Jerome Robbins by Lesser Wendy

Author:Lesser, Wendy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

Fiddler on the Roof

WHEN HE WAS nearly six years old, in the summer of 1924, Jerry and his twelve-year-old sister were taken by their mother to visit their paternal grandfather in his native village of Rozhanka. The shtetl had been transferred from Russia to Poland when the borders moved after the First World War, and its name had officially been changed to Rejanke, but otherwise it still very much resembled the place from which Jerry’s father, as a seventeen-year-old seeking to avoid conscription in the tsar’s army, had emigrated in 1904.

For the little boy from New Jersey, Rozhanka was an idyllic location, with a grandfather who loved him dearly and sang lullabies to him every night, plus plenty of village children to play with, horses to ride instead of automobiles to watch out for, and novel activities like fishing in brooks and climbing in haylofts. That summer was to remain a golden period in his imagination for the rest of his life. “They told me I spoke Yiddish there and that I played with the children of the shtetl all day long in the fields, in the yards. . . . I remember tea, candles, jams and the melodies of voices. It was lovely, all lovely. I do not remember one unhappy moment there,” he recalled.

Though the shtetl must have been surrounded by a hostile or at least indifferent Christian community, Jerry’s memories of it retained not a whiff of anti-Semitism. Prior to his trip to Poland, and in the teenage years that followed it, his experience of Judaism was to be much more mixed. Some of the problems came from the outside. When he was practicing at home for his bar mitzvah, for instance, a group of neighborhood boys who were not Jewish (and who he had thought were his friends) jeered at him through the window and then came into the house, unimpeded by the rabbi who was there to tutor him. It was Jerry, humiliated and angry, who had to yell at them to leave. So his bar mitzvah itself was, in his own mind, a compromised and embarrassing rather than celebratory occasion.

But part of Jerome Rabinowitz’s complicated relation to his own Jewishness, a complication that was to extend throughout his life, stemmed from inside the family. His memories of evening meals in Weehawken were eons away from the lit candles and gentle songs of Rozhanka. “Sonia and Mother. Pots would be slammed, voices rise; I’ll make it myself—my way, your way—aggravation—that killer disease caused by children of martyred parents—smell of onions, eggs & lox frying—challah toasted—a constant going & coming to the table for plates, salt, butter—the meal being eaten piecemeal—the fight going on,” and on, and on, until finally his father, “like Jove, hurls his Yiddish thunderbolts,” and the argument subsides. And though he was told he had spoken Yiddish himself in Poland, here in America there were instead family celebrations with “the yiddish jokes I could not understand,” forcing him to join in the adults’ laughter without really knowing what he was laughing at.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.