Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (18 page)

The novelist and pamphleteer had helped to found the
Forward,
but left during its first year to seek a wider audience. Cahan, who had entered America at the age of twenty-two, was justifiably proud of his fluency in English, and began to freelance articles to mainstream publications. The
Commercial Advertiser
accepted so many of them that Lincoln Steffens put him on staff. There Cahan proselytized as he wrote. “He was the one,” Steffens was to acknowledge, “who brought the spirit of the East Side into our shop and took us, as he got to us, one by one or in groups, in the cafés and Jewish theaters.”

In addition to journalism, Cahan wrote a novel,
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto,
highly praised by
Atlantic Monthly
editor William Dean Howells—the same Howells who had handled Dostoevsky's writings with a pair of tongs.
Yekl
failed to sell, though, and Steffens left the
Advertiser
in 1902. Without his chief backer, and with dim hopes of a literary career, Cahan was forced to look for a position. He found it a year later, when the owners of the
Forward
offered him the job of managing editor.

Cahan was forty-three. For the next four decades he would remain virtually unchanged in appearance and occupation. The thick graying hair, the push-broom mustache, the twinkling pince-nez glasses became as familiar a sight on the Lower East Side as the signs for “Appetizing Delicatessen.” His prodigious energy was at last channeled. From the very first weeks he set the
Forward
's style, championing the rights of labor, exhorting the values of socialism, attempting to make immigrant Jews into real Americans. Early on, the paper awarded a gold fountain pen to the workman who best defined a strikebreaker: “God took the legs of a horse, the head of an ass, the face of a dog, the hair from a hog, the heart of a hare, combined them and out came a scab.”

At the same time, the
Forward
advertised a ten-cent Yiddish translation of the Constitution as “The little Torah,” and “the high road to citizenship, employment and success.” To Cahan, education was just as important as politics—you couldn't have one without the other. When one of his editorials suggested that mothers supply their children with handkerchiefs, he received letters asking what this had to do with socialism. The answer: “And since when has socialism been opposed to
clean noses?” And while he was on the subject of table manners, Cahan went on, “not all rules are silly. You would not like my sleeve to dip into your soup as I reach over your plate to get the salt; it is more reasonable for me to ask you to ‘pass the salt, please.’”

In
The Downtown Jews,
Ronald Sanders notes that the
Forward
sought to influence the entire Jewish population of New York City and beyond. As Cahan saw it, only one institution stood in his way: the Yiddish Theater. “If the
Forward
was becoming a kind of running Talmudic text for the secular cultural life of the Yiddish-speaking masses, the theaters on the Bowery were serving as that culture's temple.” The editor could not write plays, he conceded to staffers, but he had the power to criticize them and perhaps to shape the future of Yiddish drama. Under his aegis the
Forward
ran long and detailed theater reviews. New plays were given the same attention as international news. Writers who agreed with the editor's principles were acclaimed; those who failed to come up to his expectations got panned.

Jacob Gordin was one of those unfortunates. Cahan not only carped about the playwright's work in the pages of the
Forward,
he would go on and on about the man's shortcomings to anyone who would listen. He was particularly hard on Gordin's peasant speeches. In Cahan's opinion they were loaded with highfalutin language—totally unbelievable; common folk must use common words. Gordin got wind of the editor's remarks and his reaction was volcanic. Between acts the playwright stepped onstage to denounce his arrogant critic. Cahan was notified of the incident. He sent word to the theater manager: “Assure Gordin that I won't have any more opinions about forthcoming works of his.” Cahan resolved never to sit through another Gordin play, and Gordin resolved never to read another word of Cahan's evaluations.

These were vows made to be broken. But both men bided their time before the moment of total war.

FOR A PAPER TO GROW
in New York, the prime requisite was a burgeoning audience. But Jewish immigration had slowed down after the first rush, and Yiddish readership had maintained an unpromising status quo. At that moment Russia once again changed the course of American history. In 1903, anti-Semitic feelings ran high in the town of Kishinev. The police chief told town leaders that “it would serve the Jews right if they were driven from the city for encouraging the propaganda of socialism.”

