By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My daughter and I recently watched the movie Fiddler on the Roof again. So much has changed, but not changed, since the first time I watched it almost half a century ago.
It was 1971. I was ten and living in Ogden, Utah with my mother and sister. My family had just endured a divorce, and so we did not have a lot of discretionary cash to expend. One affordable form of entertainment back then was movies, so we saw quite a few. One day, we watched Fiddler on the Roof at Ogden’s old Egyptian theatre on Washington Boulevard.
Today we give theatres rather bland names like “Cineplex” or “Megaplex,” but back then, at least in Utah, they had really cool names like “Egyptian,” “Wilshire,” or “Orpheum.” The Egyptian was built in 1924 by Harmon Peery, popularly known as Ogden’s “cowboy mayor.” Influenced by the contemporaneous discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the builders (like many others around the United States) decorated the theatre with busts of pharaohs, idols of the Nile, and hieroglyphic images.
In that unusual motif, I fell in love with a movie about persecuted Jews in czarist Russia. I was fascinated with the lead character Tevye, a poor dairyman, husband, and father. Although I knew plenty of Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and Protestants, I never had met a Jew. Tevye was interesting, deeply-religious but down to earth at the same time.
He was devoted, and liked to pray, but loved a good joke too, and did not mind getting into a bit of trouble. He also was struggling to find and navigate a bridge between the comfortable known and disconcerting unknown. Perhaps I saw a bit of myself in him.
I was intrigued too by the name of the actor who portrayed Tevye. He had only one moniker, the quite exotic “Topol.” The only other time I had heard that word was on my mother’s toothpaste tube. She used Topol, called “the smoker’s toothpaste” because it helped reduce nicotine stains on teeth.
The following Spring of 1972, I paid close attention to the Oscars award ceremony for the first time. My new favorite film and its lead actor both were nominated, but lost to Gene Hackman and The French Connection, a movie I have never seen.
I did not realize, until many years later, that Fiddler on the Roof was artistically painting a roadmap of my own life to come. Sure, I never experienced a pogrom, but over time, I left childhood behind, struggled in my own job, married/frustrated a saintly wife with my Tevye-like characteristics, and raised children determined to establish their own belief systems and blaze their own life trails despite my thinking on the matter.
Tevye and I share a common affinity for conversations with (and gentle admonitions of) God. Mike: “Is there anyone up there?” (Tevye: “It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. After all, with Your help, I’m starving to death.”) Mike: “Why do you allow my loved ones to suffer?” (Tevye: “I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”) Mike: “How can I hold to tradition that seems out of step and in conflict with the rapidly-changing world around me?” (Tevye: “Little bird… Little Chaveleh. I don’t understand what’s happening today. Everything is all a blur…”) I have documented some of this thought process in my Boy Monk blog (see: https://theboymonk.com/a-futile-stand-against-the-ephemeral/.)
I also now know (and love) real, rather than just cinematic, Jews. I hesitate to use the phrase, given how awful it often sounds, but one of my best friends (Jathan) is Jewish. Jathan is hardworking, clever, intelligent, reflective, skeptical, devoted, resiliently-honed by personal suffering, and the sort of guy you just enjoy being around.
Sounds a bit like my old screen pal Tevye, eh? I sometimes wonder if a young Jathan watched a movie years ago about ruddy Irish Catholics that ultimately helped him like me? Hopefully, it was John Wayne and The Quiet Man and not something wacky like Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
During the last fifty years, most of America’s Egyptian theatres have closed. Thankfully, Ogden’s was preserved and restored and is still open. As I have started to comb gray hair, I still watch Fiddler on the Roof. I made my three children watch with me, several times, and they liked it, even though my oldest daughter would not let me sing “Sunrise, Sunset” at her wedding. Perhaps the movie gave them, like me, the gift of a warning and preview of life’s many joys and challenges ahead.
In one of the best known songs from the film, Tevye asks, “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan…if I were a wealthy man?” Tevye lacked wealth, but certainly knew how to distribute an important form of it. He taught me a lesson I will treasure forever…there is great value in asking and wrestling with the big questions of life, even if no answers seem forthcoming. Thanks to Tevye, I truly am a rich man.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
