 The film's plot largely follows that of the musical from which it is adapted.In 1905, Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman living in the Ukrainian village of Anatevka, a typical shtetl in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia, compares the lives of the Jews of Anatevka to a fiddler on the roof (who appears throughout the film in this metaphorical role), using tradition to "scratch out a pleasant, simple tune" without breaking their necks.In town, Tevye meets Perchik, a radical Marxist from Kiev, who admonishes those for talking but doing nothing about news of the tsar banishing Jews from their villages.