A week before Easter Sunday a group of strangers, mostly Albanians, arrived for the specific purpose of wreaking havoc on the Kishinev Jews. On the fateful day, an armed horde gathered. In the words of a reporter from St. Petersburg, the “mob took possession of the approaches to the railway station, where frightful scenes occurred that beggar description. Every Jew who was encountered was beaten until he lost consciousness; one Jew was dragged under a tramcar and crushed to death. The miserable dwellings of the poor were rifled of their contents, which were removed into the street and piled into a heap. Immense clouds of feathers rose into the air.”

The violence was a mere prelude. An Irish nationalist, Michael Davitt, was touring Russia at the time. He heard about the pogrom taking place in Kishinev and hurried there, too late to do anything but listen to the survivors. After Easter Sunday, he wrote, “some of the worst outrages were perpetrated. Every Jewish woman and girl the mob could find was raped.” One thirteen-year-old was violated and then murdered. The rapists “fought for her body like famished wolves after life was extinct. When found the next morning by her relatives, the body was seen to be literally torn in two.” An old grocer, blind in one eye, was attacked. He offered all the money in his possession in exchange for his life. The leader of the men took the money, then said, “Now we want your eye. You will never look upon a Christian woman
again,” and gouged out his eye with a sharpened stick. Davitt visited another victim, barely alive, in a Kishinev hospital, “whose head had been battered with bludgeons and left for dead. He told me that it was the same gang who killed his mother-in-law, by driving nails through her eyes into the brain.”

The next year more than a thousand Jews were massacred in Zhitomir, under the banner of the “Black Hundreds,” a violently antiSemitic organization backed by the czar. Russia's own prime minister wrote in his secret diary, “The aims of the Black Hundreds are usually selfish and of the lowest character. They are typical murderers from dark alleys. Naturally, one's record is still better if he can present evidence of having killed or at least mutilated a few peaceful Yids.”

This time the atrocities did not go unheeded by the Western world. The English, French, and German press spoke out. In Russia itself there were grumblings. Tolstoy's denunciation was suppressed by the censor, but his words were leaked to the public. He recognized the czarist government as “the real culprit, which stupefies our people and makes bigots of them.” The American president was prevailed upon to make a statement against the Russian violence. Theodore Roosevelt responded with a letter distributed worldwide, expressing “the deep sympathy felt not only by the administration but by all the American people for the unfortunate Jews who have been the victims in the recent appalling massacres and outrages.”

At the new embarkation center on Ellis Island, the annual number of Jewish arrivals rose from 57,000 in 1902 to 76,000 in 1903. The influx was too much for bureaucrats to handle. Thousands of immigrants were held back, complaints got out, and that fall the president made a personal visit to the island. Roosevelt “inspected every part of the work,” said an official report, “and held an impromptu examination into the case of a Jewish woman, detained since July with her four children.” Her husband was supposed to have called for the family, but he had been too sick to make the trip. The president intervened and got the family admitted. The next year, 1904, some 106,000 Jewish immigrants were welcomed to the New World.

In his novel
The Storm,
Sholem Aleichem portrayed his fellow immigrants at that time, fleeing from the continuing Russian pogroms “with valises, sacks, packages, and pillows, pillows, pillows! Their faces were terrified, their eyes darting about in every direction. They trembled when they heard a shout or even a whistle…. The word ‘America' had
for them a special magnetism, a kind of magical meaning. It stood for an ideal of which many, many had long dreamed. They imagined America to be a kind of heaven, a sort of Paradise. ‘We hope, God Almighty, they will let us in and not, God forbid, send us back.’”

The Russian exodus was to bring new vigor to the Lower East Side. All boats seemed to rise on the tide; uptown, Longacre Square was renamed Times Square in honor of the newspaper, and the
Forward
enjoyed a corresponding prestige in its own neighborhood. The Yiddish Theater prepared new programs to entice the fresh wave of culture-hungry arrivals. Producers anticipated good times without end. No one bothered to heed a prophetic warning from the social philosopher Max Nordau. In Paris, he was interviewed by a journalist who asked him about the new congestion in Manhattan. “America saves the man, not the Jew,” he observed. “Jews in America should live in groups to preserve their character and their ideals. Influenced by foreign surroundings, Jews lose their identity.” Such a loss seemed inconceivable by 1906. The Lower East Side was enjoying a second renaissance, and thanks to the newfangled telephone and wireless telegraph, the world was learning all about it.

