A captivating, if prolonged, look at an inconsistency in a landmark Broadway musical.
A brief study explores the daughters in the backstory of Fiddler on the Roof.
The first edition of Huttner’s book was published in 2014 in order to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of Fiddler on the Roof.This second edition, which features augmented graphics, still spends a great deal of time addressing what may seem at first like a trivial or inconsequential question: Why does Tevye the Dairyman have seven daughters in the original stories written by Sholem Aleichem but only five in the famous and beloved Broadway musical adapted from those tales? Huttner, who by her own admission is “obsessed by all things Fiddler,” writes that she can’t remember a time when the work wasn’t a deeply embedded part of her life. She brings that long expertise to bear in this slim volume, discussing the history of the text and making some surprising connections to other cultural icons. Aleichem wrote his original eight Tevye stories over the course of almost 20 years, and they were a cherished part of Jewish literary culture before show writer Joseph Stein and his colleagues adapted them for the stage. In the musical, Tevye famously has five daughters: Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Shprintze, and Bielke. Why the change, Huttner wondered, and to get answers, she dug into the past of Aleichem (he had four daughters, Tissa, Lyala, Emma, and Musa) and examined the five daughters of Zelophehad in the book of Numbers.
Huttner’s conjectures along these lines are certainly intriguing, and they’re written in such an engaging way that her readers don’t at all need to be as obsessed with all things Fiddler as the author is. The connections she draws between Fiddler and the life of Aleichem (whose real name was Solomon Rabinowitz), between Fiddler and the five daughters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and even between Fiddler and the three daughters in the TV series Downton Abbey—all of this is enthralling. The main problem with the book is something Huttner herself admits: This volume is the appetizer to the author’s more comprehensive study, Diamond Fiddler(2016). This fact is evident throughout the work. More than half the page count is taken up by appendices and acknowledgements; Huttner’s autobiographical segments feel cramped and incongruous alongside the more theoretical ones; and the central preoccupation—that change from seven daughters to five—is never convincingly elevated from its status as a minor textual quibble. A far stronger choice on the author’s part would have been to trim all the fat from this book, compress its textual question, and make that material an appendix for Diamond Fiddler. Her speculations are arresting: “I believe that Jane Austen and Solomon Rabinowitz both knew what the Lord commanded concerning…the five named daughters of Zelophehad—and I think Joseph Stein did too (even if he had no conscious memory of the daughters themselves).” But since there’s nothing beyond Huttner’s suppositions, the discussion feels overly protracted.
A captivating, if prolonged, look at an inconsistency in a landmark Broadway musical.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9850964-5-8
Page Count: 122
Publisher: FF2 Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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