I was eight years old when I first watched Fiddler on the Roof. It was at my grandma’s house on a May Bank Holiday and as the opening number, Tradition, began, my mum reached for a hanky. She then cried throughout the film, as did my grandma. Even my grandpa had a tear in his eye.
However, my beloved great grandma didn’t cry, and simply sat there in silence. At the end she pronounced in her heavy Yiddish accent “ Yes, it was just like that. ”
My booba, Annie, grew up in a shtetl in Mogilev, in eastern Belarus. After a spate of violent pogroms, where her own father was beaten very badly, her parents cobbled the money together to send her to England for a safer life. Aged just 14 she travelled alone in a third class passage to Liverpool and then to the East End of London, where she worked — and slept — in a clothes factory for a penny a week. She lived to the age of 99 and all her life warned us “Don’t go to Russia, the Cossacks will get you”.
Fiddler on The Roof is one of the most successful musicals of all time, it’s the multi award-winning musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick based on the the stories of Sholem Alechim about Tevvye the milkman, his wife Golde and their five daughters. Tevvye and his family live in the fictional village of Anatevka in the Pale of Settlements of Imperial Russia at the turn of the century. Jewish inhabitants had to live, work and scratch out a living in the pale. They were not allowed to leave.
Violent anti-Jewish Pogroms and anti-Jewish legislation were a constant threat. These people lived in fear of the Christmas and Easter violence against them, of the sudden rapes and beheadings, and yet they created the warmest and most vibrant of communities. Who knew that such material could spawn this beautiful, moving witty and yet hilarious work of art? The book, the songs, the dancing are classics for a good reason. This is a great play with great songs — unusual for a musical.
When I heard that the Chichester Festival Theatre was going to produce Fiddler on The Roof this summer, I knew I had to be part of it. After all, this was my family story, it was every friend of mine’s family story. It felt like it could be something special.
I’ve never been in a musical before or even sung outside the shower, but I met with Daniel Evans, the director, and we spoke for hours. I had a connection with Golde ( Tevvye’s long suffering wife) and her hopes and aspirations for her daughters to get them a better life.
Golde and Tevvye are the heart of the community. Like the older generation, their Jewish way of life is everything. Their traditions and customs ground them and root them in a world that feels harsh and insecure. When, one by one, their daughters challenge this, it shakes them to the core and when they are finally forced to flee, everything they know is ripped away from them.
For Daniel, Fiddler is quite rightly a universal story and a timeless story. Look at the hordes of refugees fleeing persecution across the globe right now, the footage of lines and lines of desperate men, women and children leaving everything behind in pursuit of safety.
After five very intense weeks where the cast and I have seeped ourselves in research and rehearsal, we are about to open our Anatevka for public viewing.
Am I nervous? A little. Excited? Yes. Challenged at singing in my first musical? Absolutely. Proud of what our little theatrical community has created and where we have come from on day one? Completely. All these emotions must have been what my Booba Annie Donnoff felt when she left her village and stepped on that big boat to who knew where. I quietly dedicate every performance ahead to her.
