Tonight I took myself to an Off-Broadway, Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler on the Roof is a musical about how important it is to have a husband. It’s also about community and Jewish values and balancing a bottle on your head while you dance at a wedding, but it’s mostly about how you choose who you want to be with. The oldest daughter, Tseytl, marries her beloved tailor instead of the rich butcher that her father had planned. The middle child Hodl marries her teacher, even though he’s a socialist, one of the worst things you can be in the eyes of your father. And the youngest child, Chava, marries a non-Jew, leading her father to announce that she might as well be DEAD. There are two more daughters who are younger but they are irrelevant to the plot and to this argument because they are not of marrying age.
Going alone to a Broadway or Off-Broadway show is one of my favorite things to do. It’s less intimidating than dining alone, or taking the subway alone. Taking the train alone, especially at night, as a single woman, is one of the scariest things you can do. There are so many couples.
On my way home tonight, it was 35 degrees and raining— ultimate boyfriend weather. Across from me sat a couple and the guy took off his jacket to drape over his girlfriend’s cold, fragile, frail body. The cool thing about being single is I get to have my own coat. So while this boyfriend was tending to his girlfriend in the NICU, I was googling “White Lotus prostitute actor how old” between stops when I had service.
Stepping off the train, another couple was walking in front of me towards the stairs. She was to the right of her man and rested her head on his shoulder while they walked. How ergonomically inefficient. How uncomfortable. Can you rest your head on his shoulder when you get back to your 1 bedroom apartment that is beautifully spacious but cheap because you split rent? Are you publicly displaying your affection in front of me because you know that I just cried in the back row of the orchestra in a musical about young Jewish women falling in love?
My last relationship started around Hanukkah of last year. I remember this because he was Catholic and had never lit a menorah and I asked him if he wanted to and he said yes and then I said the prayer and then I felt weird and then we made out on my couch and then he gave me the first hickey of my life at 24 and then I used eyeshadow primer to try and cover it up for work but that didn’t work so I wore a turtleneck to the office the next day like the cool girls I wasn’t in high school. Our relationship ended on a subway platform at 3am but that’s another story. I’ve struggled to even call it a relationship because I never met his parents and we never went to Storm King, but we did eat Polish food in Brighton Beach and that, to me, is the peak of intimacy.
There’s more to life than having a boyfriend. Everyone is always trying to tell me that. I’m not envious of the girls in Fiddler. None of them were allowed to own property or do standup comedy. During intermission I googled the specific timeline of pogroms and Jewish evictions throughout history. I had to refresh my memory because I didn’t learn about any of it in Hebrew school, I was too busy having a crush on a boy who could play The Office theme song on the piano. (He now has a girlfriend too.) I’m glad that marriage isn’t all I aspire to. I’m grateful that I also care about (fill this in later.)
Fiddler on the Roof is about community. People who have their roles in the town, the butcher, the tailor, the milkman, the slut. It’s a story about love and the pursuit of it. About tradition and when it’s important to break from it. And it reminds us all, that at the end of the day, what matters is that you bring your pots and pans with you to America when they kick you out of your Russian village. My ancestors brought that stuff with them so that now, four generations later, I can make instant ramen on my stove. One day for my boyfriend. But I’ll add an egg on top so he knows I can be a good wife.