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 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.
