“Tevye Served Raw” Is Delicious and Powerful

Oct 25, 2020 by Susan Rosenbluth

By Susan L. Rosenbluth

Take three superb actors and material that is, by turns, funny, poignant, nostalgic, and powerful, and the result is magic, which is just what was dished up in “Tevye Served Raw,” performed last week at the Lackland Performing Arts Center in Hackettstown, NJ.

As the title suggests, the show, produced by Centenary Stage Company, was an evening of Sholem Aleichem, including (but certainly not exclusively) the Tevye stories, especially those too dark, muscular, and intense for what became “Fiddler on the Roof.”

In the hands of Yelena Shmulenson and Allen Lewis Rickman, best remembered as the Yiddish-speaking shtetl forebears in the Coen Brothers’ film “A Serious Man,” and Shane Baker, the material has the ring of authenticity.

Wildly Popular

One of the most beloved writers of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem is best known these days for his stories of Tevye the Dairyman, the basis of the hit musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” Born Solomon Rabinowitz, Sholem Aleichem moved as a child with his family from his native Pereyaslav, Ukraine, to Voronkov, a neighboring small town which later served as the model for Tevye’s fictitious town of Kasrilevke.

He adopted his pseudonym, which, in Hebrew, means “Peace be unto you,” almost as soon as he began to publish his wildly popular stories, sketches, critical reviews, plays and poems in Yiddish newspapers.

After his death in 1916, his popularity increased beyond the Yiddish-speaking world, and his work has been translated into most European languages as well as Russian and English. His plays and the dramatic versions of his stories have performed by top Yiddish and Hebrew theatrical companies in the United States, Israel, Russia, Poland, and many other countries.

True-to-Life Situations and Dialogue

In “Tevye Served Raw,” gone is the sweet family reconciliation at the end of Fiddler. Gone, too, are Tevye’s discussions with the Almighty. In their place are the more true-to-life expectations of what happened in an early twentieth-century intermarriage in the Pale of Settlement and the easy narrative between Tevye the Dairyman and the author.

Other stories in the show have nothing to do with Tevye, but, rather, with characters he would have recognized in an instant, such as Jews who happen to meet—and gossip—on a train, or the Jewish husband whose travels in search of earning a living are recorded in the letters between him and the wife he left behind.

The show reminds us that Sholem Aleichem also wrote what he considered a horror story but which can be understood on various levels, including the inborn conflict between a child whose mother has died and the stepmother who has been recruited to take her place. No stranger to that relationship, Sholem Aleichem used his own father’s second wife as the catalyst for “A Stepmother’s Trash-Talk,” a lexicon of the curses she lavished upon her then-14-year-old stepson.

Instead of complaining, he wrote what may be one of the funniest alphabetical glossaries ever compiled in Yiddish.

Easily Understood

Ms. Shmulenson and Messrs. Rickman and Baker are clearly proficient in Yiddish, but those who don’t speak Mama Loshen have nothing to fear. Much of the dialogue is in English, and, when Yiddish is used, there are clear English supertitles projected onto a screen front and center.

While “Tevye Served Raw” has completed its run in Hackettstown, information on when future performances are planned can be available by writing to TevyeServedRaw@gmail.com or publicist Jim Randolph at jimrbea@aol.com.

Although it certainly helps, you don’t have to be Jewish to love this show. It should not be missed.

***

Susie Rosenbluth is half of Two Sues on the Aisle, which bases its ratings on how many challahs it pays to buy (rather than make) in order to see the performance being reviewed.