Andrea Chapman explains why a Jewish peasant’s search for good husbands for his three daughters – and his struggle to preserve tradition in times of change – tugs at her heartstrings

It’s New Year’s Day and I’m in hospital with my three-week-old son. We’ve been here a few nights, but now the consultant has come to tell us all is well and we can go home. So why am I crying? I could say I’m overcome with relief. I could blame it on all-over-the-place postnatal hormones. But no. The real reason for the tears? Fiddler on the Roof is on the television.

I grew up with this tear-jerking tale of a Jewish peasant family in pre-revolutionary Russia. My father, the king of amateur drama, had taken the lead role many times, a prayer shawl and pre-hipster beard transforming him into Tevye: milkman, long-suffering husband and adoring father trying to make good matches for his daughters while staying true to tradition.

The film’s bittersweetness gets me every time. Take the girls’ anticipation of a perfect match – then the dawning realisation of an imperfect reality. (“You heard he has a temper,” Yente, the matchmaker, sings of one potential husband. “He’ll beat you every night. But only when he’s sober, so you’re all right.”) Or Tevye looking back over his own arranged marriage and asking his wife, Golde: “Do you love me?”

“Do I what?” she replies, amazed.

Throughout it all, Tevye talks to God: about his daughters’ romances (“Did Adam and Eve have a matchmaker? Well, yes, they did”); about his desire to be a rich man (“Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan?”); about the villagers’ persecution by the Russians (“I know we are your chosen people, but once in a while, can’t you choose someone else?”).

Tevye likens their precarious position to that of a fiddler on the roof, and just as the fiddler teeters, so, too, does the film, between comedy and tragedy. Its poignancy is played out in song, from the high of raising a glass – “To life!” – to celebrate one daughter’s betrothal, to the low of losing another to an outsider: “Little bird, little Chaveleh, I don’t understand what’s happening today.”

For while Tevye has come to accept that times are changing, and his daughters are changing too, there is a line over which he will not step. Yes, he’ll invent a dream to appease the matchmaker and allow Tzeitel to marry the tailor she loves. Yes, he’ll relent and give his blessing to Hodel when she falls for radical Marxist student Perchik. (“Look at my daughter’s eyes, she loves him” – and who wouldn’t, when he was played by soon-to-be-Starsky Paul Michael Glaser?) But when young Chava tells Tevye she’s in love with a Russian soldier, the rift with tradition is too great, and her poor father’s heart is broken.

I’m welling up just thinking about it. I am writing this not with Fiddler in front of me, but from memory. I could sit down and watch the film again, of course – but we all know where that would end. In tears.