Chagall's since Isaac Stern is the off-camera violinist

The film premiered in 1971 and won three Academy Awards. The direction (Jewison), music (Jerry Bock), lyrics (Sheldon Harnick), production (Robert Boyle), art (Michael Stringer), editors (Antony Gibbs and Robert Lawrence), acting and singing (Topol, etc.), costumes (Joan Bridge and Elizabeth Haffenden), sets, cinematography (Oswald Morris), choreography (Jerome Robbins) left nothing to be desired. The reviewer at The Hollywood Reporterwrote that it "ranks high among the best musicals ever put on film." Pauline Kael, at TheNew Yorker, called it "the most powerful movie musical ever made."

Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen, produced by Sasha Berman and directed by Daniel Raim, is filled with delicious behind-the-scenes reminiscences and clips of Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, Alan Arkin, Robert Kennedy, Golda Meir, and David Ben-Gurion, as well as interviews with the cast. " JTA's Andrew Lappin writes "there is a certain thrill to realizing that the history of "Fiddler," a show which celebrates a long-dead way of Jewish life, is, in its own way, still living." The film critic, Kenny Turan, tells us that this musical is "almost like Brigadoon. It exists in and of itself.

Turan is right. Anatevka is so very dreamy and we are so fond of it and its inhabitants. And yet, as Tevye himself might ask: What is this Jewish nostalgia for the Old Country, or specifically for the Ukrainian/Russian shtetl really about? What exactly do we miss? The unpaved muddy roads? The freezing winters? The year-round poverty? Are we repenting our own loss of faith by honoring Anatevka's Jews for their loyalty to religious Judaism? Or is this our way to connect to the grandparents we never met—the ancestors whose faces we cannot even visualize (we have no paintings, no photographs), and whose names we may not even know?

How many more charming and fanciful novels, such as Max Gross' recent The Lost Shtetl, will be published? Gross artfully imagines a shtetl that has remained unchanged and hidden in the Polish forest for 100 years. And when the modern Poles discover it—there's nothing but trouble. In 2010, Dara Horn published a short story, Shtetl World, in which a World of Our Fathers shtetl...