Pushcart Show

By Stefan Kanfer

THE WORLD OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM

Adapted by Arnold Perl

"As for my published stories, their translation into Yiddish and their publication for the benefit of the Jews . . . would give me nothing but heartfelt pleasure."

So wrote Anton Chekhov to Solomon Rabinovich. The attraction of disciple and master seemed strange at the time: Rabinovich was an obscure Jew who wrote under the name Sholom Aleichem (literally, peace be unto you). Chekhov was a renowned and worldly physician-writer nearing the end of his life.

Yet the literary distance was not so great as appeared. Before Rabinovich's own death in New York in 1916, he had become an international figure, acclaimed as the Yiddish Mark Twain.

Since then, Sholom Aleichem has suffered a worse kind of obscurity: success. The ethnic narcissism of Fiddler on the Roof, based on his Tevye stories, has drowned his oeuvre in a chorus of If I Were a Rich Man and Sunrise, Sunset. The World of Sholom Aleichem attempts to whisper where Fiddler bellowed, to reclaim the writer from the ripoffs. But, as the Yiddish proverb has it, you can't pull two hides off one ox. The musical used Aleichem to carry the tunes; the material is now too depleted to carry an evening.

Three stories illustrate the lives of the poor in czarist Russia. In Chelm, some imbecilic peasants play tricks on the village naif (Jack Gilford). For sage advice the victim consults the local, and unfunny, rabbi: "Why is the sea salty?" "Because of the herrings who live in it.'' In The Bandit, Gilford plays Aleichem himself, terrified by a thief, then retelling his role, `a la Falstaff, as heroic. In The High School, the longest and most didactic episode, Gilford plays a domineering and ignorant father whose son is anxious to leave the ghetto for the new century. Between these sketches, Adapter Arnold Perl has shoehorned Bontche Schweig, by I.L. Peretz, a man without Aleichem's name or talent, presumably to allow Gilford a star turn. The late Schweig, presented to God and his angels, has only one line, but it is enough to shame the heavenly host.

Gilford is ideally cast; he appears to have been drawn by Maurice Sendak for the occasion, and he can suggest an entire shtetl with a shrug. But, save for the narrator (Joe Silver), he is supported by performers who believe that Yiddishkeit is suggested by saying already every two minutes. Nor is he aided by Director Milton Moss's attempts to create crowd scenes by bunching his cast in clumps. Doubtless the profit motive made the producers wheel a pushcart show to the Broadway stage. They might have recalled another Yiddish proverb: The longest road is the one that leads to the pocket. --By Stefan Kanfer

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