#663) Tevya (1939)

#663) Tevya (1939)

OR “Fiddle Me This”

Directed and Written by Maurice Schwartz. Based on the “Tevye the Dairyman” short stories by Sholem Aleichem.

Class of 1991

The Plot: In the Russian Empire village of ~~Anatevka~~ Boyberik circa 1905, the dairyman Tevya (Maurice Schwartz) balances his devout Judaism with the increasing anti-Semitism of the Russian government. His daughter Chava (Miriam Riselle) has started seeing Fedya (Leon Liebold), an intelligent Christian, which infuriates Tevya and his equally devout wife Golde (Rebecca Weintraub). Despite the pleading of her parents, Chava marries Fedya, and Tevya declares her dead to him, never to spoken of or remembered again. When the town council announces the immediate expulsion of all Jews from the village, Tevya grapples with his place in the world. Sholem Aleichem’s most famous character comes to the screen in this Yiddish production that’s all about traditiooooon. Tradition. Bump-ba-da-dum-dum-bump-ba-da-dum-dum-bump tradition.

Why It Matters: For starters, the NFR’s official listing names the film “Tevye”, with “Tevya” being listed as an alternate title (the print I watched is titled “Tevya”, so that’s what I’m going with). Other than that, the NFR writeup is just a plot summary and its connections to “Fiddler on the Roof”. An essay by film critic J. Hoberman is a detailed history of the film’s production and reception.

But Does It Really?: This in another one of those movies where I get why it’s on the Registry, but I was more interested in the story behind the film than entertained by the film itself. “Tevya” is the first foreign-language movie to be inducted into the Registry, and represents a culture that was in serious danger of being wiped out in the upcoming war. It also helps that there is a significantly more iconic adaptation of the same material keeping this film’s memory afloat, but more on that later. “Tevya” is an historically important piece of American film, and its unique presentation helps it stand out among other NFR movies. It’s worth a watch for film/Yiddish theater buffs, but everyone else can just watch the musical instead.

Everybody Gets One: Avrom Moishe Schwartz emigrated to New York City in 1901, changing his name to Maurice shortly thereafter. As a teenager, Schwartz became fascinated by the Yiddish theater, and spent years working odd jobs until he could afford to become a full-time actor. In 1918, Schwartz founded the Yiddish Art Theatre, with a goal of presenting both classics and new works to a Yiddish audience. In 1919, Schwartz first played the role of Tevye on stage in a production directed by himself and based on an adaptation Sholem Aleichem penned shortly before his death. Almost twenty years later, Schwartz returned to the role of Tevye for the film adaptation, which he felt compelled to make in response to the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe throughout the 1930s.

Seriously, Oscars?: No Oscar attention for “Tevya”, but its successor “Fiddler on the Roof” fared much better: Eight nominations and three wins.

Other notes

Solomon-Olesksii Naumovich Rabinovich had been writing stories since the age of 15, when he adopted the pen name Sholem Aleichem (a Yiddish version of the Hebrew phrase meaning “peace be with you”). By the time the first “Tevye” story in 1894, Aleichem was already a celebrated figure in Yiddish literature, dubbed by some as “the Jewish Mark Twain”. Like Tevye, Aleichem lived in the Russian Empire at the turn of the century, witnessed the violent pogroms on Kyiv in 1905, and emigrated shortly afterwards. Aleichem wrote eight Tevye stories, the last being published in 1914, two years before his death. The 1939 film is primarily an adaptation of the fifth story “Chava” and the eighth “Lekh-Lekho” (aka “Get Thee Out”), with one brief interlude from the first story – “Tevye Strikes It Rich” – added to the film’s beginning.
“Tevya” was made on a budget of $70,000 (roughly 1.5 million today), financed primarily by Schwartz and a group of friends. Shooting took place in the summer of 1939 on a 130-acre potato farm in Long Island. In late August 1939, the Nazis seized the city-state of Danzig with the invasion of Poland happening the following week. Many on the “Tevya” production team had family in Poland, and despite the political anxiety, filming was completed shortly thereafter.
As previously mentioned, “Tevya” is one of the rare non-English language films on the NFR, presented primarily in Yiddish, with some Ukrainian and Russian sprinkled throughout. It makes the entire film feel more authentic, therefore making the characters feel more dimensional and more sympathetic for a viewing audience. And shoutout to whoever did the English subtitles on the Kino Lorber restoration; the translation has some character to it, retaining the spirit of Aleichem’s prose rather than just being a copy-and-paste Google Translate.
It was such a relief to see a film this Jewish from this point in history. In the late 1930s, Hollywood strategically shied away from overt Jewish depictions for fear of their films being banned in Nazi Germany and losing money. It’s unfortunate that the only way an openly Jewish film could be made at this time was an independent production, but you can feel the sense that this team had to make this film at this exact moment in time; a flaunting to the anti-Semites of the world as if to say “We’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”
As with many other films based on short stories, you can sense the padding in “Tevya”. There’s a lot of scenes of Tevya giving extended monologues about his feelings towards his daughter’s marriage and the world around him, but after a while it feels less and less earned. I suspect they opted for this rather than adding more of the original stories into the film in order to save money (Tevya goes from seven daughters to two in this version, and there isn’t a matchmaker, matchmaker in sight).

The moment when Tevya yells at Tzeitel “I have no other daughters!” got an unintentional laugh out of me. Poor Hodel, to say nothing of Shprintze, Beilke, Taybele, and the unnamed seventh one that’s only mentioned in the first story.
[Spoilers] For those of us (including myself) more familiar with the musical than the original stories, it’s surprising that this movie is even more of a downer. For starters, Golde dies! Like the stories, this movie ends with Tevya and his family being evicted from the town, although the film (and the musical) remove the ambiguous ending and let Tevya reconcile with Chava. In the end, “Tevya” is essentially an extended melodrama. A good melodrama, I grant you that, but still.

Legacy

“Tevya” premiered in New York City on December 21^st, 1939. The Yiddish papers that reviewed the film were in near agreement that while the film as a whole was quite powerful (especially Schwartz’s performance), it departed too drastically from the source material to be considered a success. Although the film had been deemed lost for decades, a print was rediscovered in 1978.
After “Tevya”, Maurice Schwartz returned to the theater, though Yiddish theater was slowly dying due to the ongoing assimilation of its audience. Schwartz performed on Broadway and in a few Hollywood movies before his death in 1960 at age 69.
There have been multiple adaptations of the “Tevye” short stories before and after the 1939 film, but of course the best known is the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. With a score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and a book by Joseph Stein, “Fiddler” adapted the material for a post-Holocaust generation, and subsequently became the longest running Broadway musical of its time. There have been revivals all over the world, including five on Broadway, and a successful film adaptation in 1971 by Norman Jewison. It’s worth noting that as of this writing, the 1971 film has not made the NFR. That’s gotta be an oversight, right?

Listen to This: The original Broadway cast recording of “Fiddler on the Roof” made the National Recording Registry in 2019. “Fiddler” expert Alisa Solomon is on hand with an essay that delves into the score and the album’s recording session.