Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg

The title is longer than the book itself.

   

There's nothing more Jewish than Fiddler on the Roof! I first saw the movie based on the film in middle school and was in love: not so much with the film but the Jewish culture, itself. As a result, I started frequenting Jewish restaurants, learning about Jewish customs, and I set a personal goal: I was going to marry a Christian Jew! Despite many of my friends and teachers in high school saying it was an impossible dream, on July 24th, 1999, I married my Jewish Princess! Since then, my wife and I have celebrated Christmakkuh, attended a Seder, and explored more of her Jewish heritage, which we've shared with dear friends and family. 

    Thus why I read this book. I found it being given away on Goodreads and I know how much my wife loved to play to the soundtrack with her sister when she was a little girl. So, I entered the giveaway and I was one of the lucky few to win a copy.

    The book covers just about every aspect of Fiddler on the Roof. From the Tevye tales written by Sholem Aleichem at the turn of the 20th Century through its first run on Broadway beginning in the 1960s over to London's West End where an up-and-coming Israeli actor named Topol would become so synonymous with the role of Tevye the Milkman that he would wind up in Yugoslavia filming the movie adaptation. The story of Fiddler then covers numerous revivals in New York and London then examines versions of the play being performed in schools and worldwide (it's particularly popular in Japan), finishing up with modern versions of the musical and it's songs finding a home on the internet.

    Tradition is a very good brief record of the history of the beloved musical. But it's not without its flaws. The biggest problem is that I think author Barbara Isenberg needs a thesaurus or something. When she refers to Fiddler's composer Jerry Bock, she almost always calls him 'librettist, Jerry Bock' or 'Librettist Bock.' This happens over and over to the point of being annoying. She also likes to point out that film director Norman Jewison isn't kosher quite a bit as well.

    Another issue I have with this book isn't Isenberg's fault- it's the use of pictures and text boxes to the point of redundancy. I mentioned that this is a short read. Officially about 272-pages, Tradition's story ends at page 200 with about 65-pages of notes and an index. That's all well and good but this tome would be about 30-pages smaller if it wasn't for the use of the aforementioned photos and text boxes which merely reprint information used immediately before or after the insertion of the dark gray boxes.

   This kind of issue is a problem on the behalf of the editors. I think they and the book's designer realized that they were overusing this publishing device as the text boxes disappear in the last third of the book.

    Despite these flaws, I really did enjoy the book quite well and I highly recommend it. But because of those mistakes I can't give this a perfect rating. What I can give you is a suggestion that you really should heed: just before you complete this book, maybe once you get to page 150, get your hands on a copy of Fiddler on the Roof. Because once you finish Isenberg's story of perhaps the greatest American musical of all-time, the songs will start to get stuck in your head and you are going to want to watch Fiddler again.

   Worth Consuming

   Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.