HOME  DISINFORMATION  KHMELNYTSKY  PEOPLE  MAGOCSI Magocsi   Letter 04   09-Dec-1999   The Jew as Ukrainian "The only legitimate role for Fiddler on the Roof in a history book may be to illustrate how little mass culture can be relied upon as a source of historical knowledge." � Lubomyr Prytulak References to a "no-more-than-able historian" and a "superior historian" in the bottom-most paragraph on this page are directed at historian Robert Paul Magocsi whose History of Ukraine Lubomyr Prytulak has been objecting to in his four letters to him. Reference to Ukrainian literature which may have provided a model for some of the characteristics of the writing of Sholom Aleichem is to Ivan Levytsky's The Kaidash Family.  Excerpts from The Kaidash Family are wonderfully read in Ukrainian by Kyiv master of dramatic reading Anatoly Palamarenko on an audio cassette that can be purchased from Yevshan Corporation whose web site has only begun construction but does permit the request of a catalog by email. In connection with the 09-Dec-1999 Lubomyr Prytulak letter to Robert Paul Magocsi which is the subject of this page and which appears further below, Lubomyr Prytulak received the following email from Ivan Kalmar: To:  [Email] From:  Ivan Kalmar <[email protected]> Subject:  Regarding your use of my book Date:  Sun, 03 Dec 2000 21:39:20 -0500 Dear Mr. Prytulak, It has come to my attention that you are using almost an entire chapter from my book "The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens" on your web site, reproducing a letter you wrote to Prof. Magocsi. I ask you to remove this web page from your site. I do not wish my writing to be used in this way and, given the extent of the quote, your doing so violates my copyright for the material. Ivan Kalmar Northrop Frye Hall 228 Victoria College University of Toronto Toronto, Canada M5S 1K7 _____________________________________ [email protected] phone +1 (416) 585-4419 fax +1 (416) 585-4584 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalmar _____________________________________ Next day, Lubomyr Prytulak sent Ivan Kalmar the URL for the present page where can be found the following reply: 04-Dec-2000 Ivan Kalmar: If you can point out any distortion or inaccuracy in my Letter 4 to Robert Paul Magocsi of 09-Dec-1999, titled using your own expression, The Jew as Ukrainian, then I will be delighted to acknowledge it and to correct it.  In the event of your neglecting to do so, I will be predisposed to regard your email as an attempt to suppress views whose dissemination is in the public interest, but with which you disagree. You will find my opinion concerning copyright at www.ukar.org/infosit.html whose bottom line is that I believe my use of your material is protected under Canadian Fair Dealing and under U.S. Fair Use laws. The main purpose of the Ukrainian Archive web site at www.ukar.org is to afford Ukrainians some protection against hatred, and I am confident that I can convince a court of law that it is in the public interest to allow a weak and vulnerable minority an occasional effective answer to the interminable stream of calumny that is published against it. Furthermore, I welcome any litigation that you might commence, as it would serve to give wider dissemination to information that heretofore has been largely suppressed, and would force my interlocutors to for the first time answer the questions that I have been putting to them but which they have been choosing to ignore.  In mustering your forces for such litigation, I recommend that you consult with others who may be similarly minded with regard to the Ukrainian Archive web site � there is a long list of such individuals, and together with them you should be able to gather overwhelming media support, not to mention a glut of money, and even not a little brawn � individuals such as Irving Abella, Yitzhak Arad, Joseph Ben-Ami, Yaakov Bleich, Edgar Bronfman, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Gladstone, Al Gore, Irving Greenberg, Don Hewitt, Michael H. Jordan, Jonathan Kay, Leonid Kuchma, Joe Lieberman, Sol Littman, Robert Paul Magocsi, Anne McLellan, Martin Mendelsohn, Adolf Ogi, Omeljan Pritsak, David Radler, Moshe Ronen, Eli Rosenbaum, Morley Safer, Near Sher, Laurence Tisch, Mike Wallace, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal.  Heretofore, all these have declined to answer my questions or to defend themselves against my accusations, and certainly have declined to litigate against me.  Perhaps you will be able to give them courage, and convince them that their position is not quite as hopeless as they themselves appear to see it. Of course I am disappointed that an individual as knowledgeable about Ukrainian-Jewish affairs as you are should respond to the Ukrainian Archive with as little correction either to your coreligionists for their maltreatment of Ukrainians, or in the alternative to me for my misperception of this maltreatment.  