Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (24 page)

To come up with the money he sold off their various real estate holdings and jewelry. When there was nothing left to pawn he signed promissory notes to theater men. One night he toted up all he owed, concluded that he was bankrupt, and shot himself. His wife found the body. Instead of going mad, she kept acting on, playing gratis for the producers to whom she was indebted. They were not fond of serious plays, but since that was all the diva could do, and since she was working for free, they took her on. Eventually she paid back every one of them, and at that point they shut the door. She never took another role. “Now I am alone and homeless,” Liptzin lamented. “My only consolation, my only happiness, is the stage, but I sit idly weeks and months because my theater has been taken away from me.” Taken away from her, and given to a new generation of actresses willing to appear in anything that brought in the paying customers, no matter how shallow or inconsequential.

To be fair, if the producers were venal, they were also realistic. What they felt instinctively, Margaret Mead had codified in her study of the second-generation American. When the son leaves home, she wrote, “he throws himself with an intensity which his children will not know into the American way of life; he eats American, talks American, dresses American. He will be American or nothing.

“In making his way of life consistent, he inevitably makes it thin; the overtones of a family meal on which strange, delicious, rejected European dishes were set, and about which low words in a foreign tongue wove the atmosphere of home, must all be dropped out.

“His speech has a certain emptiness; he rejects the roots of words— roots lead back, and he is going forward.”

For the first time in a decade, backers were forced to think about the going forward, and the rejection of a language and a way of life. Suppose no more wretched refuse came to New York? Suppose assimilation
continued to drain the ghetto of newcomers? Forget the classics and the experiments, said the smart money; fill the seats while you can, stage the crowd-pleasers that guarantee full houses. Because, who knows? Over the next few years the Yiddish-speaking audience just might disappear altogether.

AT THE DAWN
of the postwar period, Maurice Schwartz made his move. The moment could not have been more propitious. David Kessler had made the mistake of going into business with his stepson, Max Wilner. They had argued continually over salaries and repertory, and one day David walked out of his own office.

The superstar put an announcement in the Yiddish press. “During the entirety of my long career, I have never suffered so and never had to struggle so for my art and my existence as I have since entering this partnership. The end has come. I can remain no longer. I have not received a cent in wages for the entire last season. Having put $25,000 of my own money in this theater, I am left, as they say, with the shirt on my back, but I am content. I will not get lost. Although it carries my name, I have no connection to Kessler's Second Avenue Theater. I don't know, and I don't want to know, what is going on there.” His next move was a barnstorming tour of Yiddish theaters in Montreal and Toronto.

As this transpired, Boris Thomashefsky announced a new schedule—his customary mix of the commercial and serious, with a heavy accent on
shund.
Adler had cut back, but was still active enough to star in a new Russian-Jewish play called
The Governor.
In Brooklyn, two theaters offered all-Yiddish programs. Here was the opportunity Maurice had fantasized about for more than five years.

With golden tongue and relentless charm, he persuaded investors to lease the elegant, low-priced, Irving Place Theater. Once upon an era, that venue had offered German productions. But in recent years sauerkraut had been renamed Liberty Cabbage, and baseball players with
Teutonic names were called “Dutch.” The language of the hated kaiser had faded into the background.

The place had been empty since America entered the war. True, it was located some twenty blocks north of the Yiddish Rialto, but the neighborhood of Irving Place had a reputation for safety and cleanliness, and the immigrants had lately shown a willingness to leave their own neighborhoods in search of diversion. Schwartz settled in, issued casting calls, and put an ad in the
Forward
announcing his intentions. The headline asked:
CAN A BETTER YIDDISH THEATER SURVIVE IN NEW YORK
?

The question was purely rhetorical, posed by one of the cockiest young men in the city. He followed it with a defining statement. “For the past two years I have been going around with a plan to put together a troupe that will devote itself to playing good literary works, an honor to the Yiddish Theater.”

Schwartz went on about the theater managers who considered him “a madman, a dreamer, because the opinion reigns that such high theater cannot exist.” Ever mindful of public relations, he excused them: they weren't villains, they were victims, trapped in big theaters too large for noble experiments. In those caverns, a serious play had no chance. “A little gesture with the eye is too little. If you want to show you have temperament, you eat the scenery.”

