Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (30 page)

The girl, of course, was Molly. From her first appearance, the girl provides shock treatment for her insular, deeply religious relatives. Hoberman accurately observes that “nothing in the film is more American than its star.” Molly not only conceals a dime novel in her prayer book during Yom Kippur service, she also tiptoes into the kitchen and violates the fasting day with great mouthfuls of food. Later, the girl derisively labeled “That American
Shiksa
” teaches
yeshiva
boys how to Charleston, and attends her cousin's wedding dressed as a boy— Picon's trademark shtick.

At the end of the ceremonies, Molly drags an excruciatingly shy student, Ruben (Jacob Kalisch), under the wedding canopy and pretends to marry him. But when he places a ring on her finger before two witnesses, according to Jewish law the couple is officially wed. Separation follows, when Molly returns to New York. Tradition dictates that a divorce can take place only after five years. During that time Ruben leaves the
shtetl
and fetches up at his uncle's house in Vienna. The progressive Austrian convinces his nephew to abandon the long black cloak, yarmulke, sidelocks, and beard in favor of a modern look.

Flash-forward five years. Ruben is now the celebrated author of a bestseller entitled
East and West.
At a party in his honor, Molly, playing a pretty American tourist, wanders through the crowd. She looks around, searching for a familiar face. The young lady fails to recognize the clean-shaven, impeccably tailored Ruben—to whom she is instantly attracted. She wants to keep company with the young man but cannot; mock marriage though it may be, she belongs to another. Ruben recognizes
her,
however, and the next day, disguising himself as an old-style Hasid, takes her out. In a grand finale, he peels away the disguise to reveal himself as the once bashful youth she wed in Poland. They joyously embrace. Fade to black.

Ost und West
became a smash hit in the Jewish sections of Austria and Poland, outpulling Chaplin's
The Kid
in the summer of 1923. That fall the Kalisches returned to New York, full of plans for films and theater pieces. They began by renting a Second Avenue theater for one evening. It sold out in a matter of hours. The manager, curious about the lines outside the box office, asked some of the patrons why they had come. Said one, “My uncle in Warsaw wrote me when Molly Picon
appeared in
Yonkele
to go and see her.” Another added, “My cousin from Bucharest wrote me not to miss Molly's
Yonkele.
” Others had seen or heard about
Ost und West.
The European sojourn had paid off richly. Wrote Picon, “We had a subscription audience before I even started.”

Because of that auspicious beginning, the couple rented the theater and stayed on to produce their own shows. Jimmy Walker, the new mayor of New York City, attended one performance. The movie director D. W. Griffith, invariably dressed in cape and high hat, became a steady customer. After seeing one of their shows he invited himself up to the Kalisches' apartment. Griffith had in mind a film project built around Molly. “He wanted Jacob to work on the script with him because he felt Jacob had the tempo that he himself hadn't acquired. He tried to raise a million dollars, but he was on the way down—a hasbeen to backers—so nothing happened. We remained in the Yiddish Theater, which was then thriving.”

That year she had other reasons not to appear on celluloid. In the fall of 1923
Ost und West
opened in New York, now dubbed
Mazel Tov
and equipped with up-to-the-minute English titles. Members of the New York State Motion Picture Commission pounced on it. In their opinion it was “filled with scenes which tend to bring the religion of the Jew in ridicule and disrespect,” and they singled out Molly for shimmying “in her underclothes.” Kalisch agreed to excise three scenes, and offending lines like, “You know as much about the Jewish law as Moses knew about Prohibition.” The uncut version unreeled in “private” screenings. Footage was added before and after, in an attempt to placate the inspectors. They showed a grandmother telling the story of Molly to a group of children, as if the impudent girl's adventures were just a fantasy told by a harmless old lady.

None of this was lost on Maurice Schwartz. If Europe could furnish Molly Picon with a new and higher stature, why couldn't he get the same results with a little side trip to the Old World? He had profoundly miscalculated the situation. By the time he and his troupe arrived, circumstances had changed. Polish, French, German, and Yiddish companies were now thriving in their own theaters. A touring American group held little interest for European audiences, and by the time Schwartz & Co. reached Vienna they were broke. A frantic wire to the Hebrew Actors Union followed. Bailed out with a long-term loan, the chastened players returned to New York.

