Tevye The Dairyman And Fiddler On The Roof Compare And Contrast

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Stories of Tevye: Tevye the Dairyman (1939) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Tevye, the protagonist of the films Tevye the Dairyman and Fiddler on the Roof, originated from a series of short stories about Tevye written by Sholem Aleichem. Although the two films are both based on the same story, they are different in many aspects, especially in the endings and how certain characters are emphasized. For example, while all the daughters and their marriages are emphasized in Fiddler on the Roof, only Chave is emphasized in Tevye the Dairyman. Despite the differences, it is clear that the relationship between Chave and Tevye plays a crucial role in the overall storylines of both films.

In both films and the original story, Chave, one of Tevye’s …show more content…

In Tevye, Chave lives in longing for her family after running away from home and constantly tries to meet her father. After hearing the news that Tevye was to be driven away from their hometown, Chave abandons her husband in order to reunite with Tevye and leave the village with him. Initially being reluctant to have his beloved daughter back, Tevye embraces her in the end. Here, not only does Chave willingly returns to her father, but also realizes that she cannot live outside the boundaries of Jewish life. However, in Fiddler, Chave decides to leave the town alongside her husband instead of coming back to her family after the announcement that all Jews were to leave Anatevka. Before leaving, Chave visits Tevye to say goodbye, and Tevye blesses his daughter in silence. This shows that in Fiddler, Chave is more willing to stay with her husband and Tevye becomes to accept his daughter’s marriage to a …show more content…

Both films depict Jews being forced out of their villages beginning from the late 19th century, even though they had not done any harm to the neighboring Russians or others. However, Fiddler takes place in a village where the Jews live together in a Jewish shtetl-like setting and the larger Russian population populates the remaining parts of the village, which was common during the late 19th century in Ukraine, while in Tevye, Tevye is a lonely Jew living in a village among Gentiles. Also, the more progressive, open-minded Chave in Fiddler better represent the times depicted because in the vast changes were taking place in the late 19th Century, and the children of Jews were more and more opened to the modernized world that had become more

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