TEVYE'S DAUGHTERS - NO LAUGHING MATTER

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.