Scholar turns to Tevye for views on intermarriage
By Deborah Moon Seldner
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Professor Anita Norich will present varying perspectives on modernity and intermarriage as they are revealed in four film portrayals of Sholom Aleichem's Tevye in the final lecture of this year's Writers and Scholars Lecture Series presented by the Institute for Judaic Studies.
Norich, an associate professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, will discuss "How Tevye Learned to Fiddle: Sholom Aleichem's Tevye in Yiddish, Hebrew, English and Russian Film" at noon, May 17, in the Browsing Lounge, Room 238 of Smith Memorial Student Union at Portland State University.
"I'll show clips of all four film versions," said Norich in an e-mail interview. "The Yiddish is a famous one starring the legendary Maurice Schwartz. The Hebrew and Russian are rarely seen in the U.S., but have interesting perspectives on the problems posed by Sholom Aleichem's text: modernization, assimilation, intermarriage, intergenerational conflict and resolutions, and Jewish national identity."
"This is really a rare opportunity to see these films juxtaposed with one another and to try to figure out what is going on in them and what's going on in Sholom Aleichem's text," said Norich. "It's not the typical understanding of "Fiddler on the Roof," but a more nuanced sense of Sholom Aleichem's novel."
Norich teaches, lectures and publishes on Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature and Holocaust literature. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1979.