Fiddler on the Roof/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • In Fiddler on the Roof, during the Disney Acid Sequence of The Dream, when the chorus pass one to another about the arrival of Lazar Wolf's late wife one of them say "Why not?" I always thought it was just meant to be a funny line... until I heard it again and thought about it... and remembers this whole sequence is meant to be Tevye inventing a dream to his wife, so this is actually him saying Throw It In. -- Maxmordon

Fridge Horror

  • Fiddler on the Roof: Motel, Tzeitel and their child, are evicted from Anatevka and leave for Warsaw, Poland. Some thirty-odd years later...
    • Also, Tevye has five daughters. The first falls in love and goes against Tevye's tradition and morals. The second falls in love and goes even further against his tradition and morals. The third falls in love and goes so far against Tevye's tradition and morals that he basically disowns her. The play ends before the fourth and fifth daughters can fall in love but following the pattern and *especially* with the fact they're going to America where things are less formal... you just can't help but feel this either won't end well for Tevye or he's going to essentially lock them up.
    • Thirty years is plenty of time for them to end up following Tzeitel's parents to America at some point (and hopefully Chava and Fyedka, who go to Krakow, would make the same decision, as Chava and their children would still be considered Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws). Poland had issues with anti-Semitism even before the Nazi invasion, and so perhaps they would have found another reason to pack up and leave.
  • A close inspection of Fiddler's dialogue says Tzeitel and Motel have been married for two months. The next scene shows them with a baby. No wonder Tzeitel wanted Motel to hurry up in proposing...
    • But that means Tzeitel would have already been seven months pregnant during the wedding. You would think that everyone will have noticed. If not, everyone would probably know about it anyway thanks to Yente.