You witness my vast critique, and your only comment has to do with an ill-founded quibble concerning copyright!  I expect from the feebleness of this opener that you will find yourself drawn to the ranks of the many who decline to debate me.  The question � for starters � of whether what was really being covered up by the images of Fiddler on the Roof were the arenda contract and the Bolshevik blood bath are ones that I suspect you will lack the courage to take up. Lubomyr Prytulak Ivan Kalmar resumed: To:  Lubomyr Prytulak, Marvin Kurz <[email protected]> From:  Ivan Kalmar <[email protected]> Subject:  Re: Regarding your use of my book Date:  Mon, 04 Dec 2000 10:19:49 -0500 Dear Mr. Prytulak, The brevity of my note to you was due to my desire to be courteous, and not by any lack of courage. Your public reply appears to be devoid of any consideration for courtesy. Consequently, I no longer feel any need for constraint. Your misuse of my article does not require any extensive commentary. You are correct if you wish to say that in my book I pointed out that "Fiddler on the Roof" was a myth. That in itself does not mean that it is a lie � any more than any other work of fiction. I do also believe that "Fiddler on the Roof" romanticizes Jewish life in Ukraine in order to counteract the hateful stereotypes of the "rich Jew" held by people such as yourself. Indeed, I did say that some Jews in Ukraine were rich. However, if you read my book in full, you would see that I do not see any need to apologize for that fact. A Ukrainian who noted that some Ukrainians were unsophisticated peasants would, similarly, not need to feel that he subscribes to a whole set of stereotypes overgeneralizing about the entire Ukrainian people. I know you could tell from my chapter that I have a fondness for Ukrainian people and literature. I do not hold it against them as a group if some of them, like yourself, are racists with little respect for others. The leap from my position to one that holds that the Jews "enslaved" the Slavs is not � as you say � from one taken by a merely able historian to one taken by a superior one. Rather, it is a leap from considered criticism to pathological fantasy. Analyzing your use of my article therefore belongs not to the field of intellectual debate, but to that of psychotherapy. I am sure the other authors you mention have felt the same way, which is the reason they have not replied to you. I hope you have the courage to publish this note as well as my previous one, in which case I am quite satisfied to see my chapter on your website. Otherwise � I repeat � you are violating my copyright. Ivan Kalmar And Lubomyr Prytulak learned once again � to his cost � how time-consuming is the refutation of facile, flippant, off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness writing such as the above: 05-Dec-2000 Ivan Kalmar: How do you define "racist" and "pathological"? You call me "racist" and "pathological" and my thinking "in the field of psychotherapy," but do not disclose your definition of these terms, and do not allude to the observations that led you to your several diagnoses. Do you take the position that it is not racist and pathological of Jews to hold Ukrainian women in sex slavery in Israel, but it is racist and pathological for Ukrainians to object? It is not racist and pathological for Orthodox Jews to refuse to pick up the telephone to call an ambulance for a Gentile who has collapsed in their neighborhood, but it is racist and pathological for an observer to wonder whether Orthodox Judaism is racist and pathological? It is not racist and pathological for Jews to have occupied six out of every ten senior positions in the Ukrainian Cheka-GPU-NKVD, but it is racist and pathological for a Ukrainian to compute this statistic? It is not racist and pathological for successive U.S. Presidents to honor Rabbi Schneerson on Education Day, but it is racist and pathological for an observer to point out that Lubavitcher education "drastically minimizes secular studies (math, science, history, English, social studies, computers & other technical studies) in favor of total immersion in Torah, the Word of G-d." It is not racist and pathological for Morley Safer to broadcast a 60 Minutes story about Ukrainians killing five to six thousand Jews prior to the German occupation of Lviv, but it is racist and pathological for a Ukrainian to point out that Safer has been unable to substantiate his story, and that a wealth of evidence demonstrates that during this same interval, it was the Jewish-dominated