Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (28 page)

But a succès d'estime was not enough. Artef still needed that capitalistic entity called profits.
Diamonds
was intended to bring them in. The drama harked back to the grand old farces of con men who arrive in a small town, swindle the occupants, then get exposed as frauds. Here the principal charlatan was Comrade Schindel, posing as an official from Moscow in search of goods for schools and orphanages.

Actually, Schindel has come there to smuggle diamonds out of the Soviet Union. He hides the stones in
tefillin
(the leather boxes worn by Orthodox Jews at morning prayers) and accidentally loses them. Frantically, he and his assistant overpay for every pair of
tefillin
in town until they find the right ones. Then, just before the cheats can sneak away, the police collar them, leaving the thieves and townspeople sadder and wiser.

In form
Diamonds
was just another folktale, but the ending punched home a different moral: the days of the
shtetl
were over. In the new Soviet regime, provincial shenanigans were no longer to be tolerated; reeducation and comradeship would usher in a new era of progress and crime-free life.

The new production had positive reviews, but no lines appeared at the box office. Early in 1931, the
Freiheit
reported: “Because of purely technical problems the Artef management is forced, as of today, to suspend all performances for several weeks.” This was fiction; the difficulty
was not a lack of props, it was a dearth of popularity. No matter how good the acting or memorable the sets, ordinary Yiddish-speaking audiences wanted to be amused in these miserable times. They were made uncomfortable by harangues, political metaphors, and object lessons delivered from behind the footlights.

So they went elsewhere, to the straight plays and
shund,
the “ideological poison” of Second Avenue. There, they knew what they were getting: emotional involvement, not mass movement; entertainment, not lectures. And besides, these people had long memories. The incident of the “Zion orgy” was not something they could dismiss out of hand.

Only one thing could have reconciled traditional Jews with the nonreligious communists—a common enemy. Someone, or some movement, that could threaten the very existence of their
landsmen.
In the early 1930s this seemed plausible but unlikely. The czar had been dead more than a dozen years. To be sure, there were rumors of mob violence in the East, not unlike the pogroms of the past. And everyone knew stories of anti-Semitism reasserting itself in the West. But these were minor incidents. Leon Blum, a Jew, headed the French Socialist Party. In Germany the city of Ulm had put up signs for Einsteinstrasser, naming the street in honor of its most famous citizen, a Jewish physicist. True, the entire world struggled with hard times. Yet America, where one third were ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-housed, had not dissolved into chaos. Why should the older nations? As civilizations advanced, what men, what countries would be capable of destroying European Jewry? And why on earth would they wish to do so? It would be some time before the Jews awakened to reality. The years of sleepwalking would be the most tragic in their long, winding history.

THIS BASTARD IS
UNDERPLAYING
ME TO DEATH!

A
MAJORITY
of the early film producers and scenarists had grown up in Yiddish-speaking homes. Consciously or unconsciously they were familiar with the classic themes of the Yiddish Theater—the sanctity of the family, the precariousness of life, the importance of education. Louis B. Mayer, one of the founders of
MGM, was typical in this regard. He grew choleric when he saw a gangster film that violated the idea of motherhood: “Knock the mother on the jaw! Throw the little old lady down the stairs! Throw the mother's good, homemade chicken soup in the mother's face! Step on the mother! Kick her! That is art, they say. Art!” Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner brothers, and many other foreign-born producers found their ideal in Samson Raphaelson's
The Jazz Singer.
America's first sound movie unreeled in 1927, making silent film obsolete and changing every aspect of show business.

An opening title card set the scene: “The New York Ghetto, throbbing to that rhythm of music which is older than civilization.” In this roiled neighborhood a battle gets under way between Jakie Rabinowitz and his father, a fourth-generation cantor. He expects his son to carry on in the family tradition. Jakie refuses. A frightful row takes place, and the boy leaves home. Years pass, and in that time he becomes famous as Jack Robin, cabaret entertainer (Al Jolson). When Jack comes home his mother embraces him. The cantor wants no part of his celebrity son. Robin returns to show business, going from strength to strength until, on the opening night of his first Broadway show, he learns that the old man is dying. Should Jack go onstage anyway? Or should he return to his parents? Naturally, he chooses the latter course, his blackface makeup still clinging to his skin as he goes down on one knee and sings:

Even in those palmy days, filmmakers were made uncomfortable by scenes of parent worship—unless it could be expressed in disguise. The black mask was ideal: audiences knew the singer was a Jew, played by a man who was himself the son of a cantor. But in the movie Jack Robin could also get himself up in burnt cork and pretend to be a Negro. As
such he could express the raw emotion of mother love and a fear of death. (A Freudian interpretation of
The Jazz Singer
changed the letter “a” to the letter “o”—from “Mammy” to “Mommy.”)

The Yiddish filmmakers were overjoyed. At last, the
mamaloshen
could be heard as well as seen. And forget about burnt cork, they told one another. Yiddish actors needed no Jolson-like masks; they would never disguise themselves as another race. The headliners had been emoting for fifty years; audiences expected to see them go over the top.

Two years into the sound era, two New York businessmen, Louis Weiss and Rubin Goldberg, founded a new company called Yiddish Talking Pictures. It might have been named Yiddish Talking Picture— they produced only one film,
Uncle Moses.
Maurice Schwartz had recently starred in his own stage adaptation of the Sholem Asch novel; naturally he was chosen to do the screenplay and take the title role. Filming took place at the East Coast version of Hollywood—a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. There were only minimal sets, big parts, sharp dialogue, and best of all, a relevance to the current climate of distress.

