Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (14 page)

But who would supply him with the necessary dramas to elicit such passions? Certainly not those twin hacks Hurwitz and Lateiner, or the imitators who had just begun to offer their works to producers. Of course, one could always adapt the work of European writers, but where was the authentic, the serious voice of the Yiddish Theater to be found?

I WILL WRITE YOU A BETTER
PLAY THAN THIS
HAMLET

J
ACOB GORDIN CAME TO AMERICA
in 1892 at the age of thirty-eight, one jump ahead of the czarist police. Had he stayed in his home another day he would have been caught, jailed, and very likely executed. He was a tall, heavily bearded activist with burning eyes and a censorious attitude. Throughout Russia he was known as a persuasive writer of underground pamphlets. These advanced the cause of socialism and disparaged religious and political orthodoxies.
Vilified by traditional Jewry, attacked by government authorities, he fled to America along with other members of Am Olam—Hebrew for the Eternal People. The Tolstoyan group intended to go back to the land, setting up a socialist farming commune: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Like most utopian schemes this one quickly went under, leaving its members penniless.

Gordin forsook the hinterlands for the city and returned to journalism, filing reports and stories for a Russian-language newspaper. Deadlines and piecework did not agree with him, but he made no complaints; there were eight children to support. In order to familiarize himself with the Lower East Side, Gordin dropped in on a Yiddish production at the Union Square Theater. “Everything I saw and heard was far from real Jewish life,” he lamented. “All was vulgar, immoderate, false and coarse.”

Still, the idea of serious, intellectually provocative drama stayed with him. As Irving Howe points out in
World of Our Fathers,
“Like many halfderacinated Jews of his and later generations, Gordin was mad for culture.”

But just what did the word “culture” mean to those strivers? To some it referred to the new European literature they had read (or more likely, read
about
). In France, Emile Zola was inventing the neorealistic novel, unafraid to detail the lives of prostitutes and thieves. At the same time, Paul Verlaine's poetry celebrated decadence, and
la vie de bohème
of drugs and alcohol. Yet it was in the detested Romanov Russia that the most significant work had taken place. The giants, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, threw long shadows over Europe and America. Tolstoy, an aristocrat transfixed with guilt for the seductions and indulgences of his youth, portrayed his entire country, peasants, farmers, nobles, during the Napoleonic era. Still,
War and Peace
was not enough; in his second greatest work the author focused on the angst of one adulterous woman, Anna Karenina, as if to show he could work on a small canvas as well as a panorama.

Unlike his countryman, Dostoevsky could not be bothered with the externals of scenery or the physical descriptions of his characters. His territory was nothing less than the disturbed psyche and its consequences. He was his own favorite subject, whether describing his terrible bouts of epilepsy in
The Idiot,
or his scarifying experiences in prison, a place he called the House of the Dead. Dostoevsky felt on intimate terms with death; as his devotees loved to recount, the author was once
sentenced to be executed as a young radical, then spared at the last minute. He remained convinced that his father had been murdered by his serfs, and the subject of assassination haunted his work, from
Crime and Punishment
to
The Brothers Karamazov.
Although both men professed Christian beliefs, and Dostoevsky made no secret of his anti-Semitism, that made little difference to Jewish thinkers in America. From their safe redoubt in the land of the free, they could afford to be above such considerations.

Gordin went them one better. He not only knew the prose works of the European masters, he was also familiar with the new theater emerging overseas and on Broadway. Technically, the big venues were in a class by themselves. Electricity had replaced gaslight, and stages were made deep and high, so that elaborate scenery could be “flown” overhead, out of the audience's sight. As a result, long waits for scenery changes were becoming a thing of the past. Norwegian Henrik Ibsen and the German Gerhardt Hauptmann swept away the romantic excesses of their predecessors with exciting, naturalistic dramas. The works were so controversial they couldn't be shown in commercial theaters, where censors would have neutered the dialogue. Subscription theaters had to be established, private places beyond the reach of official editors where audiences sat openmouthed at the new candor of these plays.