NKVD that was killing Ukrainians by the thousands and by the tens of thousands? It is not racist and pathological for a Jew to smear Bohdan Khmelnytsky as the first Hitler, but it is racist and pathological for a Ukrainian to point out that the main cause of the War of Liberation of 1648 was the Jewish-held arenda contract? It is not racist and pathological for Jews to execute Palestinian children and teenagers on a daily basis, but it is racist and pathological for a Canadian to point out the incongruity of Canada's war crimes unit dedicating the bulk of its energies to prosecuting immigration infractions committed more than half a century ago? It is not racist and pathological for a string of Jewish eyewitnesses to tell wild stories about John Demjanjuk which led to him being convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for being Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, but it is racist and pathological for a Ukrainian to wonder if these eyewitnesses may not all have been lying, as the charge that John Demjanjuk was ever at Treblinka has today been totally withdrawn? It is not racist and pathological for Yitzhak Arad to have testified in an Israeli court room that 870,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka, but it is racist and pathological for a reader of the court transcript to be disturbed by Arad's testimony that not a shred of forensic or physical or photographic or documentary evidence exists for a single one of these murders, or even for the existence of the death camp that he described? It is not racist or pathological for Sol Littman and Simon Wiesenthal to engineer the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals which targeted Ukrainians, but it is racist and pathological for a reader of the Commission report to note that Commissioner Deschênes was incensed to discover that Littman and Wiesenthal had been duping him in a series of publicity stunts? It is not racist and pathological for Simon Wiesenthal to incessantly accuse Ukrainians of war criminality, but it is racist and pathological for a reader of his biographical works to be struck by his disclosure that the Nazis permitted him to keep two pistols while he was in their captivity, and that when they recaptured him and others following an escape, they put everyone to death except himself, and him they relieved of work and put on double rations? It is not racist and pathological for Elie Wiesel to tell stories of his experiences at Auschwitz, but it is racist and pathological for a reader of his biographical works to be struck by his describing the chief method of execution at Auschwitz as making prisoners leap into pits of fire? It is not racist and pathological for the Canadian Jewish Congress to lead attempts to suppress free speech in Canada, but it is racist and pathological for someone who treasures freedom of speech to object? It is not racist and pathological for Orthodox Rabbis to collect a supermarket tax, but it is racist and pathological for a consumer to wonder whether it is right for this tax to be levied surreptitiously, and to wonder why nobody will tell him how large that tax is? I could go on, but perhaps you could take a turn to begin explaining just what you mean by racism and pathology, and just where you see evidence of racism and pathology in my writing, and if any of the above instances are demonstrative of my racism and pathology? Ukrainian stereotype, or Jewish stereotype? You claim that I hold the stereotype of the "rich Jew."  I was unaware that the image of a "rich Jew" played any role in my thinking, and I ask you to indicate where in my writing you see evidence of this stereotype.  It seems to me, rather, that you hold a stereotype of Ukrainians resenting Jews for their economic success, and that you apply this stereotype to me. Your stereotype is self-serving.  It dismisses genuine Ukrainian grievances against Jewish exploitation and oppression and violence on the grounds that the Ukrainian victims have no greater cause of complaint than being made uncomfortable at the view of Jewish economic success.  However, to portray Ukrainians as resentful of Jewish economic success is as bizarre as to portray Palestinians as being resentful of Jewish economic success � it is exploitation, oppression, and violence that are of overriding importance and that cannot be left out of the picture. The theory that for a group within Ukraine to arouse Ukrainian antagonism it is sufficient for that group to speak a different language, practise a different religion, and be economically successful is discredited by the observation that German settlements abounded in Ukraine, that their inhabitants spoke a different language, practised a different religion, and were comparatively affluent � and yet elicited no appreciable hostility from the surrounding Ukrainian population.  