In the spring of 1969, I took the bus from Durham, New Hampshire, where I was studying at the state university, to Boston to see the national touring company’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”  Tevye was played by Paul Lipson, who had performed the role of the butcher Lazar Wolf on Broadway.

This production was being presented five years after its opening in New York. Though this was the touring company, it was the first “Broadway musical” I had ever seen. I was prepared: The fanfare that accompanied the Broadway show had rippled through the American Jewish community. Finally, a treatment of the Eastern European experience would be presented to the broader American public, addressing such issues as anti-Semitism, pogroms, discrimination, intermarriage and dislocation, through a brilliant interpretation of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories and a score of memorable songs.

The stories had been presented before on the American stage. The acclaimed actor Maurice Schwartz played “Tevye der Milkhiger” in 1926 at his Yiddish Art Theater in New York. Schwartz reprised the role in the Yiddish-language film “Tevye” in 1939. But those productions played to Jewish, largely immigrant audiences.

I took no scientific poll of those in the audience, but from standing in line to get in, my guess is that maybe 10% could carry on a conversation in Yiddish. I was not in that group. There are subtitles (the theater calls them “supertitles”) in English and Russian, to accommodate the large Russian Jewish community in New York. The set is minimalist, with a large backdrop adorned only with the word “Torah” in extra-large Hebrew script. The music, so familiar to all of us, is ably conducted by Zalmen Mlotek, of the well-known Jewish musical family of the same name.

If only a small percentage of theatergoers understands the language (indeed, a number of the actors in the show are not native Yiddish speakers), what explains the success of this production?

The Sounds of Music, the Pull of Tradition

For me, it was as much about family as the music itself. Both my parents were born in Eastern Europe (Russia and Lithuania), in shtetlach not unlike Anatevka. As the cast members interacted with each other — in the kitchen or in the wedding scene or even in the brilliant dream scene in Tevye and Golde’s bedroom — I imagined myself looking and hearing exactly how my parents lived and spoke. My paternal grandfather was a tailor, and the storyline about Motl Kamzoyl’s quest for a sewing machine resonated clearly with me. Even the time frame of the story fit my parents experience. My mother was brought to the United States in 1903; my father in 1913.

I am one of those hundreds of thousands of Jews from my generation whose parents spoke Yiddish at home only when they didn’t want us to know what they were speaking about. That said, I did often strain to figure out what they were trying to say, so I can understand a little Yiddish. My father was a subscriber to the Yiddish daily Der Tog-Morgen Journal, which arrived by mail. Sometimes, I would try to figure out the headlines by sounding out the words. My mother also favored the Yiddish expressions of my grandmother, and I can still repeat a few of those.

But this is a three-hour show, so we relied heavily on the subtitles, notwithstanding our knowing the story and the songs. The acting is superb, and the music, because of the quality of the small orchestra, Mlotek’s direction and the excellent acoustics in the theater, made this Off-Broadway production a winner.

It’s the story, though, and its relevance today that was so gripping. With the spike in anti-Semitism globally, the story of Anatevka and its residents, wary and weary of the Czarist police and their fellow travelers, was a striking reminder of the deep vein of hatred aimed at us then, and that has surfaced globally in recent years.

And the story of the edict expelling the families in Anatevka was a stark reminder not only of the great immigration to America, but the miracle of the re-establishment of Israel as a Jewish State in 1948. In both instances, I thought of how fortunate we have been to have had both Ellis Island and Haifa Port in the lives of our people at such crucial moments in our history.

Many know the English lyrics of the songs in “Fiddler” by heart. How many weddings have been graced by “Sunrise, Sunset” over the years? One song in particular gets to me. Now that I have seen it performed in Yiddish, it speaks to me even more: “Vayt Fun Mayn Liber Heym” (“Far From the Home I Love,”) sung by Tevye’s daughter Hodl to her father as they wait at the train station, from which she is leaving to join her husband Perchik, who has been exiled to Siberia for political reasons.

I think of my parents leaving the only homes they knew, for the New World. Even with the normal feelings of anticipation, and even with the Czarist yoke under which they lived, tearing themselves away from familiar surroundings to the unknown must have been wrenching.

For others, the production surely resonated in other ways. Indeed, when one enters the theater, on either side of the lobby there are tall signs with the word “Tradition!” in many different languages, a nod to the universal appeal of this magnificent production.

So thank you, Sholem Aleichem, Joseph Stein, Harnick and Bock, Jerome Robbins, and Joel Grey for enabling me to immerse myself in a musical that is not only great theater, but also great history.

My history.