Great Performances

In Fiddler, these outsiders who had come up through the family of the theater, told their own story, told the story of their grandparents, of being ethnic and made that American popular culture.

Someone sent me a book by Sholem Alecheim called Wandering Stars, it's like a Dickensian novel about a Yiddish theater troupe touring all over Eastern Europe and I loved it.

And I gave it to Jerry Bock and he loved it and we thought there's a musical in it and we thought who would be the right person to do the book and we thought of Joe Stein.

And my father read the novel and did not think it could be musicalized.

And he then suggested the Tevye stories, which he fondly remembered from childhood.

The warmth of Tevye, his humor, his relationship with God, his is deep humanism in the context of this very religious, formerly religious, and rigidly religious background.

Joe had read them in the original Yiddish and so we got ourselves some translations of his short stories and one by one, fell in love with the writing, the ambience, the atmosphere, the connection it made with us as well.

Much of the most profound of Sholem Aleichem's writing was concerned with his people who were in this remarkable transition from tradition to modernity.

All of the spectrum of human emotions that you see in Sholem Aleichem's work were in him, the man.

He was funny and he was angry and he was neurotic and he was anxious and he was loving and he was ruthlessly ambitious about his own writings.

In some sense, he lived for, and in his writing, he would put all those emotions out, in his letters and in his stories.

I came to understand that Sholem Aleichem so thoroughly understood the people he was writing about that they really came alive.

My job was then to transfigure it so that it could be done on the stage.

I was working with Joe Stein, who was writing the dialogue, and I think Joe was kind of inspired.

He took from Sholem Aleichem and then added his own sense of humor, his own sense of humanity.