Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (19 page)

In December 1907, his dearest wish came true.
Ben-Ami
opened to a roar of applause, encores, the awarding of flowers, and, finally, a speech by the grateful playwright. He walked down Second Avenue to his apartment clutching the bouquet. Swinging open the door of the flat, he shouted: “Paulina, Paulina, they gave me laurel wreaths! I'm not senile, Paulina, I'm not senile!” The moment was so sweet he insisted on savoring it for the next five nights. At each performance he laughed and cried and took bows from his box seat. On the fifth evening he experienced some discomfort and pain in the chest. He walked home slowly. That night he died in his sleep. No one, not even Goldfaden himself, could have written a more emotionally satisfying finale.

Boris, a connoisseur of melodrama, reveled in the moment. Having rescued the deceased from oblivion, he insisted on the last word. The
truth was that he had planned to take
Ben-Ami
off the boards after a couple of weeks. Now, in the wake of renewed interest, he saw an opportunity to extend the run—and to make a speech. En route to the cemetery he addressed the mourners. “If not for our old father Goldfaden,” he intoned, “we none of us would have become tragedians or comedians, prima donnas, soubrettes, playwrights. If not for Goldfaden, we'd be plain and simple Jews, choir singers, folk singers, clothes peddlers, machine sewers, cigarette makers….

“Goldfaden went out like a light in his dark room while we, his children, ride in carriages, own our own houses, are hung with diamonds. Union members, club members, pinochle players, decision makers, managers, sports—we're nice and warm, all of us. But our father was cold.”

It was a fine lamentation, and better business.
Ben-Ami
played to full houses for the rest of the season. But there was no Goldfaden revival. Audiences were being exhorted to “better” theater, and with this one exception, the drama critics looked down upon the good old days when the Yiddish Theater was young. Contemporary plays were what they were looking for, written by freethinking playwrights. The trouble was, everyone had a different definition of freethinking. Case in point: the enduring quarrel between Jacob Gordin and Abraham Cahan. Having sworn never to see or read each other's work again, they promptly ignored their promises and engaged in yet another battle of egos.

Gordin's drama
The Purity of Family Life
had just opened. In the
Forward,
Cahan complained that “the leading feminine role was not a role at all, but a collection of propagandistic speeches. Madame Keni Liptzin, in this part, had nothing to play. Instead of an actress, she had to be a speechmaker.” As for the supporting players, they were “of the variety-stage type that we are used to seeing from the pen of Mr. Lateiner—not one jot better.”

The comparison to a notorious hack was the final, unendurable insult. In
Dramatische Velt
(Drama World) Gordin wrote of Cahan: “Whatever I build he tears down. It's clear that we are working for the sake of the selfsame people. But I want to lead them forward, and he drags them backward through the
Forward.
”

Cahan returned fire, aware that his opponent had an extra weapon in his arsenal. After all, Cahan could only write prose; Gordin could create dialogue to make his point. Although the playwright regarded
himself as a socialist, he was not blind to the faults of the left. In
The Russian Jew in America,
the author created a duplicitous labor leader, clothed, mustached, and bespectacled in the unmistakable Cahan style. At the finale, the man betrays his followers and becomes a boss. “Everything would be fine,” he booms, “if not for the union.” Those words pushed Cahan over the edge. He stood up in the darkened theater and yelled in Russian, “
Eto lozh!
” (It's a lie!)

Battle lines were drawn, and the crossfire grew intense. Neither side knew that the war between Gordin and his enemies was drawing to a close. For the playwright, a lifelong smoker, had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Suddenly internecine battles no longer seemed important to him. A bigger matter intervened: who would see to his large family when he was gone? He traveled overseas, hoping to secure royalties for the plays that had been pirated. The trip did little good. He returned to the United States and wrote a mordant comedy,
Dementia Americana,
satirizing the immigrants who had jettisoned their background and ethics for the Almighty Dollar. During rehearsals the author's suffering was evident, and an actress tried to console him: “Don't worry. After all, this is not your first play.” “No,” replied Gordin. “But it will be my last.”

Dementia
received a cold response from critics and public alike. Worse still, the
Forward
ran several pieces accusing Gordin of plagiarism for articles he had written many years before. This was to be the ultimate showdown between rivals. The series started in early April of 1909; by the end of the month Gordin was dead at the age of fiftyeight. Cahan backtracked; the paper ran a black-bordered obituary and a reporter duly exclaimed, “What a personality this was! What an example to all men! We hardly dared speak of him. Of Jacob Gordin one always expected something great. One could do no less, and he expected it of himself!”

Leon Kobrin summoned up an image of the deceased: “His eyes like two fires, sharp as knives; in his right hand, a stick, and in the left—one of his plays. He passes, and the actors tremble when they catch sight of him. People who know him say, ‘There goes Gordin,’ and those who don't know him look after him and say, ‘What a good-looking man.’” Jacob Adler added a greater compliment. Gordin was not only an important playwright, he was “My rescuer, my Messiah! Without him I would have no life in the theater.”

Gordin had no such romantic notions about himself or his work.
His last writing was not a play; it was a posthumously distributed fable about the narrator, his wife, Jehudith, who represents the Jewish people in general, and his stepdaughter, “a neglected, sick child growing up in squalor and dirt”—obviously the people of the downtown ghetto.

