InsightALT: "Tevye's Daughters"

American Lyric Theater partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust to present a concert of Tevye's Daughters - a new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann. 

Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye's Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman's younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis in silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines - Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women - Tevye's Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, and even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tseytl, Khave, and Beykle, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintse's traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present.