by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Artists, Make Room for the Audience
John Updike (in the foreword to Hugging the Shore) suggested that in a well-written book review something like a quarter of the words will be words drawn from the book under review.
The Times's reviewer of Alisa Solomon’s new cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof observes that principle, and so brings to prime time this incisive account of how artists making worldly works dealing with religious material (in Fiddler, director Jerome Robbins and performer Zero Mostel) fashion an artistic truth that cuts both ways:
In different fashions, both men were internally making the show’s primary contradictory gesture: embracing Jewish practice at arm’s length. `Fiddler’s own dialectics — Tevye’s constant on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand reasoning — expressed this ambivalence and made space for audience members, whether Jewish or not, at any point along several spectrums of observance, knowledge or parallel experience, to find a place of emotional entry.”