Their impresario, however, stayed on in Austria. Remembering the
publicity surrounding
Mazel Tov,
he signed for a starring role in
Yizkor
(Prayer of Remembrance), also directed by Goldin. Schwartz was an ideal choice to play the hero in this eighteenth-century tragedy: he had starred in a stage version the year before. Set in a small Ukrainian village, the film focuses on the travails of a dashing Jewish guardsman, Leybke, in service to the local Count. He has eyes only for his intended, Kreyndl, an innkeeper's daughter. But the Count's daughter has other plans. Lovestruck, she uses all her wiles to seduce Leybke.

When he proves immune to her vamping she goes into hell-hathno-fury mode, accusing him of attempted rape—just as Potiphar's wife did when she failed to seduce Joseph in the biblical account. On the eve of his wedding, police arrest Leybke. He escapes and flees with his fiancée. In response, authorities hold the entire Jewish community hostage. Leybke surrenders, and is forced to amuse the onlookers by putting on a bearskin and dancing in it—a common amusement of anti-Semitic Poles at the time. His humiliation acts as a goad for the onlookers. Egging each other on, they bury him alive. The Countess, mortified by the cruelty she has incited, takes her own life.

Yiskor
did well enough in the Jewish neighborhoods of Europe, and much was expected of it in America. A Yiddish Theater journalist gave Schwartz reason to hope when he wrote that the Jews in attendance at an advance screening “could not help but shed a tear” and that “the film is likely to make an even stronger impression on the Gentiles for, in addition to suspense and human interest, they will find the appeal of the exotic.” The feature opened on the Lower East Side, with extravagant fanfare—and flopped. “Inept distribution may have been one factor,” Hoberman speculates; another, perhaps more important, was the reviewers' general disdain. The man at the
Jewish Theatrical News
was the most derisive; he compared Schwartz to “a ghost playing Hamlet.”

The actor had a rhinoceros hide; he staged more theater productions and made plans to appear in yet another movie. For this one he would not only star, but direct.
Di Gebrokhene Hertser
(Broken Hearts) had previously been done by a Polish organization and shown with modest results. The new one would be made in America by Jaffe Art Films, a company that existed only on the letterhead of its stationery. Real estate speculator Louis N. Jaffe was a cinema-struck producer who claimed to be in the business in order “to present the Jew… done in an artistic manner.” Actually a commercial hit was what Jaffe and
Schwartz were after, and the bathetic
Broken Hearts
seemed the ideal vehicle for both of them.

The actor/director played Benjamin Rezanov, a radical writer forced to flee the Alexandrine pogroms. His wife, Esther, is supposed to follow him, but upon arrival in New York City, Rezanov hears that she has died in the Old Country. The Russian Revolution takes place during the requisite mourning period, during which Benjamin marries Ruth, the daughter of an impoverished rabbi. Soon after, he learns that the information about his first wife was false. She was arrested by the Cossacks but freed by the Bolsheviks, and is alive after all. Bound by his vows, Rezanov sails for Russia.

He arrives too late. Now Esther truly
is
deceased; even the great Soviet doctors could not save her from a lethal disease. Back goes Benjamin to Manhattan, hoping to make amends with the pregnant Ruth, who has been supporting herself by working in a sweatshop. She is nowhere to be seen. Shamed and alone, she has given birth far away from the city. On the eve of Yom Kippur she returns to visit her beloved parents and behold! There is Benjamin, armed with the good news: he and his now legitimate wife and baby can live happily ever after.

Schwartz didn't believe his name would be enough to attract an audience. Therefore, in addition to the regulars in his company he hired an established cinema actress to play Ruth. Lila Lee came armed with great credentials. A performer since childhood under the sobriquet Cuddles, Lee had been featured as the servant wench in Cecil B. DeMille's
Male and Female
in 1919, and starred opposite Rudolph Valentino in the bullfight melodrama
Blood and Sand
three years later. It was assumed that she would bring
shiksa
appeal to the production, thereby roping in gentiles as well as Jews. Lee did indeed earn good reviews—the
New York Times
lauded her work, as well as the film's “sincerity” and “restraint.” But her affecting turn was not enough to make
Broken Hearts
a hit. The same
Times
critic thought Schwartz the director was too deliberate, too measured in his tempo. And though the
Jewish Theatrical News
had more positive things to say about the film, it found Schwartz the actor devoid of the requisite passion, “listless, a trifle stunned, a wee bit too careful. This is especially noticeable in the love scenes.”

