Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

 

TWO EXTREMES

 

i

I
N HIS 1902 BESTSELLER
,
The Spirit of the Ghetto,
journalist Hutchins Hapgood urged readers to visit the Jewish quarter on the Lower East Side. The exotic territory was bounded by 14th Street on the north, the East River on the east, Broadway on the west, and Catherine Street on the south—hardly the place for Manhattan's uptown crowd. But Hapgood insisted that visitors would not only be safe, they would be nourished in every sense of the word. For at the heart of the district were Yiddish theaters offering New York City's most exciting dramas, comedies, and operettas. And while the tourists were in the area, he added, they could visit cafés “where excellent tea and coffee are sold, where everything is clean and good, and where the conversation is often the best.”

A century after Hapgood published his guidebook, hardly a trace of the old times can be found. A few blocks to the south, Chinatown is still a vibrant community of Asian immigrants. To the west, Little Italy remains the scene of the Scuola Italiana, and the dialects of Naples and Sicily can be heard in the neighborhood shops. Artists seek places in Greenwich Village, as they always have. But on the Lower East Side, not one of those theaters is extant. No spirited Yiddish colloquies take
place because none of the cafés and tearooms survive. Yiddish itself, the Velcro language that picked up idioms and words from every European nation, has vanished from the streets. With it has gone the audiences who once crammed dineries and emporia, and who filled the balcony and orchestra seats, night after night. Hardly any synagogues are left, and those that remain are attended by the elderly and the curious.

Hippies who moved in during the era of low rents in the 1960s; young couples who want proximity to their workplaces on Wall Street; adolescents in search of navel piercing and tattoo establishments—all have turned the area into the opposite of what it was, the focal point of American Jewry. Once upon a city, the Lower East Side was the place of sights and sounds and smells that remained in the minds of its denizens long after they had graduated to high-rises and suburbs.

Eddie Cantor, the child of Russian immigrants, was raised in that ghetto. He called himself the “world's supreme delicatessen eater, absorbing more salami, pastrami, bologna, and frankfurters in that short span than most families do in a lifetime.” Along with many such youths, he could recall the powerful aromas of Kosher food and drink well into old age. Others, like children's book writer Sydney Taylor, recreated the bygone scene in detail: “Heaped high with merchandise,” the pushcarts in the ghetto “stretched into endless lines up and down the main streets. They were edged up close to the curb and wedged together so tightly that one could not cross anywhere except at the corners. The pushcart peddlers, usually bearded men in long overcoats or old women in heavy sweaters and shawls, outdid each other in their loud cries to the passers-by.”

Not that the Lower East Side was a continual pageant of bounty and delight. For every greenhorn success story there were scores of early deaths and abject failures. A great deal of human misery was hidden from public view. Sweatshops used the immigrants mercilessly; sixtyhour weeks were not uncommon, and the overcrowded tenements were a breeding ground for mental illness, tuberculosis, felonies, and murder. In
Looking Back
, the novelist Belva Plain imagined a Hester Street apartment house at the turn of the century: “The stench surged from the street door … cooking grease, onions, an overflowing toilet…the sickening steam of pressing irons; a noxious drenching of tobacco from the front apartment where the cigar makers lived.” Another novelist, Meredith Tax, made her heroine, Hannah, wander through a place where “colors glowed more garishly, dirt was greasier,
people grew bigger, and all the latent exaggerations in their characters flowered. Hannah heard her own voice come out louder than before.”

But these truths could not obscure the significance of the New York ghetto. In her study
Lower East Side Memories,
historian Hasia R. Diner notes that the pawnshops and eateries, the factories and workplaces, the tumultuous thoroughfares and teeming flats, the meeting halls and theaters, provide the iconography of the American Jewish experience. The turf below 14th, she observes, “has entered the realm of the sacred.”

Nothing about that realm is more hallowed than the Yiddish Theater. Most of the immigrants had never seen a drama or operetta before, and they regarded them with a child's credulity. When the ticket-holders witnessed scenes from the Bible, from czarist Russia, from American tenements and workplaces, they believed every speech and every incident. They were swept up in the narratives of avaricious bosses and passionate union organizers, autocratic parents and defiant children, whores and innocents, intellectuals and big shots. And as they watched, they came to understand the roles they themselves were playing in the New World.

