Before there was Fiddler on the Roof there was the collection of short stories by Sholom Aleichem called Tevye the Dairyman. These stories were highly popular which led their to being adapted into the musical we know and love today. That being said there are some significant differences between Fiddler on the Roof and Tevye the Dairyman that I came across while I was preparing research for the actors about the source text for this musical. One major difference that shocked me was that Aleichem wrote the character Yente, the matchmaker, as a man named Ephraim. I was quite surprised to find this as Yente has become such a well-known name in Yiddish English to mean a woman who is a bit of a gossip or a busy body. The use of this word doesn’t date back to Aleichem, as I expected, or even Fiddler. The origin of Yente’s meaning dates back to Yiddish Theatre in the 1920s and a series of comedic sketches that were written about a woman who was the town’s busybody (for more info about the origin of Yente check out this website).
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