The main figure, played by Schwartz, is a venal and lecherous clothing manufacturer. Back in the European ghetto of Kuzmin he had been a butcher with a bloodstained apron. In America, with a combination of luck, gall, and manic energy, he has become a benevolent despot, a man who pays for his
landsmen
to come to America—and then engages them in his sweatshop for fourteen-hour days and subsistence pay.

Two of Moses' relatives provide the counterpoint to the boss's dominant personality: his father and his nephew. The old man is a kind of Shakespearean fool, speaking truth in comic asides. He sings constantly, but the cheerful
nign
(melody) carries references to his son as a modern-day pharaoh, cruelly using his Jewish prisoners. The nephew, Sam, is a totally Americanized operator, running the day-to-day operations of the factory, and dreaming of when he'll inherit his bachelor uncle's property.

Moses devotes much of his leisure time to the wooing and winning of a beautiful seventeen-year-old employee, Mascha. She is in love with Charlie, a labor organizer, but marries her aging boss in order to liberate Mama, Papa, and all her siblings from abject poverty. Mascha becomes pregnant, and Moses revels in his prospective fatherhood. Historical forces are at work, however, and they will soon overwhelm him.

On the day Moses' son is born, a strike is declared. The workers hail Charlie as the
true
Moses, the one who will lead them out of wageslavery. To counter their moves, Sam hires hooligans to break the strike. The idea of Jews attacking other Jews is too much for Uncle Moses. He suffers a severe heart attack, ages overnight, and undergoes a moral reformation. He alters his will, leaving 25 percent of his estate to his abused employees, and agrees to divorce Mascha. The young mother will at last be liberated from her chains, free to marry her heart's desire.

In the closing scene Uncle Moses returns to the factory and speaks to the workers in the resigned, all-is-vanity tone of Ecclesiastes: “I was walking past the Great Synagogue. I walked in and heard a rabbi delivering a sermon. He was talking about ‘man.’ He spoke for an hour and never said what ‘man' is all about. So I asked him: ‘Mister, what is a man? He builds houses, factories, brings his countrymen to America, and after all, the grave awaits him. He builds, he makes a commotion, and the grave still waits.’”

In
Bridge of Light,
J. Hoberman remarks on the film's strange agnosticism. “Religion is present largely as an absence—it's striking that even after Moses renounces his worldly goods, he does not turn to God. In the harshest ending of any Yiddish film, Moses asks one of his old workers to sing the
nign
he sang for his father and the melody is drowned out by the roar of the machines.”

Uncle Moses
had none of the polish associated with Hollywood features. The cast was solid but plain, the montage a collection of crowd scenes, two-shots, and close-ups. And yet, in the year the film was released only one English-language talkie had the same visceral impact. It also opened in April 1932. As Maurice Schwartz spoke the words of Uncle Moses, the Yiddish Theater's first crossover star, Paul Muni, filled the screen as Tony Camonte
—Scarface.

MUNI HAD TAKEN
a winding trek to the big time. At the age of twelve he entered his parents' touring Yiddish Theater company. First Salche and Nachum Weisenfreund played in Eastern Europe, then came to the United States. Their son had a certain knack in adolescence: with an adroit use of powdered chalk and charcoaled wrinkles he could impersonate codgers with sly immigrant faces and timeworn physiques. Backstage they called him Old Man Makeup. Out front, few cottoned to the fact that they were watching an adolescent.

But Nachum wanted something better than a scrambling show business life for his boy. Muni had shown some talent for the violin; what if he were to be another Misha Elman, the Jewish kid who had played himself out of a Russian
shtetl
and onto the recital stages of the world? Muni was forced to take lessons and to play his instrument two hours a day—until the moment his father unexpectedly came home to find the boy making faces in the mirror and experimenting with makeup. His violin lay under a bunch of discarded underwear.

Nachum picked up the instrument. “Why aren't you practicing?”

Muni hesitated. “I—I no longer care for the violin, Papa. I don't have time for it. I want to be an actor—I can't do both!”

Without another word, Nachum took the violin in his hands and broke it over his knee. Yiddish melodrama once again reached into real life: save for the lines they exchanged onstage, father and son did not speak to each other for the next two months. By then Nachum realized that Muni's ambition was an irresistible force. There was nothing he or anyone else could do to impede it.

Muni's work drew the attention of provincial theater managers; they won the apprentice numerous walk-ons and cameo roles as a doddering geezer. A decade later, when Muni was on his own in New York, Maurice Schwartz arranged an audition at the Hebrew Actors Union. Again the young man played an elderly figure. One committee member
was less impressed than his fellows: “Let him in—he'll never put anybody out of work, except himself. And if Schwartz wants him, that's Schwartz's funeral.” In a way, it was.

Muni quickly made himself at home in the city. He married young— to Boris Thomashefsky's niece Bella—and she became his most important audience. Preparing for a show at the Yiddish Art Theater, he developed an offstage routine. When Bella went shopping, he would sometimes arrange to shuffle by her on the street, a wrinkled beggar
in extremis.
If she walked on without a sign of recognition, he knew his stage persona would pass muster. Muni liked to call on his mother-inlaw with much the same purpose.

Emma had been bound in a wheelchair since that horrific day Morris Finkel aimed at her lover, shot his wife by accident, and then turned the gun on himself. These days she rarely got out to the theater, but fancied that she could still spot a false beard and windowpane glasses from a hundred feet away. Not when Muni wore them. More than once she failed to spot him beneath the clothes and manner of a doddering rabbi. “Mama,” he would chortle after the revelation, “I'd rather fool you than the critics.”