Broken Hearts
lasted one week in a first-run uptown theater. Nevertheless, it paid dividends for Schwartz. Jaffe was so impressed by his own production that he took a lease on the Folks Theater on Second
Avenue and 12th Street. This, he told the Jewish community of New York, would be the permanent home of Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater. The actors, designers, and businessmen moved in, secure for the first time in their lives. In the subsequent months they found much to praise in their boss's attitude and generosity.

The Yiddish Art Theater manager wrote that whenever Schwartz barnstormed he took costumes, electrical equipment, and various props with him. “But he never brought any back to New York. He left them with the local troupes.” A designer claimed that Schwartz had “remarkable theatrical instincts.” And outside the little company a similar feeling became widespread. Critic John Mason Brown thought that, by and large, American theater had become predictable and vulgar. By contrast, he wrote, the Yiddish Art Theater was “one of the few playhouses in New York that has shown a steady humility in its approach to the theater. It has been untiring and patient in its work. And it has been directed by Maurice Schwartz, one of the few really creative directors that this country knows.”

In a feature piece, the
Times
asked, “Would it be perilous to declare that Schwartz has welded players, theme and scenery into monumentally impressive works?” Given this new buzz,
Theater
magazine expressed a renewed interest in the goings-on of Second Avenue, and secured an aisle seat for the Yiddish Art Theater's adaptation of Goldfaden's play
The Tenth Commandment.
The reviewer thought Schwartz “directed with great gusto” and “an intensification more common to Berlin than Broadway.” There could have been no higher compliment.

GROUCHO MARX
never allowed Irving Berlin to forget about his past—particularly about songs that he had written in the old days, numbers like “Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Ragtime” or “Sadie Salome,” about a young lady who takes to the stage, to the distress of her fiancé:

Like many another Jewish youth, the comedian had learned these tunes by heart, as he and his brothers gathered at the parlor piano. In the 1930s, Julius Henry Marx sang them at parties. More than once, the embarrassed Berlin dangled a $100 bill; all Groucho had to do was just shut up and sit down. If Marx was feeling expansive he took the money and sang numbers by lesser composers, among them “The Yiddisha Rag” and “Under the Matzos Tree, A Ghetto Love Song.” These never reached the Hit Parade, but remained great favorites on the Lower East Side. There were also such self-satiric Western numbers as “Yonkle, the Cow-Boy Jew” and “I'm a Yiddish Cowboy.” After them came songs about assimilation: “It's Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone,” followed by a plea to Jewish maidens, “Marry a Yiddisher Boy.”

The subject of anti-Semitism rolled around, and the songsmiths addressed that as well, giving it an eccentric lilt, as if the whole thing were some kind of joke. “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me” was first recorded by the singing team of Billy Jones and Ernest Hare, better known as the Happiness Boys. They specialized in topical compositions, and this one took off from an incident in the automobile magnate's long career of Jew-hatred.

Ford owned the
Dearborn Independent,
a Michigan-based newspaper with small circulation but wide influence. The periodical had always been home to journalists who were repelled by Jews. One of his reporters, Patterson James, attended a Jewish vaudeville and quoted an unnamed “esthetic” companion who “foamed with rage at what he called Kike race appeals.” The
Independent
serialized the bogus
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
using it as “proof” that an international Jewish conspiracy was out to control the world's economies.

The series came as no surprise to Ford's inner circle. The old man had forbidden the use of brass in his factories—he called the amalgam “a Jew metal.” Confronted with his bias, Ford replied that he was “only trying to awake the Gentile world to an understanding of what is going
on. The Jew is a mere huckster, a trader who doesn't want to produce, but to make something out of what somebody else produces.” Several articles followed, accusing some Jewish businessmen of Bolshevism.