Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (20 page)

Yet the Yiddish Theater kept going, thanks to the czar. The pogroms continued in Russia. A group of Bolsheviks, some of them Jewish, robbed a train in the Urals, and a wave of student strikes took place in several cities to protest the treatment of Jews. The government's reprisals were swift and harsh. At the same time, a spellbinding monk, Gregory Rasputin, worked his way into the confidence of the Romanovs. He encouraged Czar Nicholas II to make even more repressive moves against non-Christians of all kinds. Russian Jews continued to flee by the thousands, headed for the port of New York.

The spillover from Eastern Europe filled the venues and furnished new talents for the city's Yiddish theatrical companies. The trouble was, these new refugees turned out to be as unsophisticated as the old ones—perhaps more so. Generations of life in provincial
shtetls,
followed by years of intimidation and brutality, had kept them innocent of art. Now that they had reached the astonishing safety of America, they wanted melody, farce, melodrama played without subtlety or complication. The managers gave it to them. Keni Liptzin, the leading
actress in so many of Gordin's plays, lamented the situation.
Shund
had come back in fashion “because the post-Gordin dramatists are weak, and the managers are afraid of literary drama. Even when it is a moneymaker, they find other reasons for its success.” Her
kvetch
included the Yiddish press. Drama critics were “not honest, and besides, they were insulting,” their language “suitable for fishwives.”

David Kessler had worse to say. He was performing in a play called
The Ironmaster
when he heard hisses and laughter. “I was struck dumb,” he remembered. “I knew that I ought to continue, but was absolutely unable to do so.” He appealed to the audience. “Was there a rip in my clothes? Had I forgotten to button my doublet? I was very angry, and I spoke with passion, and the crowd became silent, but the play did not continue.” The next night he changed his tactics. “I made a burlesque of the part. I did not play it with truthfulness. I waved my hands and I stamped my feet. I had eight curtain calls. It is useless to act well with some people.”

A line about a Second Avenue ham made the rounds: “He used to be a good actor, poor fellow, but now he's just a star.” Damned if that will ever be said about me, declared Jacob Adler. He had come too far to turn back, and at the Thalia his company made one last attempt to honor their favorite Yiddish playwright, Jacob Gordin.

From across the street at the People's Theater, Bessie Thomashefsky watched them fail. Her memoir is filled with schadenfreude
.
“Well,” she notes, “they had made their reputations with Gordin, so who could blame them? But at the People's Thomashefsky and I were coining money. Very soon the Thalia began to envy our full houses. We delivered the goods to the faceless audiences we called by the single name of ‘Moishe,’—the great almighty public.”

The Thomashefskys consumed every penny of their box office receipts. Their luxurious house in Brooklyn was deemed too hot for the summer and they acquired a grand dacha in the Catskills. The young son of Rudolph Schildkraut, Vienna's most celebrated actor, was invited to the twenty-acre estate. To him it appeared to be “the domain of a millionaire. Not even the great German director Max Reinhardt had achieved this style of living.” Best of all, “a part of the grounds had been set aside for an open-air theater. During the summer Father starred here in a one-act play that Thomashefsky staged just for the entertainment of his colleagues.”

Boris's son Harry recalled a gray afternoon when no live performance
was scheduled. A silent film unreeled on an outdoor screen, featuring Thomashefsky in an experimental role. “Father hated his work in the movie. There were plenty of rocks on the ground and he pelted his image with stones. Then he had the film run again and threw more things until the screen was in shreds. Back in New York City people thought he was smitten with himself. On stage, definitely. On screen, no.”

Meanwhile, as Bessie stated, the Adlers maintained their loyalty to Gordin long after the public lost its appetite for his searing dramas. Sara starred in Gordin's adaptation of the Tolstoy novel
Resurrection,
playing a pure, self-sacrificing peasant girl. She followed it with
The Homeless,
Gordin's bleak portrait of immigrant life in New York. Once again she portrayed a guileless, self-abnegating soul—Mrs. Bathsheba Rifkin, a middle-aged woman whose husband comes to find her an embarrassing relic of their life in Eastern Europe. He takes up with a modern woman, an intellectual who supplies what Bathsheba cannot: a connection with the vibrant social and intellectual life outside the Rifkins' confining flat. After he leaves her, she becomes one of the ironically titled homeless, an immigrant with a place to lay her head, but with no position and no future in the New World. Bathsheba winds up in a mental institution.