The reason may be that the German settlers did not exploit or oppress or terrorize � which is what it really takes to incite Ukrainian resentment. You are a welfare bum As you have taken the liberty of diagnosing me, I will do the same for you, though I hope my diagnosis will have a firmer grounding in reality than yours did.  My diagnosis is that you are a welfare bum � an intellectual welfare bum. Just as economic welfare destroys the ability to work, so intellectual welfare destroys the ability to think.  Jews have been cursed by having won for themselves the right to intellectual welfare � which is to say, they are able to close down any argument by the facile expedient of crying "Anti-Semitism!"  As a result, they don't have to think as hard, and the quality of their reasoning deteriorates.  Some Jews apply this magical incantation reflexively to a broad range of situations, and begin to lean on it as on a crutch, and eventually discover that they cannot function without it, and that they have become stupid. You do not exactly cry "anti-Semitism," but what you do cry is indistinguishable: "racist," "pathological," and "in the field of psychotherapy."  A primitive debating tactic, only inappreciably more sophisticated than the "you're crazy" which is in the working vocabulary of every child.  It conveys nothing but, "I don't like what you're saying.  You are a bad person.  You have to be quiet." I am surprised to see this level of debate coming from a faculty member at the University of Toronto.  I would expect that a good deal of your time is spent grading essays, and that among the most frequent comments that you find yourself obliged to write on these essays would be ones like: Don't emote, prove! Ad hominem! Where's the evidence? That's your opinion, now justify it! Don't spend your time attacking a straw man! An expression of your feelings is no substitute for argument! In unqualified hands, psychiatric diagnosis is nothing but insult! I would expect that your students would be disappointed to learn that your own writing is capable of falling to the C- level, and that you are capable of such lack of self-awareness as to request that one of the poorest of your endeavors be put on public display.  In your defense, I might speculate that the quality of your writing is typically higher, but that the experience of coming across a Ukrainian who did not demonstrate the traditional subservience incited you to an intemperate outburst � an outburst of the sort that one might once have observed from a Southern racist upon his first encountering a Negro sitting in the front of the bus. When do I get to sit in the front of the bus? You say above, "I have a fondness for Ukrainian people and literature."  Maybe someday when I will be allowed to sit in the front of the bus with you, it will be my pleasure to discuss the literature of our respective peoples, and listen to their folk music, and swap recipes.  Sitting as far back as I am, though, I would find such a discussion awkward.  Let's put that chat off until the day of equality. Come to think of it, though, I don't want equality with you because you're not just in the front of the bus, you're sitting on the driver's lap, and that's a little crowded for me.  Consider what real equality would be, and you will see why I say that I don't want it.  Complete equality would be: Jewish girls lured from Israel to Ukraine on false promises, and in Ukraine kept in a state of sexual slavery.  The Ukrainian government throwing up its hands in helplessness saying, "Tough!  We don't have laws against slavery, so what do you expect us to do?"  And that's not complete equality in this sphere � no, not yet! Complete equality in this sphere would be your being afraid to broach the subject with me, because if you did, I would fly into a rage, call you racist and pathological, and try to get you fired. That would be complete equality, and I don't want it, and the Ukrainian people don't want it.  The only equality we want is that you should get off the driver's lap, and we should be able to sit wherever we want.  In other words, keep the hands of Jewish pimps off Ukrainian women! An analogue to John Demjanjuk would be a Jew extradited from the United States to Ukraine and kept in solitary confinement for several years in Kyiv on charges of having killed 870,000 Ukrainians in some Gulag camp in Siberia, and convicted and sentenced to death. Complete equality would be your fearing to raise the objection that the only evidence that anybody had ever been killed at this camp was half a dozen Ukrainian eyewitnesses who had never been proven to be at any camp anywhere.  