When her Billings, Montana high school decided to stage “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1971, there was one problem, recalls Kate Coe. Except for kosher pickles, Jewish culture was the great unknown.
We had singers, we had dancers, we had cows, we had carpenters — what we didn’t have was anyone who knew about Judaism. No one in the senior class was Jewish. One kid in the whole school was Jewish, and he couldn’t sing.
Most Jews in Billings kept a low profile, but a Jewish literature professor named Dr. Small agreed to coach the actors.
During that month of rehearsal, the cast and crew formed a little community within the school. Jocks, majorettes, student council members and debaters were nothing to us — we were the chosen people. We wished each other mazel tov and shalom when passing in the halls. We sat at our own table in the cafeteria, and someone got the bright idea of asking the lunch ladies if the pigs in blankets were kosher. We must have been insufferable.
After the triumphant performance, the mothers catered a cast party:
. . . a lavish spread of Sloppy Joes, ice cream sandwiches, challah, and gefilte fish made by Sally Tollefson’s mom, which explained the strong resemblance to lutefisk. Dr. Small brought blintzes, which he introduced as a kind of enchilada.
The Montana teenagers didn’t become models of tolerance, she writes, but they expanded their horizons.
I saw “Fiddler on the Roof” in Chicago when I was a teen-ager. At the end, music plays sadly as the Jewish villagers leave their homes to journey to America.
“Is that what it was like when you left Russia?” I asked my grandfather, who’d come to America at the age of nine.
“Well . . . ” He paused. “We weren’t so sad to leave,” he said.
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