Alisa Solomon

It is fascinating to read about how tremendously gifted people came together to create and mold great works that touch the lives of many people in different ways. Fiddler is different than other musicals and has expressed the needs and dreams of a variety of people in different ways over the years. You will see it in a different light and will understand why it speaks to you in a certain way, and why it affects people differently than Guys and Dolls or other musicals. Four stars because she tells me more about some things than I really wanted to know, and about 25 percent could have easily been lost. But there is a very interesting book hiding in there.… (meer)

Engaging and intelligent look at the Jewish musical to end all Jewish musicals. Solomon not only provides invaluable background on the Sholem Aleichem stories that inspired "Fiddler" and the creation of the play, but discusses the various cultural resonances that the original Broadway show and subsequent productions, including the film version, sought to evoke. (I guess it makes sense that the same story could be made to look back to a romanticized vision of the shetl and to look forward to the future of the tough-minded sabra. After all, this *is* the religion that produced the joke, "Two Jews, three opinions"!) Solomon's text is full of details but (at least for me) was still easy to follow, and as a longtime fan of "Fiddler" I found the subject matter fascinating. In fact, I think my rating has gone up a star in the process of writing this review!… (meer)

Alisa Solomon's richly detailed Wonder of Wonders ; A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (New York : Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2013), tells the tale of how the now iconic Broadway musical grew from stories by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (born Sholom Rabinowitz in Pereyeslav, Russian Ukraine, in 1859) about Tevye the Milkman and his daughters in their village in nineteenth-century Czarist Russia, living with the continuing challenge of maintaining religious and cultural traditions. From the first story, 'Tevye Strikes It Rich' (1894) to the opening of the musical itself in 1964, and several revivals (1976, 1981, 1990), the shaping of Jewish tradition within tradition is the triumph of this book.… (meer)