No bodies, no remains of bodies, no ashes, no burial pits, no buildings, no remains of buildings, no photographs of buildings � nothing but a railway stop on the tundra, and half a dozen Ukrainian witnesses claiming that all traces of the 870,000 bodies and of the camp had been erased by the cunning Jews who had run it.  Complete equality would be my feeling justified in flying into a rage and calling you racist and pathological for daring to raise such questions with me, with the implicit threat that Ukrainian might was looking for some way to crush you. However, this is not an equality that I want, or that the Ukrainian people want.  We want you should get off the driver's lap, and we should get to sit wherever we want in the bus.  In other words, stop persecuting Ukrainians, and make reparations for the lives you have senselessly ruined, and that will be enough. Saddam Hussein invades Israel, but 21 months later retreats in the face of a NATO counter-invasion.  On his retreat, his secret police kill off vast numbers of Israeli political prisoners.  Historians later discover that six out of every ten senior members of his secret police were Ukrainian. Complete equality would be that your recounting this peculiar observation would lead to charges that you were racist and pathological, and to attempts to get you fired from the University of Toronto. This is not an equality that anybody on my side wants either. Do you get my point?  Do you see that I can keep going and turn every one of the long list of wrongs that Jews have committed against Ukrainians into a wrong that Ukrainians would have to commit against Jews for full equality to be achieved?  Do you see how insufferably arrogant you are, with what infantile egocentrism you view the world, and what a long road you have to travel before you attain intellectual adulthood? Why don't they sue me? All right, you say that those whom I address won't talk to me because I am a nut.  But why then don't they sue me?  Some of my work, on public display, is damaging to their reputations.  It may even be the case that I have left some reputations in tatters. What do you think?  Could it be that as of today (the Canadian Jewish Congress not yet having had its way with Canadian legislators), truth is still permitted as a defense to the charge of libel?  Could it be that, nutty as I am, I am sensible enough to stick to the truth? And what about you?  Now that you may have had a chance to calm down since writing your email above, can you say that you are certain that you have subjected your own writing to the same constraint?  "Racist" and "pathological" are strong claims; in the absence of documentation, they could land you in some hot water; can you back them up?  Don't you anticipate that if you mail such strong words without supportive documentation, you encourage the view that you have chosen them gratuitously, and that this might provoke some litigious recipient to initiate legal proceedings?  If you have a predisposition to intemperate speech, perhaps you would do better to have your lawyer check your statements before you send them, rather than merely sending him a copy after it is too late. My prayer I have been hoping for several years that some wise person will critique my work and demonstrate how I have been misled.  This would permit me to retract all that I have said, and return to the comfort of political correctness. However, I can see that you are not going to play the role of that wise person.  The total lack of substance in your emails only encourages me to believe that there is little to be said on your side, and that I will not soon be able to lay down the heavy burden of my unpopular beliefs.  Such is the price that one must pay for tying one's beliefs to evidence, and not to political correctness or emotion. Lubomyr Prytulak December 9, 1999 Robert Paul Magocsi Department of History University of Toronto Toronto, ON M5S 1A1 Robert Paul Magocsi: In your history of Ukraine, you allude to Sholom Aleichem's Fiddler on the Roof depiction of shtetl life in Ukraine: Daily life in the shtetl revolved around the synagogue, the home, and the market, which was also the place where Jews interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors (goyim).  The attractiveness of small-town life in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shtetl has been immortalized by numerous writers and artists, among the most famous of whom was the Ukrainian-born Shalom Aleichem (Rabinowitz), whose stories were later used as the basis for the popular American musical Fiddler on the Roof.  