Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (12 page)

Back in Russia, Jewish audiences knew that Goldfaden had written
Bar Kochba
in code; they were well aware that he was commenting on the czarist pogroms. The trouble was, the Cossacks also knew the code. In the eyes of the government this huge and violent production was meant to inflame the nation's Jewry. It had to go, and with it all other Yiddish Theater works. The prohibition made Abraham a folk hero all across Eastern Europe.

But in America things were different. Here he had to contend with an offstage movement that had been quashed in Russia: socialism. Along the Lower East Side of the 1880s the spirit of revolt was very much alive, kindled by the injustices of the sweatshops. No one quite knew how to organize; the factions were untested, the leadership uncertain. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were exotic names to most laborers; their bodies were overworked, their minds ripe for propaganda. A handful of leaders encouraged them to whisper to one another at their machines, meet at night, plan strikes, make demands for an eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Organizers reminded them that
they
were the instruments of production, not the bosses. Hadn't the socialists run a candidate for mayor, Henry George? All right, he came in second to Abraham S. Hewitt, but he beat out Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican nominee. The future belonged to the left.

A Jewish firebrand, freshly arrived from Riga, surveyed the scene with a radical friend. At first they were discouraged. “There had been, we knew,” wrote Morris Hillquit, “unions of shirt makers, cloak operators and bakery workers at one time or another. We thought them dormant. We found them dead.” However, they did locate two unions with a strong pulse, and this was enough to keep them going. The typesetters were men who had always exhibited great pride and solidarity. And the actors in the Yiddish Theater were beginning to show resolve for the first time. At meetings they complained loudly about star treatment given to the few, and the short change doled out to the many. The socialists egged them on: these talented performers were the exemplars of the utopian future. The theater belonged to them; it
was
them. The membership rose to its feet and thrust fists in the air. It was Goldfaden's
misfortune to harrumph and strut just as the labor movement started to jell.

The youngest of his performers were still tentative; they needed the work and had enormous respect for the Father. But the more experienced wanted no part of Goldfaden's rigid conditions and they prevailed. A strike was called. Everyone went out. Goldfaden denounced the rebels as ungrateful children and held firm. He discovered that he was powerless; this was one union that could not be replaced by scabs. A month of picketing and refusals went by. When it became obvious that the performers would rather starve than act as vassals, Goldfaden caved in. In a grand gesture he held out a hand to the entire acting community. “There will be no reprisals,” he promised. “You will be treated as my equals.”

The olive branch was offered too late. For more than thirty days no dramas had been produced, and, consequently, no tickets sold. Debts had mounted up. Strapped for cash, the owners sold their theater out from under Goldfaden and his reconciled company. The new owner had no regard for the past; he wanted to put on shows “in the American language only.” Now the Yiddish actors were truly unemployed and Goldfaden had nothing to show for his attitude. Both sides had lost the strike.

Professor Hurwitz came riding to the rescue with an ingenious plan. He dubbed it the Order of David's Harp. For an initiation fee of $1, and a monthly payment of $2, subscribers were promised free admission to certain productions at the Romanian, plus $500 for a dowry when their eldest daughter came of age, plus $500 worth of life insurance. Accompanied by an a cappella chorus singing psalms, Hurwitz toured the neighborhood every evening, speaking persuasively about King David, about Jewish responsibility, about Yiddish Theater.

In a matter of weeks he had addressed just about every Jewish lodge and fraternal organization in the ghetto, and by the end of the summer of 1887, he had signed up some nine hundred customers. With the money Hurwitz leased Poole's Theater at 8th Street and Fourth Avenue and on August 26, 1888, threw himself a big parade from Canal Street to the new showplace. Abraham Cahan, who had Hurwitz's number from the beginning, watched the large demonstration and despaired for his people. “This is what the masses want,” he muttered. “Give them Tammany politicians and Hurwitz!”

