ABSTRACT
The most commercially successful of the three, Fiddler on the Roof ran for over a year, undergoing only modest revision from when it originally appeared at the end of Broadway’s so-called Golden Age. Indecent recounts a story based on historical events: Sholem Asch’s Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, despite controversies regarding its setting in a brothel, its lesbian love story, and its sacrilegious treatment of the Torah, is mounted successfully in Berlin and then tours Eastern Europe before being staged for Yiddish-speaking audiences in New York. The core lesbian story in Indecent is nevertheless dominated by the concerns of men. Both Fiddler on the Roof and Indecent are set in highly profiled pre-World War II Jewish settings, a guarantee in itself to trigger nostalgia and the intense ache of loss that all evocations of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe evoke, especially among Jews, and most especially among those who lost family in the Holocaust.