All this was heady stuff to the Jewish intellectual. Wandering along Second Avenue, Gordin dreamed of a new Yiddish Theater, revolutionary, persuasive, modern—the equal of anything overseas or uptown. After all, this was a vibrant and changing city; why shouldn't the Jews be in advance of the change instead of behind it?

He was offended by almost every Second Avenue entertainment. Jacob Adler and David Kessler and Boris Thomashefsky had become familiar names by the time Gordin settled into the city. But to his eyes, all three were hams, strutting in naive and irrelevant dramas and operettas. Yiddish vaudeville was even worse. The music halls displayed the very “tail of the theatrical business, with disgusting shows, demoralizing recitations, vulgar witticisms, emetic beer, and debauchery.” Cahan, who had done his own investigations, heartily agreed. He wrote a diatribe entitled “Scandal Has to Be Stopped.” It denounced Jewish prostitutes who made every vaudeville venue “a house of assignation,” where waiters and doorkeepers acted as pimps. “Since there is a slack season among the pick-pockets, they also qualify for this business.” His
secular sermon shocked the old—but it did not deter the young. They went to the halls anyway, some to go upstairs with the streetwalkers, but more to get away from their parents for an evening. Amid a clamorous privacy, they could listen to a singer or a baggy-pants comedian, see a one-reel silent film, and, if their luck held, meet someone of the opposite sex as anxious and innocent as they were.

The theatrical community was not unaware of these conditions. The performers and directors searched for a solution. They agreed that a new kind of theater was necessary, a fresh dramatic style. Only that could save the Yiddish Theater from the vulgar and the garish work that pleased the lowest common immigrant. An actor persuaded Gordin to meet Adler and Kessler at a café, along with the man who had become the leading clown of the Yiddish Theater, Sigmund Mogulesko.

Gordin approached the place apprehensively. “I was curious to meet a Yiddish actor,” he remembered. “I thought as soon as I told him I wanted to write a play, he would start emoting: wipe his nose on his sleeve, jump on a chair, and recite one of the popular tunes of the day.” He was astonished to find “gentlemen with silk hats and handkerchiefs who talked intelligently. In their eyes I even detected a spark of talent.”

Gordin's tone of condescension evaporated when Adler dangled the double prospect of money and art. If the Russian would write an original play, the Great Eagle would guarantee a first-class production starring himself, Kessler, and Mogulesko. Jacob was feeling expansive these days; he was getting the best reviews of his career. (“Watching Adler play Sampson,” said a typical rave, “the audience sat paralyzed, afraid Samson would destroy the world with his terrible strength.”) On the street he enjoyed the kind of celebrity afforded uptown to the likes of Barrymore and Duse. One journalist described a moment on East Broadway, with Adler, “tall, wearing a high hat and long coat and carrying a fancy cane in his hand. I had to stop and watch—not the actor but the people who followed him, their faces shining with adoration and enchantment and awe.”

Less than a fortnight after Adler made his proposal, Gordin showed up with a complete four-act drama. He had written the work in a fever of inspiration, he claimed, “like a scribe at work on the holy Torah.” Adler read the manuscript and bit his lip. The protagonist of
Siberia
is Reuben Cohen, a man condemned to prison for a misdemeanor. En route to the north he escapes from his chains, rejoins his family,
changes his name to Rosenkranz, and assumes another way of life. He prospers and becomes a respectable leader in his community. A rival, jealous of the man's success, discovers his secret and informs the police. Arrest and martyrdom follow.

