Wonder of Wonders (Part Two)

Wonder of Wonders Part One is right here.

After I wrote Part One, I was feeling dissatisfied and I think it's because I started out and ended up without really knowing what I wanted to say. It was as if I had an assignment but no one had told me precisely what was expected of me.

I didn't manage to make the connections between the musical and my patients I had hinted at when I wrote Miracle of Miracles a couple of days ago although I guess it's obvious. The story of Jews being forced from their shtetl in Russia into the diaspora is a pretty specific connection.

But the universal message of the musical is not only literal, it's also symbolic. It's a story of oppression and deliverance and that's why it had — and continues to have — cultural repercussions around the world.

That message is seen so clearly in the story of the junior-high school production in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1969. It was a time of school strikes, of bitter battles between the school boards and the teachers' unions, and of black-Jewish tension throughout the neighbourhoods and the schools. I remember the unrest of those times. The story of the school's production of Fiddler on the Roof was new to me, however.

The drama teacher in charge of the production was Richard Piro. He believed that working on this show would give his black and Puerto Rican students a more sympathetic understanding of Jews. It was a controversial choice. The principal of the school wanted to do Guys and Dolls.

As told in The Jewish Week:

While many in the school and the community tried to stop the production, Piro and the students persevered, rehearsing in his Manhattan apartment during the teachers’ strike. Sheila, the young woman who played Chava, Tevye’s daughter who falls in love with a Ukrainian, felt her character deeply, as her own parents wouldn’t let her date, and her brothers kept an eye on her.

Many of the students had witnessed evictions, and understood the sadness as families left Anatevka. Like many high school plays, the production became their own Anatevka, a small shelter of warmth and family, before they too must move on.

There were still people in the community who wanted to stop the show and their final move was to alert the Broadway producers because the student production hadn't got the authorization they needed to perform. It brings tears to my eyes to think about it but the show went on for the brave students and their wonderful teacher, Mr. Piro, when the Broadway producers granted them special permission and when producer Hal Prince, Jerry Bock (composer), Sheldon Harnick (lyricist) and Joseph Stein (librettist) travelled to Brownsville for opening night! It's an unforgettable story!

The true story of Richard Piro himself, a music-drama teacher, who worked in a junior high school where black and Puerto Rican students put on a Jewish musical, Fiddler on the Roof. It is about the tragic realities he had to combat: black anti-Semitism, the fear of Jewish teachers who believed the children would ridicule them, the anger of black militants who did not want excellence to be shown in a ghetto school.

It is the story, too, of how the Jewish principal and black parents and leaders joined with Piro, a gutsy and deeply devoted teacher, in the battle so that the show would go on. The youngsters' production was so successful that it was nationally televised. And finally, and most important, it is about children, their humor, their passion, their despair, and their triumph.

When I started reading Alisa's book, I was just interested in the simple story of how the musical came to be. By the time I read the story of the junior high production, the open-air production in Poland and the making of the Norman Jewison-directed film, it turned out to be so much more than that. Fiddler on the Roof is a phenomenal work on so many levels — literature, music, community, politics, oppression, fear and courage and hope.

Because it's all of that, it's life itself.

To Life!