In fact, it was the psychological comfort afforded by shtetl life that made many Jews reluctant to leave their centuries-old homes in Dnieper Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe even in times of economic hardship and physical danger. Robert Paul Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 340. In your depiction, I notice that you use the Russian "Dnieper" instead of the Ukrainian "Dnipro," for which possible explanations are (1) ignorance of the Ukrainian language, and (2) hostility toward it.  But this is a secondary point, and not the reason for my writing to you. I notice also that you introduce the word goyim as if it was a neutral term having the meaning "non-Jewish neighbors" when in addition it carries with it a contempt comparable to the contempt expressed in kikes.  The only explanation that occurs to me for your introducing "goyim" as a neutral word is that you wish to conceal the deep and abiding hatred that Jews nurtured toward the Ukrainians among whom they had chosen to settle.  However, this too is a secondary point, and not the reason for my writing to you. The reason for my writing to you is to caution you against confusing mass-media images with history.  You do this by alluding to Fiddler on the Roof without bringing to your reader's attention its outstanding characteristic � which is that it is a falsification of the role played by Jews within Ukrainian society.  The nature of this falsification begins to be explored by Ivan Kalmar in his book, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens: Portrait of a Culture, from which I quote: The Fiddler In the days of the Tsar, there lived two Jews who passed their lives in ways that could not be more different from one another.  One wore a yarmulke and tsitsis.  The other wore a broad tie under a starched high collar.  One spoke mostly Yiddish and fondly quoted and misquoted Bible and Talmud.  The other spoke Russian, and read Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorky.  One got his education in the traditional heder, the other, in a Russian school.  One was a dairy farmer; the other augmented his inheritance and his income as a writer, with profits from the Kiev Stock Exchange. The first man was a fictional character, Tevye.  Best known from the Hollywood classic film Fiddler on the Roof, he became to future generations the living voice of the shtetl, the Jewish small town of Eastern Europe.  The other man was a real flesh-and-blood person, Sholom Rabinovich.  He was a Yiddish writer and the creator, under the pseudonym Sholom Aleichem, of the first Tevye.  Sholom was a "modern" Russian Jew.  His life bore even less resemblance to Tevye's than the Hollywood Tevye did to the original.  Ironically, Jewish nostalgia regards the fictional Tevye as the truest of real characters, while many Jews today are surprised, if not shocked, to find that modernized Jews like the real Sholom Aleichem existed at all in the Tsar's realm. Tevye is one of the most poignant examples of the Jewish Proletarian Counter-Stereotype, shtetl version.  A stalwart Jewish peasant, with a native wit and a naïve religiosity, ever sturdy in the face of unending adversity, he is the epitome of Jewish nostalgia.  But Tevye never existed.  Sholom Aleichem was not like his fellow Yiddishists, who went about the countryside in the manner of the German and Slavic folklorists, asking common folk to talk into the horns of their early gramophone recorders.  The voice that spoke to him was not that of a real man, but that of the muse.  Like all writers, Sholom Aleichem told the truth through lying.  In doing so he helped to invent, along with the image of Tevye and his shtetl, Yiddish literature itself. From the rather provincial confines of Yiddish publishing, the imagery of the shtetl passed into the limelight of the secular press, stage, and screen.  Shtetl bittersweet came to be the obligatory taste in any depiction of "ordinary" Jews, even if they lived in New York and did not sport sideburns or wigs. Fiddling with the Tevye image may incur me the wrath of the reader, and I hesitate to do so: the Fiddler is so much a part of the way we think of our Jewish background � as much as bagels and lox.  But bagels did not form part of the diet of most East European Jews (and are not very well known among their descendants in Israel or Western Europe).  And although smoked fish was popular with Jews everywhere because kashruth permits fish to be eaten with both meat and dairy products, it is a safe bet that smoked salmon was not readily available to most inland shtetlach.  I apologize for any offence, but the Fiddler is hardly much more genuine an image of old-time East European Jewish life than bagels and lox.  Like those "typically Jewish" foods, the Fiddler image has some basis in reality, but it is also very much part of a nostalgic reconstruction of our past, an example of what anthropologists call "invention of tradition." The Jew as Ukrainian True, the original Fiddler was created by a true Russian, or more precisely, Ukrainian-Jewish writer.  