Whenever I’m tired, or bored, working late at night, stuck on a scene or a paragraph, this never fails to move me.
Not only because of the gorgeous, balletic dancing by the enigmatic men in black, or the haunting music, but because of the depiction of collective joyousness experienced at a wedding before the Russian pogroms began. It’s a foreshadowing of a genocide, a stain on a whole century, and one that we all grew up in the shadow of.
The wedding is that of Reb Tevye’s eldest daughter, who marries a penniless tailor. He says of the happy couple afterwards: ‘They are so happy they don’t realise how miserable they are.’
