As it later turned out, his offer had an interesting history. The fact was that the designs and sketches for the stage set had already been made, by the extremely well-known artist Kononov, and they had even been accepted, but Efim rejected them at the last minute. Kononov, a recipient of many national prizes and distinctions and a favorite of the authorities, had never worked in theater before. His reputation had been built on portraits of government officials and enormous patriotic canvases on heroic-historical subjects—from the thirteenth-century Battle on the Ice to the routing of the fascists at Stalingrad. Kononov was an ideological anti-Semite, which everyone knew very well, and Efim Berg was surprised, to say the least, when Kononov received the offer to design the stage sets for the Jewish play Fiddler on the Roof. His name alone, appearing on all the posters announcing the performance, would guarantee the interest of the broader public and the indulgence of the ministry heads.
Swiftly, in a realistic style, the monumental Kononov drew the crooked little houses of the Jewish shtetl, and they were ready to start constructing the sets—the sketches had been passed on to the set-building department already—when all hell broke loose. Right before leaving, the director and the artist sat down to drink a glass “for the road.” Both of them relaxed and let their guard down, and Efim, in a fit of drunken gratitude, admitted that he had always considered Kononov to be an anti-Semite, but he was glad that he had turned out to be a “regular guy” and was committed to staging the Jewish performance. Kononov began defending his reputation, and his right to take part in this production:
“You Jews are so aggressive and pushy, you always try to move into others’ territory. Your painter Levitan paints our landscapes; your Chagall introduces his Jewish fantasy into our space; Pasternak and Mandelstam use our language as their own; you taint our Russian art, injecting into it the spirit of cosmopolitanism, destroying Russian integrity and purity. Anti-Semitism is our only protection, because, if we don’t wall ourselves off from you, if we don’t create impediments for you, you’ll infect the whole world with your Jewish ideas. And this whole avant-garde, from Malevich to Shostakovich”—here he was mistaken—“are the result of this Jewish disease, absorbed by the Russian people merely through proximity to you. Yes, I’m an anti-Semite, but I’m prepared to help you stage your Jewish play if only you will agree not to muscle your way into our Russian world with your destructive ideas. Yes, let a hundred flowers grow where they will, but no one wants hybrids and mongrels; therefore, I will fight for the purity of Russian art.
“Go ahead and stage your Sholem Aleichem. I will even help you; but don’t touch my Chekhov!” announced Kononov with a good-natured smile.
At that very moment, shrieking the words “Your Chekhov!,” the diminutive and springy Efim leveled a punch at his interlocutor, striking him on the jaw. Kononov, who had a significant advantage in size, floored Efim with a single blow. Efim, in turn, after somehow managing to struggle up to his knees, grabbed from the table a paperweight that had found its way into the theater four directors ago, even before the war, and only the fact that the producer and the assistant just happened to be nearby prevented a murder. They dragged Efim away bodily, stuffed the artist in a car, and sent it off in the direction of the airport.
After recovering from his upset, which was more moral than physical, Efim turned over in his mind all the set designers of Jewish descent he knew. Unfortunately, David Borovsky was engaged for the entire year. Mark Bornstein, an acquaintance from Leningrad, also declined. Then Efim remembered Nora.
Their acquaintance was also marked by a conflict, which had transpired five years earlier. At that time Efim had been appointed head director, and he had invited Tengiz, many of whose productions he was familiar with, to stage Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tengiz accepted the offer, and arrived with Nora. Time was short: the play was due to be performed before the start of the school vacation. Everyone was in a rush; they were all on pins and needles. Finally, Efim and Tengiz quarreled about something, the cause of which neither of them could remember afterward. Now Efim was asking Nora to stage Sholem Aleichem with him.
Nora laughed. “I was just at the Moscow première, and the applause at the end nearly brought the house down. That will be a hard act to follow.”
“No, I’m not talking about that play, I’m talking about Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a brilliant musical—a Broadway play—it’s been performed all over the world. The script is by Joseph Stein, and the score is by Jerry Bock. I have two voices in the theater now that would make Topol go green with envy.”
At that moment, Nora had no idea which Topol it was who would soon turn green, but she said that she’d take a look at the material. That evening, she went to see Tusya. Tusya was unexpectedly glad. She found an American LP on the shelf and put it on the record player. The music was enchanting—sadly happy, happily sad, lively, and carrying inside it the impulse to dance.
“It’s klezmer music, a wonderful modern arrangement,” Tusya explained. “Small klezmer orchestras wandered through Eastern Europe before the war. Nowadays there are vestiges of the music in a few pop renditions. But this is klezmer at its best.”
They listened to the record from beginning to end.
“I’ve never heard anything like this,” Nora said.
Tusya was surprised. “I didn’t teach you very well, then.”
From that evening on, a new subject—Jewishness—became part of Nora’s life. A circumstance that had previously not really concerned her at all, and had not seemed significant in any sense—the Jewish half of her—began to mean a great deal to her. And, as was usually the case in her life, this new knowledge came through the theater. It was the last realm of knowledge her old teacher personally inducted her into.
“You see, Nora,” Tusya said, “at the end of my life, I’ve been forced to examine my relationship with Jewishness. For Russian Jews of our fathers’, and your grandfathers’, generation, it was a very painful issue. It was the problem of assimilation. They were ashamed of their Jewishness, and put great effort into pulling up these roots and becoming part of Russian culture, as seamlessly as possible. They had to struggle against enormous resistance within the Russian milieu. The same thing happened in Europe. It began earlier there, though—at the end of the eighteenth century. Look it up in any encyclopedia. Under the letter ‘A,’ for ‘assimilation.’ Look up ‘Austro-Hungary.’ The first volume.” And she gestured toward the bookshelf.
“In a nutshelclass="underline" In the nineteenth century, educated Jews became the leading cosmopolitans of Europe, and created a new intellectual universalism. There was an enormous explosion of intellectual energy. With wild enthusiasm, Jewish youth broke away from the heder and began to pursue secular education. They made great strides in science, art, and literature. And, it goes without saying, in economics. At the same time, they began to lose what would later be called their ‘national identity.’
“Simultaneously, another movement got under way, completely contrary to the first. This was Zionism. The goal of Zionism was to create an independent Jewish state, which had not existed for almost two millennia. In spite of historical precedents, this state was created—but at an enormous cost: the six million Jews who died in the gas chambers. My late father would lose his mind if he heard me say this. These are the thoughts I think in my waning years. Why were Jews so enamored of Soviet power? Because, in the initial years, it replaced ‘national identity’ or ethnicity with ‘internationalism.’ Many Jews hoped in this way to free themselves of the burden of being Jewish.”