Historical Context

Fiddler on the Roof, based on the short story "Tevye and His Daughters" by Sholom Aleichem, was one of the first musicals to defy Broadway's established rules of commercial success. It dealt with serious issues such as persecution, poverty, and the struggle to hold on to one's beliefs in the midst of a hostile and chaotic environment. Criticized at first for its "limited appeal", Fiddler on the Roofstruck such a universal chord in audiences that it became, for a time, the longest running production in the history of Broadway.

Set in 1905, Fiddler on the Roof takes place in Anatevka, a small Jewish village in Russia. The story revolves around the dairyman Tevye and his attempts to preserve his family's traditions in the face of a changing world. When his eldest daughter, Tzeitel, begs him to let her marry a poor tailor rather than the middle-aged butcher that he has already chosen for her, Tevye must choose between his own daughter's happiness and those beloved traditions that keep the outside world at bay. Meanwhile, there are other forces at work in Anatevka, dangerous forces which threaten to destroy the very life he is trying to preserve.

Fiddler on the Roof opened on September 22, 1964 with Zero Mostel in the leading role. It ran for 3,242 performances at the Imperial Theatre and opened the door for other musicals to deal with more serious issues.

The 1971 screen version featured Norma Crane, Molly Picon, and Topol.

Deeper Background

The characters of Tevye the dairyman, his unimpressed wife, his five daughters and other dwellers in the village of Anatevka, first came to attention in the stories written in Yiddish by the popular fiction writer who called himself Sholom Aleichem (literally "peace be with you" in Hebrew). The stories appeared in vairous publications in eastern Europe and then spread to Yiddish publications in America and elsewhere, in the years 1905 through 1910.

Over the years, they became world favorites in many languages. This continuing interest was vastly accelerated when in 1953 Arnold Perl, a long-time admirer of Sholom Aleichem's work, and that of I. L. Peretz and other popular Yiddish writers, put together a series of short plays. They were based on Aleichem's stories, including one by Peretz, which under the title of "The World of Sholom Aleichem" dramatically vivified the life of the Jewish "Shtetels" in Tzarist Russia, a picturesque, though impoverished life that had disintegrated considerably as a result of World War I and was thoroughly destroyed in World War II.

The success of "The World of Sholom Aleichem" encouraged Arnold Perl to plough the same field a bit more, and in 1957 Perl brought out a play about that indomitable milkman of Anatevka, which he called "Tevye and his Daughters." This prompted Joseph Stein to believe that the Tevye stories could be made into a musical, and Fiddler on the Roof was the result.

http://www.fiddler.siegelweb.com/facts.htm

Fiddler on the Roof is the story of life in a small Russian shtetl in 1905, when Russia was still an empire, ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, head of the dictatorial Romanov dynasty. While much of Western Europe was becoming more free and democratic, Russia was still rooted in traditional ideas of absolute monarchy. Nicholas was determined to hold on to, in his words, "absolute autocracy." This, coupled with his seeming lack of common sense as his country stumbled through crisis after crisis, would eventually lead to the downfall and destruction of the Romanovs.

Along with other abuses of human rights, Nicholas' administration was instrumental in releasing a great deal of anti-Jewish propaganda. This propaganda incited fear and hatred of Jews among many non-Jewish citizens, and often led to violence. The three-year period from 1903 to 1906 was a particularly terrifying time for Russian Jews, as one pogrom after another raged in Western Russia. (A pogrom is defined as the "organized killing of a minority." Some dictionaries actually include a reference to tsarist Russia in their definition.)

There had been many pogroms in Russia in the second half of the 19th century, including 166 in the year 1881 alone. In 1905, the year in which Fiddler on the Roof begins, there were at least six pogroms in Imperial Russia, occurring in such major cities as Kishinev (capital of present-day Moldova), Odessa (in present-day Ukraine and the site of a catastrophically huge massacre of Jews in WWII), and Minsk (capital of present-day Belarus). In all, these pogroms claimed the lives of no less than 1,500 Jewish citizens, a total of four for each day of that year.

Most of these pogroms occurred within an area referred to as the Pale of Settlement, the area of Russia in which Jews could legally settle. Shtetls such as Anatevka, the fictitious village in Fiddler on the Roof, began to disappear as discriminatory laws against Jewish citizens forbade them from living in rural areas, or in towns of less than 10,000 people. Indeed, as Fiddler begins, the people of Anatevka have just received word of the Tsar's edict, which will shortly evict them from their homes. By the musical's end, the people of Anatevka are packed up, some moving to America, many others to Krakow (in modern-day Poland), for what they hope will be a new and better life.

More than a century later, we know what became of those who immigrated to America, and to those who immigrated to Poland. This knowledge only adds to the sadness and poignancy of this tremendous musical, which is steeped in so much true and tragic history.

http://fordcenter.blogspot.com/2010/10/history-in-fiddler-on-roof.html