We all have our cultural blind spots. I’ve never seen an episode of “The Simpsons,” either, though I very much have always meant to. Some things just slip by. My failure to see “Fiddler” is only important in that it would be extremely on-brand for me to have seen “Fiddler” 35,000 times — to have “Fiddler” be the only show I’d ever seen. I grew up attending Jewish schools and in a home where my mother became Orthodox when I was 12, and where my mother’s full-time mission became to guide my sisters and me toward her enlightenment. This worked on my sisters. It still works for them.
Me? I failed to observe, I criticized their observance, all of which my mother called “my self-hating,” when she was lightly chiding, and my “anti-Semitism” when she wanted me to feel the full disappointment of what my resistance represented. She felt that if I had no love for tradition, I would only subvert it — that I would be responsible for the draining of what she most loved and found essential. We either replenish or we drain. My apathy was not replenishing.
I attended the show with my mother and one of my sisters — Tracy, the one who loves musicals — and my aunt, Lois, who has taken me to a majority of theater in my lifetime. I had not seen Bartlett Sher’s 2015 Broadway production, though my mother wanted to. I hadn’t seen the movie, ever, no matter how many times I passed through a living room where it was playing on a TV. And I hadn’t planned on seeing this, the version in actual Yiddish, either when it became a surprise hit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, nor when it moved uptown to Stage 42.
I casually informed my family before curtain that I had never seen “Fiddler.” My mother hadn’t realized. “How?” she asked. Then: Of course. She filed this under my resistance to being Jewish, which was never really resistance to being Jewish. It was only a lack of enthusiasm for all the rules that she now ascribed to being Jewish.
And yet? Had I seen “Fiddler”? The story of Tevye and his five dowry-less daughters in a small Russian village that faced increasing anti-Semitism was strangely familiar to me: The daughters pining for their not-yet husbands. The father begging God to watch over his family even as the world becomes less and less familiar to him. The pogroms.
And I knew every single song. In eighth grade, my chorus sang “Sunrise, Sunset,” while our parents sobbed and we middle-schoolers rolled our eyes at its sentimentality. I knew “Matchmaker” from hearing it hummed (in good and exasperated humor)in my own home growing up, where there was some amount of anxiety over the plethora of daughters and lack of dowries (and money in general). I knew “Miracle of Miracles” from my mother singing it to me on the rare night I finished my homework at a reasonable hour. I knew “Tradition” because everyone knows “Tradition.” Same for “If I Were a Rich Man.”
“Fiddler” played out in my home as if Sholem Aleichem had lived with us while he wrote it. My mother literally cried to the heavens when I told her I was marrying someone who wasn’t born Jewish. When my cousins and her ex-husband married outside our faith — I saw her terror that our religion and culture, which she valued and loved, were being diluted with every brazen decision. And I knew the pogroms — or rather, my body knew, from repeated exposure to these stories my whole life: Things look fine, things look less fine, then suddenly there’s the sound of glass breaking.
I had the normal number of opportunities to see “Fiddler” in any of its iterations, I suppose: the movie, the many professional productions, the many in-school productions, that one camp production. But by the time I was old enough to choose, I would never waste my time on something that felt like kitsch or cliché, and it was already too familiar. How many people with Yiddish accents did I already have around me? No, when I was finally able to choose my own entertainment, I watched episodes of “thirtysomething” and “A Different World” so that I’d know how regular, secular people related to each other once I got out into the world.
But I’m soft in middle age. I dissolved into tears at the theater as wordlessly, the stage turned into a wedding, whose every step I knew by rote,and Tsaytl married her love, the short tailor. They stood under their huppah, the actors not so much older than I was when I stood in front of a crowd of weeping adults. I’ve just started planning my son’s bar mitzvah. If I chalked up my familiarity with “Fiddler” to its clichéd resemblance to my life, now I remembered that clichés are clichés because they’re true, right?
Onstage, the pogroms came. Once again, there was no stopping them. Growing up, that was all history to me, a time we were told about in our Jewish history classes. Each year on Yom HaShoah someone very old stood in front of us and gave testimony to the slow-mounting horror of the Holocaust. But now the implications of those scenes were chilling: The village acquiescing; the wedding that turns violent; the lulling placidity of nostalgia and sentiment and then the sudden, brutal way the background tension comes into the foreground.
Over just these last few months, more than several Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, have been attacked in the street, seemingly for the crime of being visibly Jewish. There are people with actual gathering permits brandishing swastikas — swastikas! — in the South, chanting that “Jews will not replace us.”
So I sat there and I cried, and I was filled with self-loathing for being such a target, though maybe my mother is right; maybe that’s the most self-hating part of me — not that I hated being Jewish; I hated the traditions that were imposed upon me and I thought I could avoid them but now I realize I can’t.
Sometime after the intermission, puddly from my tears, I began to relax. I am part of a long history, for better or worse. Why shouldn’t I lean into the poignancy, made manifest on the stage, of a familiar struggle? It’s not as if I have a choice. Why shouldn’t I allow a beautiful show to be a comfort to me in my own endless panic about what modernity has wrought? Why shouldn’t I yield to who I apparently was this whole time: a person who would eschew my culture, then become defensive about it, then realize one day that familiarity is what “Fiddler” is actually about. We grow old, our children are no longer babies, there is always someone menacing breathing down our necks — and each time it is beautiful and each time it is horrible and each time it is a surprise and each time we’ve been warned. Tradition.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.