Holmes and Tevye: Fiddlers on the Roof

Join acclaimed director and actor Joel Grey and award-winning film director and bestselling author Nicholas Meyer as they discuss Meyer’s new Sherlock Holmes novel which takes the famous detective to Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th-century.

In 1903, long before the phrase “fake news” was coined, the world was exposed to the most destructive forgery of all time: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fabricated minutes of a secret meeting of Jews plotting to take over the world. In his new novel, Nicholas Meyer—a leading writer of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, including the international hit Seven-Per-Cent Solution and its subsequent Academy Award-nominated screenplay—asks the question: what if the vicious hoax were investigated by none other than Sherlock Holmes?

The Adventure of Peculiar Protocols thus follows the legendary Holmes and Watson as they embark on a mission to expose the dark scheme of the Ohkrana, the Russian Tsar’s secret police, to create the Protocols as justification for the hideous pogroms that blotted the early twentieth century. Along the way, the detective duo joins forces with the remarkable Russian-American Jewess who helped found the NAACP, Anna Strunsky Walling.

The world in which Meyer’s novel takes place (Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th-century) is the same world inhabited by the characters of Fiddler on the Roof, the beloved musical currently presented in Yiddish at Stage 42 by acclaimed directed Joel Grey.

Join Meyer and Grey as they discuss the history that inspired their art, the Jewish themes at the heart of their stories, and the world in which Holmes and Tevye, the central character in Fiddler on the Roof, could have coexisted.

A book signing follows the event.