But even in old Russia, Jewish authors tried to create stereotypes of the Jews that would identify them with less wealthy groups who were looked at more favourably by the greater society.  Sholom Aleichem's Tevye is very much a Ukrainian peasant.  To counter the idea of the Jew as a "parasite," Sholom Aleichem presents Tevye as a dairy farmer, who sells not the Gentile peasants' products but his own. North American Jews have enthusiastically accepted the validity of Sholom Aleichem's Tevye as a metaphor for the Eastern European Jew of old.  One critic wrote of Sholom Aleichem that he "was Russian Jewry itself.  It is hard to think of him as 'a writer.'  He was the common people in utterance."  Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg are two American authors who did perhaps more than anyone else to popularize Sholom Aleichem's image of the common Jewish folk, the amcho.  To them, Sholom Aleichem was "the great natural genius of Yiddish literature ... one of the very few modern writers who could be said to speak for an entire people."  The admiration for Sholom Aleichem felt by Irving Howe, whose stature as an interpreter of the shtetl is augmented by his position as a leading American democratic socialist, is easy to understand.  Tevye is the antithesis of the "rich Jew" capitalist, and the natural precursor of the great Yiddish socialists or Russian Poland and Lithuania, the Jewish bund. Of course, there were in reality Jewish peasants like Tevye, but compared to the Slavs, the percentage of jews who farmed was minuscule.  (It became almost zero in 1882 when Tsar Nicholas II ordered that all Jews must live in towns or townlets, but not villages.)  Nevertheless, Sholom Aleichem's counter-stereotype, helped along generously by scores of American authors as well as Norman Jewison's film, has become deeply entrenched as an example of a real, authentic period Jew from pre-Soviet Russia.  Most North American Jews know that their grandparents who came from Poland or Russia with "five cents in their pockets" were armed with a mixture of tired Orthodoxy, the Jewish equivalent of the Protestant Work Ethic, and socialistic ideology.  However, they are convinced that those who stayed in Eastern Europe were quasi-Hassidic, quasi-Ukrainian peasants à la Tevye. The truth is that when Sholom Aleichem set out to chronicle the life of Kasrilevke, Tevye's fictional home, the traditional shtetl was, as the editor's introduction to one of the translations of the Tevye stories puts it, "already passing into the collective memory of his generation."  Sholom Aleichem's work fell into a category of nostalgic fiction that celebrated both a lost childhood and a lost world.  [...] Sholom Aleichem's first Yiddish stories appeared in 1883, when he was twenty-four.  Soon he was able to raise Yiddish to a high literary standard. He did so with great originality, but in his criticism of traditional mores he resembled Gorky, and in his detailing of life in a rural home, the major Ukrainian writers like Ivan Neåuj-Levic'kyj, author of The Kajdas Family.  Tevye's world view is in many ways reminiscent of the folksy wisdom so revered by the Slavs, and which was more recently evident in the public style of the Soviet leader and Ukrainian ex-shepherd, Nikita Khrushchev.  Taking off his shoe to bang it on a table at the United Nations to get attention for justice in the midst of a sophisticated, protocol-ridden, but empty discussion was a gesture worthy of any simple man of heart, a gesture worthy of Tevye.  [...] The "God arguer" side of Tevye, billed as typical for a traditional Jew, happens to be one of his genuinely modern Jewish characteristics. So, where Tevye finally shows unique character, he turns out to be a modern Jew.  Where he is being a "typical," folksy, traditional East European Jew, he resembles the romanticized Ukrainian peasant. The Americanization of Tevye: Fiddler on the Roof Sholom Aleichem may have written much of his work in Geneva or New York, yet he still had a first-hand knowledge of his home country.  His fiction could not depart as much from the historical reality as its spectacularly popular American adaptation, Fiddler on the Roof.  The rich Jews to whom Sholom Aleichem had opposed Tevye are blanked out in the American Fiddler: the stage musical by Joseph Stein and the film by Norman Jewison.  Stein is Jewish; Jewison is not.  But the Canadian director, bearer of a very English name that sounds Jewish, spoke powerfully to the Jewish heart, as only one other non-Jew, Chaplin, did before him in the Great Dictator.  