Monday night I saw Fiddler on the Roof. In Yiddish.

Part of it was intellectual curiosity. Yiddish was the lingua franca of that world. Sholem Aleichem wrote in Yiddish. Tevye der Milkhiker — Tevye the Dairyman — was born in Yiddish. Hearing it in the original felt like something I owed to history.

I was not prepared for what it would do to me.

Most people know Fiddler from the 1971 film — warm, elegiac, bittersweet. But Sholem Aleichem’s original Tevye stories are darker than that. Much darker. This production honors that darkness. There is no softening, no redemption arc. The arithmetic of Anatevka is brutal and honest: those who stayed in Russia and Eastern Europe were killed — first by Stalin, then by the Nazis. Those who went to America found freedom, yes — but also the slow dissolution of everything that made them who they were. Assimilation was not salvation. It was a different kind of ending.

When I first saw the film as a teenager, Anatevka felt like ancient history. A sepia photograph of a world that had nothing to do with mine.

Monday night, it felt like a headline.

During the pogrom scene, as the mob tears through Anatevka, they rip apart the centre-stage backdrop — a single word, in Hebrew letters: Torah. Theatrically effective. But my body didn’t process it as theater. I reacted as though an actual Torah had been desecrated. And in the same instant two images........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)