As the doubters suspected, David's Harp was nothing but a slick
Ponzi scheme. Shortly after the parade, Hurwitz treated himself to a country house and another fancy carriage and four steeds. Only then did he pronounce the insurance plan null and void. It had always depended on exponential growth, and after the initial rush there were no more customers to deceive. Crushed by the results of the strike, and now the bankruptcy of David's Harp, Goldfaden saw no future for himself in America, the place where he had so carefully planned his second act. He took a wistful look at New York and booked passage for the Other Side.

More
tsorus
followed. First, he put together a troupe in Paris. His treasurer absconded with the profits. Weary from the tribulations in America and France, he fell ill, disabled with asthma attacks that left him unable to work. Abraham wrote friends, grumbling about Paulina's expensive shopping expeditions and complaining about his own physical deterioration. “My disease shows how the hardships I have gone through in the Yiddish Theater have affected me,” he observed. “I was always of healthy stock, but so be it! Because of my illness, I must not become overexcited or overstrain my nerves.”

A year later, still in precarious health, he turned up in Lemberg, Germany. He had in hand the manuscript of a new play,
Times of the Messiah.
It was an autobiographical drama set on the Lower East Side, featuring a long-suffering writer and the actors who didn't understand him. Goldfaden staged that, and some of his old works, with yet another company. That effort ended when the theater demanded a bigger portion of the gate. Rather than face yet another debilitating clash, the old man walked away.

He came to resemble a character in one of his period melodramas, strolling alone and impoverished through the Jewish quarter. One evening he heard his own songs being sung. The melodies issued from the window of an apartment three stories above. In his memoir he speaks of delivering soliloquies in the night, very much like Tevye in Sholem Aleichem's stories: “Don't these Jews know, as they amuse themselves and give their parties, that the composer is wandering about on the streets without even bread to stay his hunger?”

THE NEW YORK CITY
that Goldfaden abandoned had become, almost by accident, a world capital. In 1865, when Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi began working on his immense present to America—a sculpture of a lady with a lamp—he was dismissed as an impractical visionary. Even after the artist won the approval of the French government, he was unable to complete his project in time for the one hundredth anniversary of the United States. Only the statue's raised arm and torch could be shown at the Centennial in Philadelphia. And when the whole thing was finished and paid for by France, the pedestal remained unbuilt. America was supposed to pay for it, but Congress refused to allot the required $100,000. It took the intervention of the press to make the Statue of Liberty a reality. Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who had fought in the Civil War, married a wealthy woman and bought several newspapers, including the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and the
New York World.
Upon hearing that the statue was about to die for lack of funds, he seized his opportunity to make heroes of the public and, not coincidentally, the
World.

He would accomplish this by asking readers (and potential readers) to send their extra pennies to underwrite the pedestal. Cannily working the ethnic neighborhoods, his writers and editors appealed to the Irish by slamming the British government in editorials, covering the affairs of the Bismarcks for German immigrants, and acknowledging the important Jewish holidays for Lower East Siders. The resultant publicity increased the paper's circulation and gave it, and the city it served, a world-class status. More than $100,000 came in. The massive figure rose in the harbor and was promptly dubbed “Miss Liberty.”

As she loomed over New York, other plans took form. Castle Garden was judged inadequate to accommodate the rush of newcomers, and Ellis Island, a larger arena, was readied with new buildings and offices. Ground breaking started for something called a “subway,” a rail
system to move people underground from City Hall all the way to West 145th Street. The elevated steam trains that ran along Sixth Avenue soon would be replaced by electric cars. The legitimate theater had expanded from Union Square on 14th Street all the way to 42nd Street, and to show that the movement north was no fluke, the Metropolitan Opera House had risen up on the southwest corner of Broadway and 41st Street.

Nothing could slake the public appetite for drama and music, not even the great blizzard of 1888 that buried the city in two feet of snow. That weekend, the Star Theater had a big draw: the English actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in
Faust.
There was not one empty seat for the evening or matinee performances. At the same time Daly's Theater also played to capacity houses: Ada Rehan, a comic star born in Ireland and educated in Brooklyn schools, led the cast of
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
An unprecedented ebullience filled the air. Poverty, crime, pollution were all judged to be minor and rectifiable—the United States could right any wrong. Appraising Dostoevsky in the distinguished
Atlantic Monthly,
editor William Dean Howells became the thinking person's cheerleader. He conceded that the Russian had his good points, but that “our” novelists should “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.”

