1905 in the pre-revolutionary Russia of the Tsarist era. "If only I were rich", dreams the Jewish milkman Tevye, who has money worries and, above all, problems with his daughters, who are rebelling against the strict traditions that hold the world of the shtetl together. And the Jewish community is not only threatened from within. In the middle of the wedding of Tewje's daughter Tzeitel, who has managed to marry the man of her choice, Russian soldiers devastate the village, which the Jews have to leave within a few days.
It is the rousing, poignant and comforting music, in which Eastern tradition meets Western modernity, the "laughter with tears", that made the 1964 musical a worldwide success.