This would not be the case at the Irving Place locale. Schwartz enumerated the reasons why. His theater was intended as “a sort of holy place, where a festive and artistic atmosphere will always reign.” In it, “a company of artists who love beauty” would “strive to bring the Yiddish Theater to a beautiful fulfillment.”

Those who thought he was going highbrow on them could relax. He would also put on “comedies, worthy farces, and nice operettas.” Melodramas would also find a place, as long as they had “interest and logic.” Finally, there came an appeal to organized labor: “If the theater unions give us the support we need, I am sure the Irving Place Theater will be the pride of our Jews in New York.”

LIKE MAURICE SCHWARTZ
, the actor Jacob Ben-Ami turned twenty-nine in 1919, and, like Schwartz, saw himself as the avatar of a new Yiddish Theater. He, too, had paid his dues as a Jewish youth in Russia. The farmer's son sang in a synagogue choir and acted in amateur productions. He was handsome, and his skills so evident that talent scouts came around with an offer—convert to Christianity and you can study acting at a Moscow academy. He refused. Keenly aware that he had no future in Russia, he headed west.

The ambitious youth was hired to do walk-ons with London companies and presently made a name for himself. When one of the troupes set sail for New York, Ben-Ami was invited to come along. Before his thirtieth birthday he was directing plays, insisting on the naturalistic approach he had seen in pre-Revolutionary Moscow.

Everything that rises must converge; it was inevitable that Schwartz and Ben-Ami would run into each other. When they did, Schwartz got onto the subject of the Irving Place Theater. The two men were identical in their yearning for a better Yiddish Theater. So what if their styles differed? Why not work together for the common good? BenAmi agreed to come aboard for $75 a week—on one condition. No matter what happened during the rest of the week, one night must offer a “literary” production. Schwartz smiled and extended his hand.

And so the two pillars of the Yiddish Theater, rivalry and nepotism, were put in place yet again. The network of interlocking relations included Ben-Ami's boyhood friend Lazar Freed, who specialized in the roles of
luftmenschn,
men who would rather dream than do. Freed's wife, Celia Adler—Jacob's daughter—joined the group. In addition there was Celia's brother-in-law Ludwig Satz, who specialized in Jewish Pagliaccis, alternately making the audience laugh freely or sob uncontrollably. Schwartz also hired a young, pretty actress named Bertha Gersten, whom he was later to marry.

The first season opened with
Man and His Shadow.
Like many of Schwartz's productions, it was a melodrama more notable for the performances than for the writing. At a cast party, an actor's wife gushed to an unknown guest, “You must go see my husband in the new production.” The author pretended ignorance: “In whose play does he appear?” She was nonplussed: “Who knows?” A
Forward
story remarked that in Schwartz's theater the actor was everything. “What is the result? The dramatist is the fifth wheel on the theater cart.”

Ben-Ami set out to restore the balance. He told Schwartz that a verbal contract carried with it exactly the same obligations as a written one. A literary play must be staged
one evening per week.
But Maurice had since changed his mind. He wanted nothing to do with projects that had “deficit” written all over them.

Ben-Ami was adamant; grant him his night or lose him forever. Schwartz argued: he had scheduled works by Schiller and Tolstoy. Weren't they enough? Who needed some new, untried, and probably pretentious Yiddish author? Worn down, Ben-Ami consented to a $5-a-week pay cut—if he could stage the play of his choice. Schwartz agreed, but in the end refused to allocate money for sets and costumes.

Ben-Ami went ahead anyway, casting himself and Celia Adler as the principals of
A Secluded Nook,
a Chekhovian work by Peretz Hirschbein. Schwartz watched an early rehearsal. A girl was arguing with her lover in a rural garden. He departed angrily; she pined silently. The village madwoman walked through, singing and muttering to herself. The girl's mother entered and pulled her daughter into their little cottage, fearful that the lunatic had put the
kenahorah—
the evil eye—on them. No one was left on the stage. From the wings came the cracked voice of the madwoman, still singing. The lights faded.