Upon release, she finds her husband remarried and her son estranged. All that remains are memories of Russia, now gilded in her fretful mind. Looking out the window at falling snow she begins to babble. Too late her neighbors summon an ambulance. She has descended into madness for the last time. Dancing and clapping her hands, she chortles in a childlike manner, “I am going home! I am going home!” as the lights dim. Lulla Rosenfeld notes, “Keni Liptzin produced her own version of
Resurrection
some years later. But no actress, no matter how gifted or ambitious, ever dared to follow Sara Adler as the simple Jewish housewife of Jacob Gordin's
Homeless.
”

These works were respectfully but not fully attended. The Adlers found themselves in the red. Rosenfeld recalls the day Jacob finally surrendered to Moishe, presenting a lachrymose tragedy called
The Living Orphans.
On opening night there were ovations and calls of “Author! Author!” Jacob brought the playwright onstage and made the shortest curtain speech of his career: “You and this man,” he informed the audience, “are ruining the theater!” There was a becoming blush from “this man”; after all, an insult from the Great Eagle was worth more than
praise from lesser celebrities. Besides, he knew that
Orphans
would run for weeks and weeks, and that no producer ever sneered at box office receipts.

Nevertheless, Jacob never made his peace with substandard theater, dealing with his professional discomfort by turning
shund
into a family joke. He circulated true stories of the egomaniacal actress who insisted on top billing, renaming Shakespeare's play
Juliet and Romeo.
And of the tragedy that featured a mother crying over her stricken child: a doctor enters, shaking his head. She entreats him to sing a final lullaby. He strolls to the footlights, instructs the orchestra leader, “OK, professor! Shoot!” and then sings the up-tempo “A Mother Is the Best of All Things.”

He also told of a white slavery drama that took place in Chinatown. One of the Yiddish actors who doubled as father and villain was taking some sun on the theater roof. He had fallen asleep when the stage manager roused him. Bolting onstage, he realized that he was wearing two conflicting pieces of makeup, a long white beard and a pigtail. To rescue the moment he addressed the onlookers: “You think because of my beard I am a Jew. But in my heart”—here he abruptly pulled off his whiskers—“I am a Chinaman!” Two generations later the line was still alive; anyone in the Adler family who misbehaved was told, “In your heart you are a Chinaman!”

SEEN TOO CLOSE
, the Yiddish Theater appeared to be going in reverse. David Pinski took a longer view. Born in Russia, educated at Columbia University, he made his argument in a book,
The Jewish Drama,
widely distributed in 1910. His story of the Yiddish Theater amounted to a play in three acts, all of them dominated by writers rather than performers.

Act one centered on the groundbreaking Abraham Goldfaden and his immediate followers, especially the commercial vulgarians, Hurwitz and Lateiner.

Act two was the story of Boris Thomashefsky's commercial achievements and Jacob Adler's artistic ones. They were followed by Jacob Gordin and the Gordinites, who created a higher form of theater, but whose achievements were short-lived.

Act three would reinvent the Yiddish Theater, filling it with significant artistic fare—by Pinski, of course, but also by other high-minded playwrights.

The author set out to prove his own theory. Early experiments turned out poorly, but they led to
The Treasure,
a drama that attracted the attention of Max Reinhardt. He produced the play in Germany in 1910, where it created a small sensation and this, in turn, caused New York to take notice.

Pinski's drama was hardly a groundbreaker. The subject matter—the corrupting power of money—had been addressed by a dozen playwrights before him. What separated
The Treasure
from the other works was its bold fusion of reality and symbolism. A Russian
shtetl
is shaken by a rumor: the town grave digger has come upon gold coins in a burial plot. A day later, the poorest of the poor becomes the most flattered man in town. Marriage brokers vie for his daughter's hand; snobs and politicians seek his company.

