Fiddler in the Afternoon: A Poem

So already, April may be the cruelest month, but that's not because it's National Poetry Month. In the spirit of this month, I'd like to post a poem I wrote last fall. It's flawed but important to me. We all get to write poems, not just those of us who write them really well. And if we have a blog, we get to post them.

What I present to you today is the revised first section of what was originally a three-part poem, the second two parts of which I've since deleted, though they conveyed so much of my thinking. Which is to say that in its earlier incarnations, this poem was even more flawed. But as I said, it's important to me.

So some background for the very prosy, narrative poem that follows. As some of you know, I spend a lot of time at my mother's nursing home--really the Skilled Nursing section of her senior living community. Since the community is part of Hebrew Senior Life, many of the residents are Jewish, and the community's "life enhancement" programs often reflect this.

Last fall, I happened to visit my mother on an afternoon on which a presentation about Fiddler on the Roof as international musical theater was just about to get underway.

That presentation just happened to be taking place while the Ken Burns' The U.S. and the Holocaust documentary was airing over several nights. Until I watched the series, I hadn't understood how many Jews had tried desperately and unsuccessfully to leave eastern and western Europe in the 1930s and 1940s in order to avoid annihilation. The degree to which their pleas, their letters, and their applications were denied or simply ignored floored me.

I had, however, understood who generally was killed first: the very young, the ill and infirm, the very old--like the people on Skilled Nursing. 

But here those Skilled Nursing residents were, ready for the afternoon's entertainment, most of them having called America home since before World War II. My own ancestors had left Lithuania, Russia, and Poland in the early 1900s for "a better life." They couldn't have imagined what a decision to stay would have meant thirty or forty years later, even though they were no strangers to antisemitism and acts of violence against Jews.

The problem with my poem was that it wanted to be about all of this in addition to my first experience of listening to Fiddler in the Roof in 1966. As an eleven-year-old crying inconsolably during the album's final songs, I could see no blessing in Tevye's family leaving Anatevka. But as a sixty-seven-year-old, could I ever! That's where my poem really came from.

With Passover beginning in just two nights--and no doubt it will be marked on on the Skilled Nursing floor at Orchard Cove--it seems fitting to be sharing a poem/story related to Fiddler on the Roof. This is the season in which the story is told of another group of people who made a harrowing journey into the new, not at all certain of what they would find, what it would ask of them, who they would become, whether the life they found or made would be better than what they were leaving. 

It's possible my mother and a number of her fellow residents won't notice the holiday, though it will no doubt be marked on her floor. And on the other hand, some things stir memory. With that, I present to you "Fiddler in the Afternoon."

The October afternoon program: “Fiddler on the Roof Around the World.”

One View of Orchard Cove

Slanted sunlight streamed into the living room on Skilled Nursing. My mother and I sat in the outer semi-circle facing the wall-mounted screen.

“Every day, “Fiddler on the Roof is performed somewhere,” the presenter explained. Her fingertips hovered over the keyboard of the laptop tethered to the screen.

“It’s performed in different languages”— double-click: Tzeitel pleading with Tevye in Yiddish to let her marry for love—

“And in different countries”— double-click: Tevye singing “If I Were a Rich Man” in Japanese on a Tokyo stage.

Smiles and nodding in the audience, and some dozing. “I saw it in Yiddish once,” someone said.

“Why do you think Fiddler stays so popular?” the presenter asked.

Momentary silence, then a voice: “It reminds us of childhood. I’m thinking of my grandmother right now, of holidays at her house.” Happy memories beatified this woman who often tongue-lashed aides and nurses.

Another voice: “It’s about leaving home—so many people have to do that.” Everyone in that room, I thought to myself.

“It’s about family and changing times,” a third resident volunteered.

After affirming other responses, the presenter asked, “Are there parts or songs you’d like me to play? That you’d like to sing along with?  

As we watched and listened, hummed and softly sang, she gave discreet cutoffs to an imagined orchestra. A former community theater music director, I thought to myself.

During “Sabbath Prayer,” listening gradually replaced the singing and humming.

May the Lord protect and defend you, I thought to myself, knowing, for them, the prayer was being answered every day.