Thus the history of that theater is more than merely a show business account; it is the saga of a people in the New World, illuminated by spotlights and scenery, backed by mood music, enacted by some of the most luminous talents of the twentieth century. As we will see, before the story was done it had not only changed the ghetto dwellers, it had altered the history of Broadway and Hollywood, and thus, to a certain extent, America.

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. Its last, lingering illness can also be traced to a specific decade, although the causes of the malady are varied and subtle.

Late in the 1960s the celebrated Jewish actress Ida Kaminska came to New York with her troupe. The USSR had been currying favor with Arab nations of the Middle East, and yet another wave of antiSemitism had been encouraged by the Soviet government. Kaminska and her actor husband, Meir Melman, no longer felt at home in their native country, Czechoslovakia. In the 1965 feature
The Shop on Main
Street,
she had played an elderly Jewish shopkeeper at the beginning of the Holocaust. Nominated for an Academy Award, Kaminska was endlessly praised and interviewed, a new face at the age of sixty. Everyone in the film and stage business knew her name. Roles were tendered. America seemed a likely place for the Melmans to relocate.

But en route to the United States, the actress had an unsettling premonition: though her touring troupe played to astonishingly full houses in Germany and to unsurprisingly enthusiastic audiences in Tel Aviv, Kaminska kept thinking of an old Yiddish folktale. A
schlimazel—
“luckless soul” in Yiddish—appeals to his rabbi for help. The ragpicker is advised to relocate; the move will change his luck. Packing up, he sees the Ghost of Poverty leaping with joy in a dark corner. “What are you jumping for?” demands the poor man. “Why shouldn't I?” chortles the apparition. “I'm coming, too!”

Despite her reservations and Old World superstitions, Kaminska settled the troupers in New York and booked Carnegie Hall for a night. Advance sales were outstanding. Then, on the eve of the performance New York was hit by the worst blizzard in more than twenty years. “Many people who had tickets couldn't come,” states Kaminska's memoir. “The results for the impresario were disastrous, and for us they were not too good either. In a word,
schlimazel.
” Nevertheless, she stayed in the city, hoping for another chance at a New York audience.

She was to get her wish. In 1970, the poet Louis Zukofsky published his lyrical
Autobiography.
“My first exposure to letters at the age of four,” he wrote, “was thru the Yiddish theaters, most memorably the Thalia on the Bowery. By the age of nine I had seen a good deal of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoy performed—all in Yiddish.” A handful of investors had similar memories; they agreed to back a project that mixed nostalgia with modernism. They founded the Ida Kaminska Yiddish Theater, rented an appropriate downtown location—the Roosevelt Auditorium on Union Square—and made ready for the renaissance.

But they had failed to consider a few details. Dressing rooms needed to be constructed, press agents hired, acoustical equipment rented. Because a language barrier stood between the actors and a large part of the audience, headphones were wired to every seat. Those who could not follow the Yiddish could listen to a simultaneous translation. Just when all seemed in place, more troubles piled on. The Roosevelt was owned by the Amalgamated Workers Union, and its directors had a
new stipulation. When they needed the auditorium for a meeting, performances had to be canceled. The investors wearily agreed. By now the project was an
idée fixe
and judged to be worth any price.

Reviews were uniformly favorable; standing ovations greeted the players. Yet attendance fell off after the first several nights. Foul weather kept some people away; others attended and registered complaints. Kaminska recalled, “Once, when I left the theater after a performance, two young men in their mid-twenties were waiting for me. They seemed to be fine, intelligent young men. They apologized for stopping me and expressed their warm thanks for the performance, which stimulated much feeling and thought in them. At the same time, my husband emerged from another door. An old lady met him and said, ‘Are you a member of this company? Then I must tell you that you've shown us a terrible play and we didn't understand a thing.’ Two extremes.” The season ended on January 4, 1970, severely in debt.

No more was said about a new Yiddish Theater, run by Ida Kaminska or anyone else.

