If today you received yet another ticket for speeding, spilled coffee on that new shirt, missed your flight, lost your luggage at the airport, was accosted by the immigration people, had to sit in a closely watched claustrophobic-causing room for five hours while they settled your identity, and you start thinking that you are having an extraordinarily bad day, you have not yet heard of Tevye.
Tevye is a milkman in Russia in the early part of 1900 prior to the revolution. He lives in a small hut with his wife and five daughters. As if life was not difficult enough, his only horse got injured. This constrained the poor milkman to draw the cart by himself, Chinese rickshaw style, so that he will be able to deliver the milk to his customers.
Tevye is faced with the spectre of providing a dowry for his daughters, three of whom will have to be married soon. The daughters, however, took it upon themselves to choose a husband (something totally unheard of at that time) instead of allowing the village matchmaker to do the choosing. One daughter decided to marry the next-door-neighbor who is even poorer than Tevye; another daughter accepted the proposal of a revolutionary firebrand who would later on be arrested and exiled to faraway Siberia; and the third ran off with a lad from outside of Tevye’s Jewish faith.
Then the pogrom started and the possibility of leaving their home became more and more an inevitability. Where was Tevye and his family to go in the middle of the harsh Russian winter? The film provides beautiful lessons in fortitude and steadfastness of faith in the face of great adversities.
Fiddler on the Roof was nominated for eight 1971 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director and features the classic songs “If I Were A Rich Man” and “Sunrise, Sunset”. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) in 1972.
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