Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (23 page)

In 1913, a Jew in Atlanta, Georgia, was accused of murdering a teenaged Christian girl. So pervasive were the feelings of antiSemitism in that state that the testimony of a black man was permitted in the courtroom. This witness was in fact the killer, who admitted as much to an attorney. His confession was suppressed; the jury turned in a guilty verdict and the judge sentenced Leo Frank to death.

The
Atlanta Journal
wanted no part of the kangaroo court. The condemned man, said an editorial, “has not been fairly convicted, and his death without a fair trial and legal conviction will amount to judicial murder.” The paper had some influence; so did leading business and political figures. The governor commuted Frank's sentence. Before any legal procedures could take place, a mob stormed the prison and spirited the condemned man away. They hanged him from a tree. Newly emboldened, members of the Ku Klux Klan openly distributed photographs of the corpse dangling from a branch. Pro forma investigations took place. The investigators turned up nothing and no one was indicted.

The Leo Frank lynching made the front pages of mainstream newspapers everywhere. Naturally it had the greatest impact on Jewish readers. Yiddish papers interpreted the murder as a New World pogrom. There was talk of making it into a stage drama èla Mendel Beilis. But by then Adler, Thomashefsky, and Kessler had learned their lesson and knew to stay away from dramatizations of an authentic American tragedy. They left matters to an aggressive new organization, the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, to combat antiSemitism. Some of the well-established German Jews protested; they thought such a group would only arouse hostility, calling attention to something best left alone. Why make a big
megillah
out of something that would be solved by education and assimilation? Internecine arguments rang out over the next several years. They only stopped when the rising tide of anti-Semitism could no longer be denied or ignored.

The new history of the Jews began on the morning of June 28, 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was killed by a Serbian nationalist. By the end of summer, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, drawing in other nations as the fighting began. Soon nearly every major power was involved. On one side were the Allies, Britain, France, and Russia; on the other was a coalition of
Central Powers, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. For the Jews of Eastern and Western Europe, the start of the Great War signaled the end of one sort of misery—and the beginning of a new and infinitely worse kind.

Immigration to America effectively ended; borders were closed and all able-bodied men ordered to serve in the armies of their host countries. As an official report put it, at the time of the hostilities, “Onehalf the Jewish population of the world was trapped in a corner of Eastern Europe that was absolutely shut off from all neutral lands and from the sea.” On the one hand, those thousands of Jews knew no other home; on the other hand, they despised what had been done to them by Imperial Russia. Loyalties were in collision, and played themselves out on the international stage.

In America, Jewish sentiments first leaned toward isolationism despite the fate of their co-religionists. Irving Berlin, a reliable barometer of public taste, was writing songs like “Hurry Back to My Bamboo Shack” and “In Florida Among the Palms” in the prewar period. The following year he urged, “Let's all be Americans now—Lincoln, Grant and Washington/They were peaceful men, each one/Still they took the sword and gun.” The year after that he appeared in the uniform of a U.S. Army private to sing “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”

Lower East Siders leaned toward Germany, principally because it was fighting the czar's hordes. (Indeed, a large group of GermanJewish intellectuals got behind Kaiser Wilhelm; Albert Einstein was one of the few who would not sign a petition supporting the Fatherland's war.) But in Europe there were no Jewish battalions as such. Hebrews fought in every army—including the Russian one. Only a handful of Russian Jews, acting on principle, joined Polish legions rallying in Austria to combat the czar's troops.

What emerged from all this was a horrific slaughter of fairly evenly matched armies, until, in 1917, America entered the war and Old Russia completely collapsed. The Bolsheviks took over, annihilated Nicholas and his entire family, and announced the formation of a new and progressive Soviet Russia. The Jews of the region, and far beyond it, were ecstatic. One of the earliest signs of enlightenment affected the Yiddish Theater. Leon Trotsky, the Red Army strategist, placed his sister in charge of a new Arts Department, overseeing just about every aspect of creativity. This newly formed bureau would not only allow Yiddish Theater, it would
subsidize
it. The stepchild of Russian drama,
always impoverished, forever operating under the shadow of a whimsical and brutal state, had been rescued by the Bolshevik revolution. What was more, V. I. Lenin himself made a record demanding an end to anti-Semitism. His message was broadcast on loudspeakers in every Russian city. It was almost impossible to conceive of such circumstances taking place in the country that had invented the word “pogrom.”

The Lower East Side was even more delirious than the rest of America by the time the Armistice was signed. jewish troubles at an end, read one banner headline in the
Forward.
Another stated full rights for all oppressed nationalities. new light rises over russia. Abraham Cahan contributed a personal note: “Mazel Tov to Our Jewish People; Mazel Tov to the World.” It was a glorious moment, spoiled only by an occasional bitter observation. The writer Isaac Babel, riding with the Red Army Cossacks, wrote in his diary: “Same old story. The Jews expected the Soviet regime to liberate them, and suddenly there were shrieks, whips cracking, shouts of ‘Dirty Yid.’”

Other complaints followed. But surely, it was argued, this was the voice of the rabble, not the new men. Once discipline was established, all the residue of hate would vanish. It was only logical. This, after all, was the twentieth century. Deliverance had arrived.

THE RESCUE HAD COME
too late for two Second Avenue celebrities, one established, one struggling. Sigmund Mogulesko, the little clown celebrated by Hutchins Hapgood as the Yiddish Theater's one true “genius of comedy,” had suffered from a sore throat that would not heal. Every recitation became an exercise in agony, always concealed from the public. His fellow performers marveled as he broke up the audience and then wept in the wings. Finally, early in 1914, he could no longer speak. Leon Kobrin remembered those last days. “The Yiddish comic spirit loves a peppery joke. Mogulesko delivered such jokes with an air so natural, so innocent, as to make them irresistible. His illness
could not destroy his spirit. The creative power so alive in him found, in spite of everything, a way to express itself. When his throat choked, Mogulesko sang with his face, with his movements. When his last strength was gone, one foot moved—and laughed!”