SOME SIX DECADES EARLIER
there had been two dozen Yiddish theaters in New York. Now only a handful of productions made it to off-Broadway venues. None had a permanent home; all were short of cash. The audience had dwindled to a few hundred loyal fans, most of them in their seventies. Their colleagues had died, or retired to Florida, or gone to the suburbs. Those who remained in the city preferred to see plays spoken in English, the language they now regarded as their native tongue, even when they spoke it with an accent.

The Yiddish Theater was so far gone that even its melodies, some of them popular enough to have made the Hit Parade in the 1930s, were forgotten. To introduce the tunes to a new generation, the
New York Times
published
Great Songs of the Yiddish Theater,
a compilation of melodies from better times. A number of lyrics had been written by the Yiddish superstar Molly Picon; in 1975 she was signed to write the book's introduction and notes. Her chipper prose refused to acknowledge reality. “Recently I went to the Yiddish Theater to see
Hard to Be a Jew,
” she said, “and frankly was surprised to see a line stretching around the corner, buying tickets at the box office. As I approached the entrance, I overheard one woman say to another, ‘I've been waiting here for half an hour and the line doesn't seem to move. No wonder the
Yiddish Theater is dying—you just can't get tickets!’” A pretty tale, but fiction nonetheless. After the second week of any such fare, tickets went begging.

That year another book about the Jewish experience was published, and this one made no attempt to avoid the truth. Irving Howe's massive history,
World of Our Fathers,
was subtitled
The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made.
The author sought to detail the entire immigrant experience in and around New York City, from the 1880s onward. Nothing seemed to escape his notice, from the tribulations of entering at Ellis Island, to the harsh overcrowded neighborhoods and sweatshops, to the labor agitations and the rise of Yiddish journalism and politics, to the intellectual ferment and the escape to the Catskills and the suburbs. Only thirty-six pages were devoted to the Yiddish Theater, though, shortchanging an art form for which Howe proceeded to sit
shivoh—
the Jewish mourning period for the dead.

Howe allowed that the dramas and operettas “reached everyone in the immigrant world, collapsing distinctions between serious and popular.” But that inclusiveness was to be both its glory and its curse. In order for the Yiddish Theater to have survived “some sort of leap was necessary … from folk to cosmopolitan.” Unfortunately this could happen “only if there had been more time, only if there had been several generations that used Yiddish as their native tongue yet were also at home in Western culture.” The rush to assimilate destroyed that possibility. In the end, “it was a theater blazing with the eloquence of its moment, and in the memories of a few the glow would remain.”

Howe's cheerless assessment was amplified in 1977, with the appearance of Nahma Sandrow's
Vagabond Stars.
The daughter of a rabbi, Sandrow was well versed in the literature and lore of the Yiddish Theater. Her volume covered early productions and performers in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, bringing the account up-to-date by reporting an incident that took place in New York City. Facing a faculty committee at Bronx Community College, Sandrow was asked to list her accomplishments. “I said I was writing a book about Yiddish Theater. The committee members sat doodling or taking notes, the atmosphere was formal but friendly. One professor said he had a question: ‘What's a nice girl like you doing writing about Yiddish Theater?' The laughter lasted for minutes. The questioner and half the committee were Jewish.”

… … …

 

NOW THAT ITS STARS HAD FADED
, the Yiddish Theater and its once boisterous audience were ripe for satire. Broadway composer Robert Merrill (
Funny Girl, Take Me Along
) wrote the book, tunes, and lyrics for
The Prince of Grand Street.
The musical followed the later life of the fictional Nathan Rashumsky, a turn-of-the-century Jewish idol, no longer young and constantly in hot water with women, playwrights, and drama critics. Mark Twain made an appearance; the actor wanted permission to stage
Huckleberry Finn,
and the author almost acceded until he learned that Rashumsky wanted to play the title role. The show seemed very promising at a run-through. But during its out-oftown tryout, laughs came infrequently, and no one went out whistling the songs. That spring
The Prince
was booked to open at the Alvin Theater in New York. It never got out of Philadelphia.