ON A PLEASANT JUNE
evening that year, Manhattan's original odd couple strolled down Second Avenue. The tall man with black beard and dark, deep-set eyes was Jacob Gordin, now a dominant presence on the Lower East Side. With loud voice and spirited gestures, the Russian immigrant went on about his adaptations of Shakespeare and his interpretations of Tolstoy's thought.

Gordin's American companion, back in the United States after an absence of twenty years, was a dedicated author, master of nuance, lifelong bachelor, apolitical, bald, clean-shaven in recent years, tentative in style and speech, as gentile in his way as the other was Jewish. The playwright led the way and chattered on; Henry James did the gawking. He
had followed the news of pogroms in Russia and of the ensuing torrent of immigrants spilling into downtown Manhattan. Ever curious, he demanded to see the phenomenon for himself. A friend had arranged the meeting between the novelist and the playwright, who grandly took his guest in tow.

What James apprehended did not seem encouraging. All around him was the pulse of cultural life, the voracious appetite for technical knowledge and dramatic art—the very art at which he had failed so publicly in London. But the great observer failed to see what was spread out before him. His delicate senses were besieged and affronted. It seemed to him that these people bred like animals. The fire escapes that ran down every tenement were reminiscent of “a little world of bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys.”

And there were those offensive accents. At the Royal, a favorite hangout for Jewish performers, foreign intonations turned the café into a “torture-room of the living idiom.” This “Hebrew conquest of New York,” James predicted, would permanently maim the language. In the future, “whatever we will know it for, certainly we shall not know it for English.”

Gordin thought a comedy might be the best choice for Mr. James's first downtown experience. He bought two tickets, and they entered the Liberty Theater. The fare turned out to be even more cringemaking than the world outside the stage door. The guest excused himself after the first act, not because it was incomprehensible but because the audience offended. Ticket buyers emanated “a scent, literally, not further to be followed.”

Appalled, James concluded, “There is no swarming like that of Israel, when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.” This was an elegantly expressed variation of Henry Adams's letter to his brother. “God tried drowning out the world once,” wrote this grandson of President John Quincy Adams, “but it did no kind of good, and there are said to be four-hundred-and-fiftythousand Jews now doing kosher in New York alone. God himself owned failure.” They were doing a lot more than kosher. The swarm that had burst all bounds was slowly—too slowly for the likes of Adams and James—learning the ways of the New World.

With this second influx of Eastern European refugees, New York was serving yet again as a microcosm for both kinds of Jewish fervor:
the passionately religious, and the purely ethnic. If the old orthodoxies were not persecuted, neither were they welcomed. The secular components of Judaism, on the other hand—adaptability, a pursuit of knowledge and opportunity, a high regard for artistic endeavor, an obsession with social justice, a heightened, almost melodramatic sense of life— were encouraged and rewarded in the Promised City.

Every immigrant group had its heroes and heroines, and many a business giant, sports figure, and politician was looked up to. But for the Jews on the Lower East Side, the artists of the theater were held in special regard. As journalist Harry Golden points out, during these years of struggle and assimilation, “the immigrants had not yet learned about Christy Mathewson or Ty Cobb …the folk heroes of the ghetto were the actors, the journalists, the cantors, the critics, the playwrights, and the composers; but mostly the actors.”

Ignored by the general public, Abraham Goldfaden wanted a piece of this hero worship. He ached to be recognized not only as the Father of Yiddish Theater but as a still viable playwright. But the indifferent responses of the producers told him that he had become irrelevant, an antique from another era. There was even a rumor, he learned, that the Father was repeating himself, retreating into senescence. As a desperate gesture he took his old work
Ben-Ami
to Boris Thomashefsky and begged for a professional reading with experienced actors. Boris could not refuse—and much to his surprise found that the play was met with considerable enthusiasm. He agreed to direct it. Goldfaden told his wife that he now had but one ambition: to see
Ben-Ami
become popular once more. He could then die happy.