John Wilkes Booth’s Other Victim

Richard Sloan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:59:45 +0000

John Wilkes Booth’s Other Victim Richard Sloan Fri, 01/21/2011 - 03:59

Marcus Connelly: "Gangway for de Lawd"

John L. Phillips — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:10:54 +0000

Marcus Connelly: "Gangway for de Lawd" John L. Phillips Thu, 01/20/2011 - 11:10

"AUTHOR! AUTHOR"

Elmer Rice — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:30:18 +0000

"AUTHOR! AUTHOR" Elmer Rice Thu, 01/20/2011 - 10:30

The Short, Brilliant Life of the American Yiddish Theater

Joshua Zeitz — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The Short, Brilliant Life of the American Yiddish Theater Joshua Zeitz Tue, 10/31/2006 - 07:00

Date Posted

2006-10-31

A new look at a lost cultural world.

Anyone who’s seen Fiddler on the Roof, in either its stage or film incarnation, knows what a yenta is. A yenta is, in Yiddish, a well-meaning busybody, a gossip, a meddler. The term probably originated with Sholem Aleichem’s now-famous collection of short stories about Tevye, the lovable but unschooled milkman who has five rebellious daughters, a boisterous and opinionated wife, and a world of troubles, both financial and political. Among the play’s colorful cast of characters is Yente the matchmaker, a diminutive marriage broker who pokes her nose in everyone’s business. Hence the term yenta.

What few devotees of Fiddler on the Roof’s 1971 film adaptation realize is that the little old woman who played Yente was Molly Picon, then 73 and relatively unknown to most Americans. In her prime she had been the queen of the Yiddish stage, adored by millions of Jews from the smallest shtetls in Poland to the largest cities in Central Europe and the United States. To the world’s substantial Yiddish-speaking population, she was as whimsical as Mary Pickford, as bold as Katharine Hepburn, and as beloved as Grace Kelly.

Stefan Kanfer reminds us in his beautifully written new book, Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95), that there was a brief moment in time, somewhere between the 1870s and the 1940s, when Yiddish theater was one of the most thriving, creative, and popular art forms in urban America. Those were the days when 1.5 million immigrant Jews lived just in New York City, when Abraham Cahan’s socialist newspaper Forverts(Forward), with 150,000 subscribers, was unrivaled as the largest foreign-language daily in the United States, when left-leaning fraternal organizations like the Arbeiter Ring drew memberships of over 50,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and when even native Protestant observers like Hutchins Hapgood marveled at the lively culture of the Lower East Side ghetto, “where excellent tea and coffee are sold, where everything is clean and good, and where the conversation is often the best”—if, of course, one knew enough German to understand the local Yiddish tongue.

These immigrants, and the family members they left behind in Eastern Europe, were relatively new to urban life, with all its demands and opportunities. They flocked to stage (and, later, film) productions of original dramatic shows—shows that were performed in their native tongue, that dramatized and made light of the tensions between modernity and tradition, and that recast traditional material, like King Lear, in Jewish settings. They thronged performances with titles like Ost und West, in which Picon played an assimilated Jewish-American girl who goes to Poland, stirs up trouble in the old shtetl, marries a Yeshiva boy on a lark, abandons him for America, and then reunites with him five years later in Vienna, after he has shed his side locks and Torah scrolls to become a renowned secular author.

Audiences delighted in these stories, just as native American audiences delighted in English-language stage productions and films. The performances offered escape, amusement, and respite from the toils of industrial labor and ghetto living. They made sense of the confusing dualities of immigrant life. And they were in Yiddish, sparing immigrant audiences the difficulty of translation.

Molly Picon, the daughter of an immigrant costumier, stood all of 4 feet, 11 inches tall. She wowed interwar audiences in Paris, Lodz, Vienna, Bucharest, New York, and Philadelphia. She starred in Yonkele, a Yiddish version of Peter Pan with a twist (in the Yiddish version, Yonkele/Peter wants desperately to grow up and bring justice to the world), and in a 1923 film version of Ost und West, which was censored by the New York State Motion Picture Commission for “scenes which tend to bring the religion of the Jew in ridicule and disrespect.” The commission particularly objected to a segment in which Picon shimmied in her underwear, prompting her husband, Jacob Kalisch, who directed the film, to issue a dry riposte: “You know as much about the Jewish law as Moses knew about Prohibition.” Still, he cut the offending scenes.

