Tevije un Mir - Author's notes

A truly great character.
A truly great character.

The literature and art expressed by the Yiddish culture in the course of its relatively brief life, if considered in relation to other literary manifestations, have created a human and cultural landscape which has inscribed itself into the heart of Europe. The tragic destiny of that people and language had seemed to extinguish an entire world, but surprisingly and against all odds, from the great flood some islands of survival have emerged. Through fragile institutions, musical emotions, theatrical reflections, a vocation for writing and studying, the microcosm of Yiddishkeit has once more made its voice heard, reaching and touching an amazingly vast new "audience".

If we turn from the surface of this phenomenon and investigate it more deeply, the reason for such interest is easily understood. The topoi and the humors of Eastern Jewry have impollinated the entire Western culture through its writings, images and performing arts. Chaplin's little tramp, persued by ill fortune and the arrogance of power, never broken, and always searching for redemption, defeated yet a defender of the defeated, on his journey encounters all the types and characters of the shtetl, the typical Eastern European small Jewish town. American theatre, cinema and literature of the 20th century and the entire adventure of the spirit of Central Europe would be inconceivable without this fundamental contribution.

The human splendor of the oriental Jew expresses itself through the lack of certainties, the straddling of borders and in the suffering of continuous persecutions. With the aid of a self-accusing humorism and of a non-dogmatic yet fervent faith, he builds the project of a life suspended between heaven and earth, between messianic hope for redemption in a land of redemption and the glorification of exile as an ethical ideal. These magnificent contrasts when proposed as an existencial practise, offer to the post-modern man, so similar to Chagall's violinist deprived of his center of gravity, so precarious in his spatial collocation and sentenced to the globalized uncertitude of a centrifugal character, a precious remedy against the certainty which sows seeds of intollerance and violence. The Yiddish language itself, with its anarchistic nature and its cosmopolitan, trans-territorial vocation capable of adapting to ever-changing contexts, represents a linguistic paradigm for a multi-ethnic world: the refusal of a prevaricating center in favor of a pulsating policentrism.

The genius of Shalom Alechem – one of the greatest Yiddish writers – was able to represent the figure of Tevye the milkman with the cahracteristics of pietas, faith, kindness and intimacy with God of the Eastern Jew. This he accomplished with the inventiveness of the great humorist, but also with great admiration for a little Jew capable of affirming his values with strength and a total lack of fanticism, well aware that human beings, life and even his poor limping mare are at the center of Jewish saintliness. And since he spends most of his time in animated and often polemic discourse with God, he knows these things well.

Tevye has already received the honors of a musical and a film with the same name: Fiddler on the Roof by Norman Jewison.

American popular art, rich with so much Jewish talent, has given its admirable contribution to this figure.

However, Yiddishkeit was also a vital part of Jewish culture in Europe, here its annihilation was perpetrated and here, also, a few patient "weavers" have begun to re-knit the tiny fragments of memory of life in that vanished world.

Personally, I have dedicated a great part of my work – ten or so theatre pieces and a few books – to this project. I've always thought that the character of the shtetl milkman contains a celebration of man in his Jewish "mode", and that this theme might offer itself to treatments other than that of the American musical comedy. I am thinking of some form of small musical theatre not necessarily realistic, but rather an expressive transfiguration which conjugates the theatrical style I've developed with my company of musicians and the dreamy visonary traits of Chagall's characters, together with the lesson of Kantor's theatre. A small piece of musical theatre, with a company of actors, dancers and elements of puppetry.

To sing the figure of Tevye is to search for the human being in all its sublime fragility. We would rather not abbandon it to a fate of annihilation.

Moni Ovadia