Tevye on the Stage: The Figure of the Soviet Jew and the Theater of Perestroika

• In Event: Staging Religion Across the Twentieth Century: Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish Scenes

Abstract

This paper considers the Russian-language playwright Grigorii Gorin's late Soviet play A Prayer for the Dead--an adaptation of Yiddish-lanuage stories about Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem. Working with recorded performances of the play, which was directed by Mark Zakharov and first staged at Moscow's Lenkom theater in 1989, this paper argues that the figure of Tevye, lifted from stories involving anti-Jewish violence from the final years of the Russian Empire over seventy years before, served as a cipher for processing the ongoing and violent collapse of the USSR along ethnic and religious lines.

Author

• Sasha Senderovich, U of Washington