Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Because isn’t her Papa, in a way, her religion? Isn’t that, shouldn’t that be the real faith, the sanctified, sustaining love between them?

But she is grateful, promises to write to them in America. Will they ever be truly reconciled? Ever embrace, or touch? Ever see each other again?

And these unanswered questions are the most disturbing thing to me, as the village empties out, everyone trudging through the snow, burdened with their meager belongings, their bundles and wheelbarrows, the old men stopping one last time to stand in a circle and pray together (just the men, only the men), and the Fiddler following after them to play his final violin song, a sweetly mournful refrain of Tradition! The true tragedy of the story is not the eviction from Anatevka; they’re off to America, aren’t they, the Promised Land? They’ll find a place to live; Tevye can find a job. (And as I grow older and watch and rewatch this movie on network television, I will think they are actually lucky to be evicted, for surely it’s better to settle into a Lower East Side tenement existence than to live — or not live — as Ukrainian Jews in Revolutionary Russia, or World War II. Doesn’t the eviction ultimately save their lives?)

No, the true Tragedy, the saddest and most chilling thing, is a father choosing faith over his daughter. Choosing a belief in a set of arbitrary rules, some fantasy Tradition! What about your actual daughter? I think. Isn’t she your “people,” your own family, your own daughter, that you are turning your back on? Flesh and blood and breath, standing right there in front of you, begging for your love, your acknowledgement? She is not a concept, a philosophical abstraction. She is not a thing to be believed in or not. She is real, she exists.

But it isn’t just, or really, about his faith, I finally realize. I finally understand. Chava’s breaking of Tradition! is a rejection of him. Of the Papa. Of his role, his supremacy — and that is the Tradition! that gives him his only purpose in life. He is a poor, persecuted Jew in the world, and this is his only semblance of power, of authority, the thing that gives him any purchase or foothold at all up on that shaky roof of his. He loves his daughter, yes, but love is conditional: Your love is expressed through obedience to me, and in exchange I will love and protect and honor you. Your vulnerability is my strength, the thing upon which I can balance and lean. And if you cease to be vulnerable, if you push me too far, disobey my directive, instructional love, challenge my absolute tsarist rule, you will be disowned, cast aside, so that I can hold on to my Tradition! and thus not lose my own precarious footing. Do not question my authority; if you do, you will cease to exist, and I am willing to pay that price.

This is the lingering, subconscious moral, for me, of Fiddler on the Roof ; it is not about the precariousness of early twentieth-century Ukrainian Jewish life, it is about the precariousness of love. A father’s love. But I won’t truly realize or understand this for another fourteen years.

For now, at seven, I will suppress this disquieting family dynamic. I will ignore and compartmentalize this moral and instead accept the narrative archetypes as presented: The threatening, bad-guy Gentile Russians, the blustering, adoring Papa and his loving family. I will hold on to the comforting and bloodless fairy-tale Judaism, the song-and-joyous-dance Jewishness, the big happy familyness, the candles and lace and melodious biddy biddy bum , I will bask in the golden warmth and stocking’d sepia glow of it all.

My German/Lithuanian maternal grandfather, Albert, my adored and adoring Grandpa Al, was proudly American-born, no fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, he. He grew up in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties, the era of speakeasies and bathtub bootleg gin, Dillinger and Capone, and my grandfather’s father, Benjamin, ran a service station that, as the family story goes, catered to the Mob. Benjamin was called “Benny the Jew” by Mobsters, perhaps even nicknamed by Capone himself, it was implied. Benny the Jew did not bother the Mob, and they did not bother him; as the story goes, they regularly arrived in a fleet of sleek black roadsters (after viewing Public Enemy gangster movies, I project tommy guns, fedoras, and cauliflower ears onto the scene) to have their tanks filled, their windows washed, their oil checked, perhaps a bullet hole patched up by Benny the Jew; they wordlessly tossed their bills (perhaps even joshed with Benny a bit, for Benny the Jew was an affable guy, knew his place, accepted their money and business with the mercenary pragmatism of his race) and zoomed benignly off on their Mobster way.

My grandfather apprenticed with his father Benny the Jew, learned to patch tires and check radiator hoses and keep his eyes down, his bulbous Jewish nose minding his own business. As the story goes, one day when my grandfather was eighteen and preparing to marry my (Polish Jew, freshly immigrated) grandmother, one of those sleek black cars pulls up. A Capone Mobster leans out the window, queries all tough-guy Cagney-like:

“You. Yeah, you. You Benny the Jew’s kid?”

My grandfather, I imagine, pauses briefly (bullet hole in the passenger door), then nods. It has to be claimed; his heritage, ancestry, race are as obvious as the nose on his face.

The back passenger door of the car opens, a shadowy leather seat, maybe a whiff of cigar.

“Get in.”

There is no decision to be made. He sets down his rag or oil can, wipes his hands on his coveralls, crawls in with as much shaky Semitic dignity as he can muster. The Mobsters and the story take my grandfather to a tailor in the city, who measured and chalked, sheared through a high-quality black wool, tailor-fit him with his wedding suit, spanking black and new. Courtesy of Capone, a thank-you to Benny the Jew for all those years of faithful service.

You Benny the Jew’s kid?

I wonder about that brief beat between query and claim, what my grandfather thought or felt. Did he look around for his father — in that moment not his Papa, not a venerable, patriarchal Benjamin, but a mere “Benny,” infantilized by the diminutive — for protection or guidance? Did he know instinctively or by experience how powerless, how useless his father would be?

But is it a moment of powerlessness, of shame? Of Jewish emasculation? Or a summons to adventure, perhaps, a lingering penny-comic fantasy about to come true, an invitation to the ultimate club of invulnerable mobster machismo? (Alcatraz and syphilis are still years away in Capone’s own emasculated future.) Is my grandfather Al, Benny the Jew’s kid, afraid or elated? Is it an initiation into adulthood, a symbolic leaving of the gas station/home? Is the fitting of a wedding suit the making of an adult man?

I have no idea — I first hear this story when I am very, very young and it has been handed down, told and retold with the intention to amuse and delight, the assertion of a tiny glamour. There is no violence, no degradation, here. It’s a story told with pride, meant to prompt images of Cagney and De Niro. Al Capone bought my grandfather his wedding suit: A charming family anecdote. Is it even true?

And what does Jewishness have to do with it? What if it were a story of Benny the Episcopalian, or Benjamin the Gas Station Guy?

But: Benny the Jew has such a ring to it. It reduces my great-grandfather Benjamin to that diminishing diminutive, plus a racial label. It is definingly pithy, to the point. The first time I ever hear this story as a child, the word Jew makes me instantly uncomfortable. The harshness of that J , the deep-voweled, yet abruptly cut-off ew triggers unease. The word Jew feels fraught; for years I wiggle my syntactical way around it, I restructure sentences to use the swooshier Jewish instead. “The Jews” isn’t as bad — the plural s again softens it somehow, dilutes its razor edge. One time I asked my cousin Sandra, who is a self-described Professional Jew, a high-level executive at a Jewish organization (once recruited as a spy for Israel: Another bit of family mythology) if Jew was a negative word, a slur. She thought a moment, then said: “Only when it’s preceded by dirty or followed by boy .”