“I took this child as my own, gave gifts to her. Perhaps my gifts were of little value, but they were the best I had. And for all this, the mother hated me. She hated the gifts I had given the girl. Nevertheless, I continue to love the child. And although today Jehudith and I have nothing to give each other, we still remain one body and one soul. She doesn't pay me much attention, yet in spite of it all I still love her. I know that when I fall, her friends, bought for a few coins, will dance on my corpse and she will look on, unconcerned. The day I die is the day she will forget me.”

If this was the self-pity of a dying man, it was also an accurate forecast. No plaque commemorates Gordin's name; his plays go unrevived. As historian Lulla Rosenfeld sadly notes, “No man of genius has ever been more brutally consigned to oblivion, no writer so idolized in his lifetime so totally neglected after his death than Gordin.” She is particularly hard on Cahan: “ ‘Realism' was the catchword of the day, and like all catchwords it made wise men foolish.”

MOISHE THE INSATIABLE

I
N
1910, some wag labeled New York City the nation's thyroid gland. It was both a put-down and a compliment. Since Manhattan could not grow out, it had grown up and become a completely vertical borough. Subways reached beyond midtown, allowing the poor and lower middle class to commute from the outer boroughs to jobs all over the city. The new president, William Howard Taft, brought with him a shining optimism about the country's future. He had been administrator of the Panama Canal, and boomed the virtues of “dollar diplomacy,” trading not only with Europe but with Central and South
America. In New York the word “imports” not only denoted furniture and rugs, bananas and sugar, tea and coffee. It was also understood to mean streams of humanity taking over the downtown streets. In the dilapidated buildings south of Washington Square, immigrants nurtured the cuisine and the street life of Italy. Chinatown, between Pell and Mott Streets, was a place where visitors could see old men in native costume and pigtails. Below that neighborhood a Greek colony thrived. Turks and Arabs settled near the Battery, where they set up trading bazaars reminiscent of those along the Levant. Little Germany was north of the Bowery, Little Hungary nearby, with restaurants and shops that catered to Old World taste.

“To explore these quarters of the city,” observes historian Lloyd Morris, “was an adventure on foreign soil. Only the facades of the buildings persuaded you that you were actually on Manhattan Island, reminded you that nowhere else could you become an alien so abruptly and diversely.” Within those quarters, no area seemed as insulated from uptown life as the Lower East Side. But the effect was illusory. To be sure, the ordinary folk still bore the scars of their experience in the Pale. They talked among themselves, read the Yiddish papers, and went to the Yiddish Theater rather than the palaces uptown. But it was no longer possible to screen out the happenings of the world beyond the ghetto.

The emergence of feminism, for example, first signaled by Bernhardt and Kalisch, could be seen and heard in the new demonstrations for women's suffrage. In Washington state, women had just been given the vote. The number of females attending college had increased 150 percent since the beginning of the century. And the first large suffrage parade took place on Fifth Avenue, organized by the outspoken Women's Political Union.

The telephone, not yet within reach of the poor, was nonetheless a potent factor in communications. The transatlantic cable brought news from Europe, translated by Morse code operators the instant it arrived. What Winston Churchill was to call the “old world at its sunset” could be seen at the funeral of Edward VII when the crowned heads of more than twenty countries met for the last time. Death had brought them together. In a matter of four years, war, thicker than blood and stronger than thrones, would cruelly and permanently separate them.

Seven English-language newspapers were published every morning
in New York City, and another seven in the afternoon. In addition there were Greek and Italian and Russian and Chinese newspapers, as well as eight Yiddish dailies. Many of the journals were sensational in nature, but all demanded a basic literacy from a news-mad readership. The horse-drawn broughams, carriages, and carts were giving way to the automobile. Electric lights, which had turned the uptown theater district into the Great White Way, were coming to the Yiddish Theater as well.

They would need them. For only a few blocks from Hester Street a new form of entertainment beckoned to passersby. “Nickelodeons,” owned by William Fox, a former garment worker, and Marcus Loew, once a fur cutter, offered flickering movies to patrons for only 5 cents. A new craze got under way when professional broadcasters offered free music and news over the airwaves. Radios became a part of the living room furniture of the middle class; poorer people constructed receivers out of Quaker Oats boxes, wire coils, tiny crystals, and cat's whiskers.

Young Jewish entertainers, who might have made their mark in the theater, instead tried their hands at singing, dancing, and comedy in vaudeville. The Lower East Side's most richly gifted youth, little darkeyed Israel Baline, changed his name to Irving Berlin and started working for a midtown song publisher. Like all tyros, he started by commenting on what he knew, and what he knew best were the sounds and attitudes of ghetto theater. These he augmented with inventive situations, bordering on caricature and even anti-Semitism:

And

And

A street singer and pop-eyed clown, Edward Israel Iskowitz, orphaned at the age of three, took his act to the vaudeville circuits and, as Eddie Cantor, made his way to the big time. A cantor's son, Asa Yoelson, later Al Jolson, entered the same venues in blackface. So did the imposing Sophia Kalish. When she dropped the burnt cork and acknowledged her ethnicity, the singer was rewarded with a number written in her honor: “The Yiddisha Rag,” whose colorful song sheet read “Respectfully dedicated to Miss Sophie Tucker.” The lady they called “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas” stayed a headliner for the next fifty years. These performers were followed by scores of other Lower East Siders with kinetic energy and a kind of demonic ambition.