This humorous blessing for the Tsar (Nicholas II) is given in the voice of the Rebbe to Mendl in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Joseph Stein’s musical theatre adaptation of Sholom Aleichem’s short stories Tevye (the Milkman) and His Daughters (1894-1914).

We are almost certain that the lines here, spoken near the end of the opening song “Tradition,” were written by Stein rather than by Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for “Tradition.” Concerning the creation of “Tradition” Harnick explained, “All I remember is that it was difficult and also that I was nervous because I thought it’s endless; it’s too long. To me an opening number had to be snappy and get down to about three or four minutes, and of course I was terrified that the whole show was too long, and that it was going to be too serious and too Jewish and a disaster. But [the director/choreographer, Jerry] Robbins wasn’t worried about that. As the number was getting longer and longer, I suddenly realized I was watching a man literally mold a number out of pieces. Joe Stein would give him some dialogue—I guess I had written the lyrics already—but I think Jerry Bock had to keep supplying him with music, and it took shape like a piece of sculpture” (from Richard Altman & Mervyn Kaufman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof, 1971, p.31, emphasis mine). It’s possible, however, that the lines may have been adopted by Stein from an earlier source (perhaps even from a story by Sholom Aleichem). If you know, please leave a comment below or contact us.

From Stein and Harnick’s work, Shraga Friedman prepared a Yiddish translation for an Israeli production of the musical — פידלער אױפן דאך (Fiddler Oyfen Dakh, 1965). The text here is as copied from the scripts prepared by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (Yiddish | English). There are some differences in the text found in Yiddish and in the English script, with באַזונדערע missing in the former. There are also minor differences between the lines presented here and those read in the popular 1965 cast recording, with ‘Tsar’ replacing ‘Kaiser’ in both lines. In the 1971 film adaptation using the English script, the name of the questioner was changed from Mendl to Leibl.

We are grateful to Yoni Oppenheim (Artistic Director at 24/6: A Jewish Theater Company) for his research help with the Yiddish script.

Recordings

“National Brotherhood Week” by Tom Lehrer was first released on his album “That Was The Year That Was” (1965). National Brotherhood Week in February was first established in the 1930s by the National Conference of Christians and Jews as a means of promoting the values of inter-religious tolerance and civic interdependence. The week gained federal support from President Franklin Roosevelt during World War Ⅱ as a means of combatting fascist and nativist objections to a vision of democracy built on the foundation of a multicultural civil society. By the time Tom Lehrer lampooned the civic commemoration in 1965, the McCarthyite oppressions of the Red Scare and Lavender Scare during the Cold War, the manufactured Vietnam War, lingering anti-Semitic prejudice and suspicion, the continued struggle for civil rights with its continued lynchings, the assassination of JFK and increasing political violence had all exposed National Brotherhood Week for many young adults as phony, a historical relic that had lost the import of any cultural imperative it might have once possessed. I feel very strongly that if anything has been proven by the past decade, it is that antifascist civic values undergirding our democratic civil society require continued, enduring promotion. If Tom Lehrer showed us anything through his jaunty takedown, it is that such civic values need to register as genuine and authentic if they are not to be watered down to the point of irrelevance. –Aharon Varady

Recordings

Source(s)

National Brotherhood Week lyrics (Tom Lehrer 1965)

“[I’m Spending] Hanukkah in Santa Monica” by Tom Lehrer was first written at the request of Garrison Keillor for his radio show The American Radio Company on which it was performed twice, in 1990 and 1992. The song was later released on the album, Bible & Beyond (Larry Milder, 1999). The first recording of Tom Lehrer singing his song can be heard on The Remains of Tom Lehrer (Disc 3) (2000). In 2022, Tom Lehrer gave an enormous Ḥanukkah present to the world, dedicating his entire oeuvre to the Public Domain including this song.

Source(s)

This work by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer is an adaptation of “National Brotherhood Week” (1965) by Tom Lehrer. Isaac notes that neither the English or Hebrew lyrics are direct translations of one another. A recording of Isaac performing the work was published to his Facebook page on 9 April 2024.

Recordings

This was originally written to be recited as a call and response, with the service leader reading the narration and four guests reading the parts of the four children. (In the 2019 framework, the entire maggid was written out as a play, and the guests were assigned to different rabbis in Bene Brak — the Bad Parent being Tarfon, the wise one/smartass being Akiva, the wicked/freethinker being Eliezer, the simple/new learner being Yehoshua, and the one who does not know/minority language speaker being El’azar. That’s been removed from the text hear because when taken out of context it distracts from the gist of the reading.)

The Hebrew text is new — along with the Amharic. In order to make the text work bilingually I actually had to make a few changes to the English — originally the Bad Parent’s response was “Do… you… speak… English?” but that obviously doesn’t work in Hebrew!