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IN THE BIOGRAPHY of her father, Sholem Aleichem, Marie WaifeGoldberg recalls the day she came across a Chinese edition of his stories. Why, she wondered, would the Orient have any interest in that home-spun shtetl philosopher, Tevye the Milkman? "Only a few of the 600,000 who bought the book in China would have read any part of the Bible or ever seen a Jew. How could they put themselves in the place of so typical a Jew, so drenched in Biblical lore, as Tevye?"
Then a thought occurred to her: "Perhaps they go beyond the parochial frame, and see in Tevye the dignity of the lowly, of people much like themselves. he may be low on the worldly scale, but he can think for himself, have a view of himself and of his situation in the general scheme of things. They hear in his voice the universal outcry against injustice which stirs man in the rice paddy as much as in Tevye's Anatevka."
That universal outcry was first heard on the stage 40 years ago, when Fiddler on the Roof, freely adapted from the Aleichem tales, opened at the Imperial Theater. Set in a tiny Jewish village in the year 1905, the production seemed to have limited appeal. After all, a show that portrayed the beleaguered Jew of Eastern Europe as a violinist perched on an eave was hardly the stuffof musical megabits.
Against all odds, though, Fiddler prevailed. It ran for seven years (3,242 performances), won numerous Tony awards, and then went out into the world, playing in more than a dozen foreign versions (including an Asian one). Seven years later a film adaptation was released, and garnered several Oscars. But this extraordinary success was not without its detractors-many of them Jewish intellectuals. The shrewdly commercial book by Joseph Stein, and the infectious music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, prompted critic Irving Howe to note acrimoniously, "American Jews suffer these days from a feeling of guilt because they have lost touch with the past from which they derive, and often compound this guilt by indulging themselves in unearned nostalgia. The less, for example, they know about Eastern European Jewish life or even the immigrant Jewish experience in America, the more inclined...