No one had ever encountered a Yiddish play like this.
Siberia
had none of the long ornamented speeches audiences expected and actors adored. And where was the music? Whoever heard of a production without a tune or two? Without a happy ending or at least a resolution? Gordin considered these objections beneath contempt. He left it to Adler to straighten matters out, and did not return to rehearsals for a week. Upon entering the theater he heard Sigmund Mogulesko trilling two songs. The clown had interpolated them into the dialogue. The second act was more insulting. Sigmund had inserted an entire section of Verdi's grand opera
Ernani.
Gordin erupted, bellowing at the cast, warning them not to tamper with a single word, forbidding the insertion of one unwanted note, stomping out of the theater. Mogulesko riposted, “Anti-Semite!” Gordin boycotted the rest of the rehearsals and refused to attend opening night.

It was just as well. Trained on pageant and song, the audience felt uncomfortable with the plain speaking and unrelieved gloom of
Siberia.
The reaction was so loud and antagonistic the actors could barely hear themselves. Adler could stand no more. During intermission he stepped in front of the curtain. “I stand before you shamed and humiliated.” His voice trembled. “If you would open your hearts, if you would open your minds, you wouldn't laugh at this play by the great Russian writer Jacob Mikhailovich Gordin. You must give it your earnest attention.” He stood silently for a moment, brushed away tears, and withdrew.

The abashed listeners returned to their seats. One of the actors who had been most hostile to the work acknowledged that “the scene where Adler begged Kessler not to betray him made a strong impression.” And at the finale, Mogulesko, playing a servant, spoke the line “Master, we are parting” with such conviction that his voice broke. The audience wept with him. Gordin attended the second night, warmed to the applause and to the intelligent comments he heard in the lobby between acts. Afterward he accepted the apologies of the cast.

But that was the high point of
Siberia
's run. Subsequent performances drew so poorly that the play had to be taken off the boards. A similar reception greeted Gordin's second effort,
Two Worlds.
His third was called
A Yiddish King Lear,
a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's
tragedy, brought into the nineteenth century and furnished with a Russian-Yiddish setting. It featured a wise fool, a successful businessman, his two avaricious
yenta
daughters, his one misunderstood child, and a large supporting cast. “The actors all predicted failure,” wrote Adler. They pleaded with him not to play an Orthodox Jew whose children reject him in old age. He was a leading man; who wanted to see him as a wrinkled geezer? Mogulesko and Kessler left the company, convinced that their colleague had backed a lame horse. Adler refused to budge; the theme of the play reminded him of a song he had heard back in Odessa. That ballad also spoke of a father spurned by his offspring, and tough old men would mist up when they heard it. If a simple folk tune could elicit such a reaction, he argued, what might be the power of a play on the same subject? And it echoed the Bard, the god of the English stage. What more could they want?

Adler's faith was justified. From the first reading he moved the cast away from cheap laughs and overstated melodrama. Gordin had told him all about the naturalism of the new European drama, and Jacob strove for that kind of intense effect. On opening night, recalled his wife, Sara, “he was not an actor but a force. All of us played with inspiration, but the great figure that evening Gordin had given to Adler, and the triumph was his own.” Jacob's success seemed to reverberate throughout the city. For the first time,
Harper's
drama critic ventured downtown. Adler, he wrote, “makes the slightest gesture count, and his frequent moments of quiet, one is tempted to say, count most of all. His costumes and makeup were as simple and unobtrusive as the setting of his stage; yet, as his clothes grew older and more worn from act to act, and his hair and beard thinner and more thin, the unconscious effect was stupendous.”

The Yiddish Theater would never be the same. Gordin's
Lear
had reached the public in a way that no spectacle, no operetta or facile melodrama could possibly have done. From here on, audiences would no longer be content to have a diet composed of nothing but
shund
any more than they would sit still for a dinner composed solely of
kreplach.
Not that the seat holders always met the demands of serious theater. For them, the play seemed indistinguishable from life itself. More than once the Great Eagle was astonished to hear audience members address him during
Lear.
“Come, Yankl!” shouted one man. “Let her choke, that awful woman, your daughter. My wife will give you a wonderful dinner, come to me!”