For Sholem Aleichem, the war years were no better. The death of his youngest son was a blow that sapped the author of energy and will. No new ideas came to him. He unearthed one of his old dramas,
The Big Winner,
and shopped it around. No one responded. Aleichem condemned the theater managers as “louts who treated playwrights with the sensitivity of cattle drovers.”

In the winter of 1916 he was felled by influenza. Spring brought no relief. He invited friends to drop by, but even these brief visits were exhausting. The last one occurred at the end of April, when Aleichem played host to a small group including the rising dramatist Peretz Hirschbein. Gathered in Aleichem's living room, the group listened to Hirschbein tell a favorite Yiddish Theater story.

A
shund
tragedy described the downfall of a Jewish shoemaker. Down to his last ruble, he fashioned a new pair of boots for a landowner. The trouble was, the rich man bought only on credit. In the last act he entered, tried on a boot, and found it too small. The shoemaker saw ruin ahead; the money would not be paid and the villagers would say that he had lost his skill. As the landowner continued to struggle with the misfit, a wail came from the balcony. Was this a deus ex machina? No, only the voice of a neighborhood cobbler who had gotten too involved in the play: “Powder!” he boomed. “Sprinkle some powder into the boot!”

Hirschbein told the story well, and the small crowd broke up at the punch line. Not Aleichem. As the others laughed he rose, excused himself, and went to his room. He never left it again. Two weeks later he died there at the age of fifty-seven. More than 100,000 mourners turned out for one of the largest funerals in the history of New York City. The deceased was praised downtown and uptown; shops were closed, and that evening the Yiddish theaters went dark in his honor. But no Sholem Aleichem plays were to be presented in any of them for years to come. It was a matter of timing, as it always is in the theater. Goldfaden had gotten offstage at exactly the right moment. Hurwitz and Lateiner had overstayed their welcome. Jacob Gordin departed too soon. So did Aleichem, who entered—and exited—before New Yorkers were prepared for the truths he had to tell. They would not be ready for another fifty years.

LUFTMENSCHN
AND
SCHNORRERS

T
HE YIDDISH SATIRICAL JOURNAL
Der Groyser Kundes
(The Big Stick) ran a cartoon that neatly encapsulated the Yiddish Theater in middle age. Under the title “If Shakespeare Had to Sell a Play Today,” four progressive panels showed the playwright in conversation with Jacob Adler, David Kessler, and the Thomashefskys, Bessie and Boris. All four reject his work because it lacks “punch,” “national fervor,” or some other vital component.

A satiric newspaper article made the same point. A journalist interviews Shakespeare's ghost and dispenses sage advice. The Yiddish Theater is different nowadays, he points out. If the Bard would make his mark on Second Avenue, his efforts must feature “some kind of girl, you understand; and bastards; and someone should say Kaddish in the third act; and some pale woman, you understand, should carry ‘the fruit of love under her heart.’”

There should follow “a little duet with the comedian, and in the last act the lover should fall back in love with his beloved.” Plus it wouldn't hurt if “the music should come in with a happy melody and it should thunder and snow and a torrential rain should fall, and two suns with five giant moons should shine through the window and—” But Shakespeare refuses to hear any more. He withdraws to his tomb.

More than a dozen Yiddish theaters were in operation, all of them large, airy, equipped with plush seats, well lit with electric bulbs and high places to fly the scenery. Classic plays could have been handsomely staged there, but producers were not interested in taking a chance on high culture—unless the texts were heavily amended. (Ibsen's
A Doll's House,
for example, was supplied with a fourth act in which Nora and her husband happily reconciled.)

Uptown, a few strivers aimed high on Broadway. Eugene O'Neill's first full-length play,
Beyond the Horizon,
won an audience and a Pulitzer Prize. But it was a rare exception to the standard fare. Soubrette Marilyn Miller enjoyed her greatest triumph with
Sally,
the story of a girl who rises from dishwasher to ballerina. The musical had a score by Jerome Kern (“Look for the Silver Lining” became an instant standard) as well as a ballet by Victor Herbert. The
Ziegfeld Follies
and George White's imitative
Scandals
packed them in every night. In vaudeville, “olios” set the style: a parade of magicians, animal acts, and patriotic tableaux, ranging from the feats of Houdini to “Freak Acts” like Evelyn Nesbitt, America's first sex kitten, whose financier husband had shot her lover, architect Stanford White.

Dr. Frank Crane, one of the first analysts of popular culture, spoke out against an amusement tax. Theater, he commented, was vital to the American people
because
it was frivolous: “The stage is not a nation's weakness, extravagance or undoing, but it is a nation's deep refreshment that gives to the hearts and minds of a great people that spirit of courage and light and adventure that is needed to achieve success.”

Since the uptown crowd was going for pure diversion, Second
Avenue producers asked, why should the Yiddish Theater be any different? Almost all “serious” actors withered in this new climate. The case of Keni Liptzin was an example of the times, a real-life drama that might have been written by Jacob Gordin. Ten years before, the tragedienne's long-running role as “Queen Lear” had been so impressive a theater was named for her. But she never was one for the light touch, and in the modern era became almost unemployable. Her adoring husband got into the act, backing any producer who would give Keni a starring role.