October 31, 2006
The Yiddish Theater Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:45 PM EST Josh Zietz’s lead article for the website today reviews Stardust Lost, Stefan Kanfer’s new history of the Yiddish theater in America. The review is in part a celebration, and necessarily an elegy: The Yiddish theater, once vibrant and vital, is dead, a victim of assimilation in some countries and extermination in others. I know that theater only at one remove. My father, who grew up bilingual in Yiddish and English, very frequently attended it as a boy in New York and Chicago. As a result, he could quote Shakespeare in Yiddish at greater length than in English; I suppose the plays seen as a child often have the strongest grip on memory. My father was sometimes mocking about the plays he saw as a child; he summarized the plot of a large percentage of them as “First Act, the shtetl; Second Act, the Lower East Side; Third Act, Park Avenue.” But the mockery was always affectionate; theater was his favorite art, and he was grateful for the form in which he first saw it, sometimes on a weekly basis. The demise of the Yiddish theater was an inevitable result of the success of Jewish assimilation in America, and on the basis of my own family’s experience, its existence was always more precarious than it seemed. Three of my grandparents spoke Yiddish as a first language, but my mother’s father was from a small hill town in Appalachia and grew up on Poor Richard’s Almanac rather than Sholom Aleichem. As a result, my maternal grandfather could not understand his wife if she spoke Yiddish, which meant that my mother never learned it, which meant that my father could not speak it to my mother, which meant that none of his children can speak it; one weak link broke the chain. This loss was not without its compensations: my mother quoted Chaucer, Milton, and Browning to us, rather than Shylock’s Daughter, and that was not a bad tradeoff. One thing does puzzle me about Josh’s essay, which is his remark that Kanfer’s book “brings back to life a world before the Holocaust, when there was still a thriving transnational Yiddish culture, and when Diaspora Jewry possessed more cultural self-confidence and didn’t yet feel the need to fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists.” For one thing, I am not sure that Diaspora Jewry possessed in every respect more cultural self-confidence before the Holocaust than after. Before the Holocaust there were plenty of Jewish quotas in American universities. It was disproportionately difficult for a Jew to get into medical school, or law school, or most good colleges. A Jew could not stay in many hotels, buy real estate in many places, get a job in many firms, etc. He or she was not welcome as a guest in many clubs, let alone as a member. This did not necessarily make for “cultural self-confidence.” The price of social advancement often meant muting or masking your identity. Only one anecdote, from only one family: My mother was offered a promotion, a good one, if she agreed to change her name; she refused, and changed jobs, moving into a different sector of the economy (radio and TV, not publishing). This process did not always make for “cultural self-confidence.” The Holocaust didn’t immediately end this regime, but it almost certainly accelerated its demise. Before its demise, which I would date to the early 1960s, social promotion usually meant learning to dress differently, speak differently, hold oneself differently, not necessarily bad things, but again, not things that necessarily made for cultural self confidence. With respect to any postwar “fetishizing the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists,” after the Holocaust, there were only three years in which Disapora Jewry could fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists; after 1948, those Palestinian Zionists were Israelis. I am not entirely sure what it means to fetishize Zionist deeds, real or imagined; I do suspect that after the Holocaust, Jews who successfully managed to resist being killed by armed enemies may have been seen in a new and very flattering light by some of Diaspora Jewry. I do not think they made this mistake, if it was one, because they had not seen enough Yiddish theater. The Holocaust made some Diaspora Jews understandably uncertain about the wisdom of living on the sufferance of their more numerous neighbors and perhaps more prone to acknowledge the importance of skill at performing some kinds of deeds. By way of explanation, one more piece of family history: I am very distantly related to Marshal Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, who commanded one of the three Red Army Fronts that destroyed Hitler’s Army Group Center. I do not think this would interest me nearly as much in an alternate history with no Holocaust. In that alternate history, Cherynakhovsky would merely be a servant of an evil regime. In our history, he is a Jew who managed to kill a very large number of armed (and, alas, some unarmed) Germans, in a world where armed Germans killed an astonishing number of unarmed Jews. Do I fetishize his deeds? Maybe, but history has given me a pretty good reason.
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