The more he denies the gossip, the more the townspeople are convinced that he has hidden the money. This causes smiles to stop, threats to begin, and the cemetery to be desecrated in a futile search for treasure. Too late, the townsfolk learn that the man was telling the truth after all—there are no buried riches. There never had been. An epilogue takes place in the graveyard, where souls rise from the earth, take over the stage, and scatter their comments:

Elemental, stark, poignant, rueful,
The Treasure
reached past Second Avenue to the corridors of Harvard. For the first time, the work of a
Yiddish playwright was praised by Professor George Pierce Baker, soon to become the teacher of Eugene O'Neill, George Abbott, and other Broadway luminaries. He read the play in translation and compared it to the work of Ben Jonson. If Pinski's dialogue “lacks the poetic expression of
Volpone,
” wrote Baker, “it has a finer truth of characterization.”

Baker's judgment was shown to Jacob Adler. He reacted with pleasure—and a vital competitive spirit. Using his own savings, he bought the rights to Leo Tolstoy's last play,
Redemption,
the study of a Russian nobleman on his way down. In November 1911, a staff writer for
Theater
magazine journeyed to Second Avenue. “A number of Broadway notables,” said his opening night report, watched the drama “which Jacob P. Adler had the courage to present. Throughout his admirable impersonation, and throughout Protasoff's fall from revelry to penury, Mr. Adler kept burning that spark of nobility that was finally to end the noble's pitiful existence.”

Also in attendance that night was Leon Kobrin, whose recollection gives a rare glimpse of the Adlerian technique: “Not one loud cry! How softly and dreamily he told his drinking companions the story of how he became a living corpse! In every move, every turn, you saw the Russian aristocrat! And in the courtroom scene, when he met his aristocratic wife, now married to another, how he looked at her! How his eyes begged her to forgive him! What a silent mute play this was, how full of soul! Even his suicide did not break the quiet of his performance. Silent as a shadow he took himself off, and then offstage—the shot!”

WHILE ADLER WAS SAVING
New York's Yiddish stage from its basest self, the world of the Russian Jews suffered yet another blow. In the spring of 1911, the body of a twelve-year-old boy was found in a cave near Kiev. The victim had been stabbed more than forty times. Since the killing had occurred at the Passover season, the ancient charge of blood libel was raised against the Jews in the area. Only a few
such Hebrews actually dwelt in and around Kiev, and a mass of evidence pointed to a Russian criminal, a gentile involved with contraband and smuggling. Nevertheless, the anti-Semites managed to find a likely candidate. Mendel Beilis was the foreman of a brickyard, and his alibi could be backed only by his family. He provided the government with an ideal candidate for framing. The police arrested Beilis and kept him locked up until trial. All intellectuals were banned from serving on the jury because it was thought that such men might be sympathetic to Jews. The jurors saw a stream of pseudo-witnesses provided by the government. Well rehearsed as they were, their evidence did not hold up under cross-examination. All along, the instruments of publicity—the wireless and the newspaper—kept the world informed of Beilis's ordeal.

Naturally, the Jews of New York followed the trial on a daily basis. But the personnel of the Yiddish Theater did something more. “It seems,” said the
Forward,
“that we can expect a theatrical Mendel Beilis epidemic. One small theater has already made a ‘play' out of the trial in Kiev, and others plan to do so as well. This is a shame. The small theaters have often committed the sin of trying to take in a few dollars by putting people and events on the stage that should not yet be dramatized, but these theaters were not then taken seriously.”

Boris Thomashefsky swiftly got in on the act. Posters proclaimed: “Next week! Great, astonishing news! The true Mendel Beilis in Thomashefsky's Theater. Mendel Beilis in the great historical bloodlibel trial.” David Kessler was not one to sit idly by; his posters advertised “A dramatization of the Mendel Beilis trial specially sent from Russia for David Kessler's theater.” Even Jacob Adler played Beilis in his own production. This time the critics were not kind to him. One review lamented, “It pained the hearts of the old friends of Adler to behold the level to which he has sunk…. Adler of the great Gordin roles is no longer what he was. Another Adler has taken his place.” A second journalist observed that the play about the Russian Jew was “not written with a pen, but swept together with a broom…. Crying, moaning, groaning, and yelping. And voilè! A brand-new drama for Moishe's enjoyment.”