Schwartz turned to the prompter.

“That's it?” he inquired. “That's a curtain?”

“Well,” the prompter said with a shrug, indicating Ben-Ami, “that's literature.”

Schwartz was unsurprised when a handful of enthusiasts showed up on opening night. Affectation would always have admiring pseudointellectuals. This particular claque was composed of highbrows who gave themselves the tongue-in-cheek title of
Schnorrers
(freeloaders). They were vociferous in their appreciation, and they returned the following Wednesday, bringing friends with them. Those friends brought others. Could it be that Ben-Ami was right? That you could have art
and arty on the same roster? He rejiggered the Irving Place schedule, allowing performances of the Hirschbein play to take place on the weekends. Two months later he pushed the leading man aside and stepped into his role.

THE NEXT YEAR
Ben-Ami and his associates made good on their threat, breaking away to their own place. The Garden Theater in Madison Square was just as luxurious as Schwartz's Irving Place Theater. Ben-Ami could afford the lease because he had found an angel, Louis Schnitzer.

The financier's story was as old as Broadway: his wife was an actress. Henrietta Schnitzer had appeared in many roles at the Neighborhood Playhouse. These failed to satisfy her. She wanted to be more than a performer; she wanted to be a Name. And she convinced her husband that Ben-Ami was the man to make it happen.

Now that he was in funds, Ben-Ami hired an entire company and put up a proclamation to rival Schwartz's. In the new Jewish Art Theater, clearly modeled after the Moscow Art Theater, there would be no stars. No actor could refuse a role. The leading man in one play must appear in a minor role in the next production. All publicity must mention the names of the cast alphabetically, in the same size font. And no director could act in a play he was directing (a daring break with the Moscow Art Theater policy, then considered the most progressive in the world—Konstantin Stanislavsky had no compunction about acting in the plays he directed).

As Ben-Ami was the first to acknowledge, theater is not judged by what it intends, but on what it delivers. To give his words substance, he hired an outsider as principal director of the Jewish Art Theater. This, too, was a break with tradition. Only on rare occasions did Yiddish troupes scout talent west of Second Avenue. And Emanuel Reicher
was as outside as they came. Decades before, the German had abandoned performance for direction, making his reputation in Berlin as an interpreter of ultramodern works. A series of artistic coups brought recognition without remuneration, forcing him to look for jobs outside Germany. Reicher thought to try his luck in America, where his reputation had preceded him. Ben-Ami sought out the director and offered a contract.

The actors soon learned they were in the hands of a very different sort of artiste. Customarily, Yiddish Theater directors gave line readings, stepping and strutting around the stage to demonstrate what they wanted. Not Reicher. Celia Adler fondly remembered his technique: “He was able to draw out from an actor exactly what was expected from a role without exhibitionism on the part of the director; he never showed an actor how to do it; he would quietly discuss and explain the role and what should be the effect of the scene. He never specified what the actor should do; he presented the overall concept of the scene.”

The Jewish Art Theater's first production, Hirschbein's
The Idle Inn,
won favor not only from the Yiddish press but from mainstream periodicals and books. In his clothbound overview of New York theater,
In the Garrett,
critic Carl Van Vechten called Reicher's the finest production he had ever seen onstage.
Theater
magazine said the direction was “so subtle that even to those who do not understand the language there is an effect of naturalness which is the height of great art.” Ben-Ami was singled out for tribute: “His passion has rarely been equaled for intensity on the stage in America. Every moment that he is on, the stage is surcharged with dramatic vitality.” By the end of the season,
The Nation
named the Jewish Art Theater “The noblest theatrical enterprise among us. It stands aloof from all the pressures of commerce and popularity.”

In yet another ghetto irony, this cheering squad was to bring down what it had so assiduously praised.
Theater
magazine lauded Reicher's direction for imparting “a swing of rhythm and an exquisite command of detail.” Broadway producers took note and lucrative offers poured in. Reicher intended to finish the season, and perhaps stay on after that—until Henrietta Schnitzer's ego forced the issue.