become the closest collaborator of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov; assisted in the publication of the Bulletin of the Opposition ; was granted full access to Trotsky’s European archive (parts of which were stolen shortly thereafter); maintained contacts with remaining Trotskyists in the USSR; and, in 1938, arranged for Sedov to be admitted to the small private clinic where he died under mysterious circumstances after an appendectomy. After Sedov’s death, Zborowski had taken over the Russian Section of Trotsky’s Fourth International. In 1941, he had immigrated to the United States, where he had embarked on an academic career while continuing his espionage work (which mostly consisted in befriending and betraying refugees from the Soviet Union). 171 But of course the central event in the story of American Yiddish nostalgia was the staging of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, followed by the movie adaptation in 1971. Tevye, it turned out, was as prophetically American as he was proudly Jewish. Gone were his irrepressible loquacity, stylistic eccentricities, and quixotic schemes; gone were his loneliness, homelessness, and braggadocio. The Broadway and Hollywood Tevye is an Apollonian patriarch, “handsome as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself.” The Yiddishization of middle-class suburban Americans seemed to require the Americanization of everyone’s Yiddish grandfather. Tevye stood for tradition, of course, but he also understood the value of progress, freedom of choice, individual rights, and the nuclear family. The home he would live in if he were a rich man is like Swede Levov’s New Jersey house with lots of rooms and stairs going up and down, and the love he preaches to old Golde is the romantic love he learned from his rebellious daughters and his suburban American grandchildren. The only exercise of free choice he remains ambivalent about is marriage outside the tribe—for if everyone behaved like Chava, there would be no Jewish granddaughters for Tevye to be a Jewish grandfather to (“anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one”). Even here, however, he finds a reasonable compromise by blessing the “mixed” couple without addressing them directly. Chava and her Gentile consort leave chastened, but not excommunicated. 172 Of all the admirable things the Broadway and Hollywood Tevye does, the most admirable and most natural is his decision to emigrate to America—the same America the original Tevye despises so much, the same America that, in Sholem Aleichem’s text, is a proper refuge for crooked Podhotzur and his long- suffering Beilke. Sholem Aleichem’s book ends with Golde dead and Tevye “on the go”: