"I didn’t see my family again until 1978. By then, my father had died, we had two children of our own, and I was active in the women’s movement..."

"... and had become an English professor at Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University. Being disowned had given me the freedom to invent my life on my own terms: as an atheist, feminist, professor, and liberal. I initiated the reunion, but not because I missed my family or needed Jewish traditions to organize my life. It was because Adrienne Rich, my colleague at Douglass, had insisted to me that no woman could be an honest feminist who had not made peace with her own mother and sister. The family I rejoined was not the family I left. No one in my generation, none of my cousins, my uncles or my aunts, was untouched by those turbulent years of American history. Fifteen years is a long time, and while some of the emotional threads that were broken were mended over the years since, most were not. But that is another story. Still, I sometimes wonder if I should write a sequel called Chava Returns...."

From "'Fiddler,' Tevye’s Daughters, and Me" by Elaine Showalter (The NY Review of Books). In "Fiddler on the Roof," Chava is the daughter who finds love outside of the Jewish faith, and her father tells her to leave and never return. He declares "Chava is dead to us! We will forget her."

In the last scene, the Jews of Anatevka have been cast out by the edict of the tsar, and Tevye is forced to leave with his neighbors and take his family to seek familiar faces in the strange new land of America. But when Chava and Fyedka come to say farewell, he will still not speak to them, although he mutters “God be with you” under his breath....

For me, the story is personal. In June 1963, when I married a nominally Episcopalian professor of French, my parents disowned me, and so did my grandparents, all but two of my twenty-plus aunts and uncles, and all but three of my dozens of cousins. No one from my family came to our wedding, and I did not see them again for fifteen years....

You hear a lot about family love, not so much about familial estrangement.