On the Other Hand 

In March 1964, Barbra Streisand opened on Broadway in “Funny Girl,” playing the Jewish comedian and singer, Fanny Brice. Six months later, “Fiddler on the Roof” opened just a few blocks away.

Both shows told stories about the Jewish past, but something about each production pointed toward the future, too.

Imagine seeing both that year.

In one theater, a young Jewish woman was becoming a star by playing an earlier Jewish woman becoming a star. In the other, a milkman named Tevye was trying to keep his family’s traditions intact while his daughters kept making other plans. And above his village stood a fiddler.

On the one hand, the violin gives us the sounds of weddings, celebrations, and Jewish communal life. Just seeing the instrument is reminiscent of the old country.

On the other hand, most Jews in the Russian Empire were legally restricted to living within the Pale of Settlement. For a gifted musician, winning a place at a conservatory and completing its demanding training could bring more than a musical education: the right to settle elsewhere in the empire. The violin could open a door the law otherwise kept closed.

And on the other hand, as Tevye might continue, the music could follow you.

When NPR’s Terry Gross asked Jerry Bock, the composer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” about writing its music, he said he hadn’t set out to research klezmer or Russian music. Somehow, he explained, he had absorbed those sounds “unknowingly, unwittingly.”

“Minor is my major key,” he said.

Meanwhile, on the other stage, Streisand was playing Brice, a star of films, radio, and the Ziegfeld Follies, lavish Broadway variety shows featuring songs, comedy, and glamorous showgirls. Her Jewish characters, humor, and Yiddish-accented delivery were part of what audiences loved. Yet she didn’t speak Yiddish. In fact, Irving Berlin had encouraged her to try the accent for a comic song, which helped her discover what became a trademark.

“In anything Jewish I ever did, I wasn’t standing apart making fun,” she said. “I was the race.”

Still, the contrast with the conventional glamorous showgirl was part of Brice’s comedy. Streisand, however, could inherit that tradition while being funny, glamorous, desired, and the romantic center of the story. Her unmistakably Jewish appearance and Brooklyn personality became part of her appeal.

The story she’d told in “Funny Girl” was about the past, but the woman telling it showed what the future could look like.

In “Fiddler,” a family celebrates weddings, observes the Sabbath, and argues over what its children owe to tradition. Tevye’s daughters choose lives he hadn’t imagined for them. Then the villagers are ordered to leave Anatevka, carrying what they can.

Far beyond the Jewish communities it portrayed, audiences recognized their own families in “Fiddler.” In Japan, Joseph Stein, who wrote the script, encountered an audience member who asked whether the show was “at all a success in America.” Stein assured him it was Broadway’s biggest success.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s so Japanese.”

Tevye wasn’t the only father having these conversations.

In “The Jazz Singer,” the landmark 1927 “talkie” that let audiences hear its star sing and speak, Al Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, who leaves home, becomes Jack Robin, and pursues a theatrical career his cantor father cannot accept. Coincidentally, Jolson himself was a cantor’s son, too.

At the piano, Jack sings Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” for his delighted mother, but his father orders him to stop. Later, Jack returns to the synagogue to lead ‘Kol Nidre’ because his dying father can no longer do so, and while his father hears him and dies at peace, their reconciliation only comes when Jack returns to his father’s music.

Honestly, I wish they’d made the movie about songwriter Harold Arlen instead. His father, also a cantor, eventually did something Jack’s father never could: embrace his son’s music.

Born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, Arlen grew up singing in his father, Samuel’s, synagogue choir. He fell in love with jazz and left high school to pursue music. His parents initially objected. In New York, he spent years writing songs for Harlem’s Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway led the bands and Ethel Waters sang his “Stormy Weather.”

“I don’t know how the hell to explain it,” he said, “but I hear in jazz and in gospel my father singing.”

Author David Lehman wondered whether Samuel ever sang prayers to the tune of “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” on Purim. So do I. I love imagining that service.