WORKING OUTSIDE
the Manhattan ghetto, Boris Thomashefsky had been forced to improve his English. In Philadelphia he read the local papers and learned of New York's popular and financial growth and longed to return. In the Yiddish papers he saw another reason to come back to Second Avenue. A young actor named David Kessler had become the talk of the Yiddish Theater.

The rangy young man had come a long way in every sense. On the Lower East Side he had come upon a poem by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He understood the lines instantly: “Where is your Self to
be found? In the deepest enchantment you have ever experienced.” For Kessler, the Self was to be found onstage.

As a boy David had been dazzled by Yiddish actors moving and speaking in a manner he had seen only in dreams. Originally, the runaway youth knew nothing of mime, music, expression. He knew only that he had to be a performer no matter what the cost, no matter where he had to go. He picked up small acting jobs here and there in Europe; picked up a wife, too, but that venture lasted a very short time. Maurice Heine, good at spotting talent in the rough, finally gave him a break. In Europe, David played walk-ons and filled out crowd scenes. He stood out in any aggregation; the charisma could not be hidden. By the time the troupe sailed for America, he was playing second leads.

As soon as he took center stage, David became the talk of the Lower East Side. The Yiddish papers were full of stories about him; within a year he was a Second Avenue celebrity, the cause of sighs from shopgirls, and of envy from more established performers. None was more envious than Boris, stuck in the City of Brotherly Love with no discernible way out. He decided to see this upstart for himself.

In his memoir, Thomashefsky is painfully honest. “I came out of the House in a trance. I had never even fantasized such an encounter on the Yiddish stage, then still in its infancy, and certainly never confronted such a talent. I remained in New York another few days and saw him in a few more roles. Each time, at each performance, I was more surprised. To my company of young assistants I said, ‘Now we have in New York a great actor, a wonderfully worldly artist, who should not be ashamed on any stage in the world, and this is David Kessler.’”

After that experience Philadelphia was impossible—too small, too limiting. Boris
had
to get back to his home city. With that goal in mind, he took his troupe on tour, intending to work his way back to Manhattan. The first stop was Baltimore. When the Thomashefsky troupe arrived there, Bessie Kaufman's parents bought her a matinee ticket. The fourteen-year-old had never seen Yiddish Theater before; she was hypnotized by the performances, led by a diva with a lyric soprano, golden hair, and striking charm. “Her head was piled high with ringlets,” Bessie recalled in her memoir, “and she had all this sparkling jewelry. She was the center of attention and flirting and all the men were watching her.” No one stopped Bessie when she ventured backstage. There in the dressing room sat the star, chatting away sans wig and costume. The
sheyne meydele
was Boris in drag.

Actor and acolyte talked, one thing led to another, as it often did with Boris, and Bessie was offered a place in the company. After all, the actor purred, she obviously had intelligence and a lovely figure—was she only in her fifteenth year? Wonderful. The company could use an ingénue. He was tired of playing the female parts; she could do them twice as well. The pay was more than Bessie could earn as a seamstress; why not join the Thomashefsky players? She would be completely safe while she learned her craft. Why, his own father would be on the premises at all times.

In the manner of so many Jewish girls of the period, Bessie went home and pleaded with her mother and father. And in the manner of so many Jewish parents, the Kaufmans forbade her to have anything to do with this or any other Yiddish acting company. She was far too young, a mere child, really. And who was this Boris? No doubt a man with dishonorable intentions, a predator. The Thomashefskys left town without her. But the idea of acting took root in her imagination, and her parents couldn't pluck it out. The next time the troupers passed through Baltimore she ran off with them. Boris had a great instinct for talent; Bessie soon inhabited the roles he had outgrown. Two years later, she was happy to show her parents how wrong they were when she and Boris took their marriage vows under a
chuppa,
surrounded by respectable Yiddish actors in dark suits and long dresses.