Despite what many people said about him, Chaplin was not Jewish. Just as the Fiddler movie has no place for the prosperous, assimilated Jews of Sholom Aleichem's Russia, it largely ignores even the Gentile environment.  Sholom Aleichem knew that Russian Jews lived with the Gentiles, who produced much of their food, and for whom they in turn supplied services, primarily as traders and artisans.  In Fiddler on the Roof one gets the distinct feeling that the Gentiles live in another village.  Even at the market, Jew deals with Jew only, and a shot of the Gentile peasants is accompanied by the voice-over comment: "They don't care about us, and we don't care about them."  So it is not surprising that the original Tevye is given his expulsion order as the sole resident of a Gentile village, while in Fiddler he lives among other Jews, all of whom are evicted en masse.  (Mass evictions, of course, did take place only too often.  The point is that showing Tevye living alone among Gentiles would interfere with the film-maker's image of an independent Jewish peasant community.) Two Gentiles are nevertheless given important roles in the film.  One, the police commissioner, rides in every now and then on a white horse.  The other, Fedka, is first seen when he rescues Chava from the harassment of his fellow-Ukrainian peasants, as she leads her cow down a road.  Neither of these characters appears to reside in the village.  Fedka is the "good goy," who, by his steady love for Chava, Tevye's daughter, proves that Jewish-Gentile coexistence is possible. The birth of the love between Fedka and Chava is absolutely necessary for the film, which after all was made for primarily Gentile audiences.  But it is too much for Tevye, who has already witnessed one daughter choosing a poor man, and another going for an assimilated socialist.  Nevertheless, at the end of the film he appears to give Chava and Fedka his blessing, as they leave for Warsaw in protest against anti-Semitism in the local area.  "Inter-marriage can work!" the film seems to say. Nothing could be more alien to the original.  In Sholom Aleichem, Chava comes home disillusioned after a broken marriage � not an acceptable conclusion for pluralistic Jewish and non-Jewish Americans.  Is it any surprise after all this that the "American" Tevye ends up free in the land of opportunity, even though in Sholom Aleichem he takes off, not for America but for a city within Russia itself? The fiddler, so beautifully pictured at the beginning and end of the film, and who has become a universal symbol for Tevye's shtetl, does not even come from Sholom Aleichem.  His original is to be found in the paintings of Marc Chagall, who has certainly done no less than Sholom Aleichem for the idealized image of Eastern European Jewry.  [...] It is to disprove that they were Rich Jews, and to prove that they are just like other people (other "immigrants"), that North American Jews love to think of their ancestors as typical, East European Fiddlers on the Roof. It also makes them feel more American.  For the Fiddler is in fact an American icon.  Jolly, optimistic and enterprising even in misery, religious but tolerant, an unshakable believer in an individual relationship with God � is this not the hallowed American stereotype of "our ancestors," Jews, Ukrainians, Italians, Norwegians, Irish, English, who came from the Old Country to make America bloom?  Among other things, the Fiddler image is the American Jew's badge of genuine Americanism.  (And it works much the same way to make Jews feel at home in Canada.) Ivan Kalmar, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens: Portrait of a Culture, Viking, Toronto, 1993, pp. 159-172. A reading of Ivan Kalmar suggests that the Sholom Aleichem depiction of shtetl life is a distortion of reality, and that the American movie Fiddler on the Roof is a distortion of Sholom Aleichem.  Therefore, the only legitimate role for Fiddler on the Roof in a history book may be to illustrate how little mass culture can be relied upon as a source of historical knowledge. More specifically, a no-more-than-able historian would demonstrate that Fiddler on the Roof is an image presented to conceal an underlying reality.  A superior historian might go on to ask whether the reality that was being hidden was merely � as suggested by Ivan Kalmar � that some Jews lived alongside Christians, and that few Jews were engaged in agriculture, and that some Jews were rich, and that some inter-ethnic marriages fell apart, and that some Jews relocated within Slavic lands instead of coming to America, or rather that the reality that was being hidden was something more heinous, even fiendish, as for example the Jewish conquest of the Slavs. Lubomyr Prytulak HOME  DISINFORMATION  KHMELNYTSKY  PEOPLE  MAGOCSI