Since the 1980s, Jewish Studies departments across the country have revived scholarly interest in Yiddish literature, and scholars continue to mine Yiddish theater for new insight into the culture in which it thrived. Kanfer’s book will undoubtedly assume its rightful place as the premier source for general readers who are interested in the Jewish stage. Loaded with colorful vignettes of the personalities who staffed the theater troupes and entertained the teeming ghettos, Stardust Lost is well-crafted and easy to read.

Particularly engaging are Kanfer’s portraits of early Yiddish stage pioneers like Abraham Goldfaden, the Odessa transplant whom the author credits as the “father” of the Yiddish stage; Jacob Adler, who exported the new genre to New York; and Boris Thomashefsky, one of the first successful Yiddish-theater impresarios. For readers less interested in the now-arcane roots of the art form, more familiar characters are also on display, notably Sholem Aleichem, the posthumously famous Yiddish author who wrote a number of stunningly unsuccessful but historically memorable plays for the then thriving Yiddish stage, and Zero Mostel, the mainstream American entertainer who was reared on Yiddish theater and dazzled acculturated Broadway theatergoers in the mid-1960s when, playing Tevye, he improvised freely in Yiddish.

In drawing up his narrative, Kanfer not only shows that the institution was the product of a specific time and place but goes so far as to argue that while “the creation of most art forms is lost in history . . . the Yiddish Theater is unique: it was born on a precise night in a precise year, and its lineage can be traced to an actual father.” Though perhaps technically true—he identifies Abraham Goldfaden’s show on October 5, 1876, in Jassy, Romania, as the first performance of secular Yiddish-language theater—this very successful narrative device comes at the price of context.

Granted, Kanfer set out to write narrative nonfiction, not analytical history. But he might have drawn more liberally on the growing body of academic literature on modern Ashkenazic Jewry. As he does point out early in the book, Jews have always woven theatricality and performance into their religious lives. What’s a Passover seder, after all, if not a carefully-staged recreation of a historical drama? What do observant Jews do every Saturday, when they read from the Torah, if not dramatically recreate divine stories from their collective past?

What was unique about Yiddish theater was that it drew on the vernacular, incorporated both secular and religious themes, and was highly commercial. None of this can be fully appreciated without understanding the rapid transformation of Eastern European Jews from rural dwellers in relatively static religious communities to urban dwellers in booming industrial cities across Europe and America. Stardust Lost hints at these underlying preconditions for the rise of Yiddish theater, but it leaves readers to sort out some of the context for themselves.

These criticisms aside, the book is a marvelous recreation of a bygone era that vanished not so long ago. It 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.

Even as late as 1950, when the National Jewish Welfare Board conducted a survey of 400 Jewish families who lived in the newly constructed Stuyvesant Town housing development in downtown Manhattan, 46 percent of the adults reported that they were fluent in Yiddish, and another 25 percent claimed they could understand it. These were not aging immigrants. Over three-quarters of them were either parents between the ages of 25 and 34 or their children.

Yet as quickly as the Yiddish theater rose, it fell. In the late 1960s, around the time that the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down the nonviolent political awakening that was Prague Spring, Ida Kaminska, a renowned Czech Jewish actress, left with her husband, Meir Melman, for the friendlier shores of America. Arriving in New York, then home to the largest urban Jewish community in the world, Kaminska assembled a Yiddish-language theater troupe and raised enough money to rent out Carnegie Hall. This attempt at a revival was a bold gamble, and the same 1969 blizzard that left most of the city’s outer boroughs blanketed for two weeks in a foot of snow spelled doom for Kaminska’s performance. “Many people who had tickets couldn’t come,” she later explained. “The results . . . were not too good. . . . In a word, schlimazel.”

Months later she tried her luck again. Renting out space at the Roosevelt Auditorium, in Union Square, she founded the Ida Kaminska Yiddish Theater and booked a full season of dramatic performances. Reviews were solid but attendance was low. On January 4, 1970, the company folded.

A year after Kaminska’s troupe folded up shop, Norman Jewison’s movie version of Fiddler became a national hit. But by then few audience members likely knew who Molly Picon was. Fewer still would have remembered the 1939 Yiddish-language film Tevya, starring Maurice Schwartz, the actor who created the role on stage.

But Stefan Kanfer reminds us that this wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, Picon and Schwartz were towering figures who embodied a dynamic culture that is now the stuff of memory.

theater

John Wilkes Booth’s Other Victim

Marcus Connelly: "Gangway for de Lawd"

"AUTHOR! AUTHOR"

The Short, Brilliant Life of the American Yiddish Theater

Keywords