Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (31 page)

One of them decided that enough was enough and sued the industrialist for libel. Months of damning evidence followed until Ford, anxious to avoid a public relations nightmare, ordered his executives to issue an apology in his name. The satiric number followed, performed with heavy Jewish intonations by the gentile team of Jones and Hare. Their record was played to general amusement in the early 1930s:

In the past, this kind of satiric warbling brought a nervous assurance: comedy was the best antidote to bias. Now, as a new presidential administration came in, they felt that politics was the answer. And so began the long and perhaps endless love/hate relationship between American Jewry and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The first years saw nothing but uncritical awe. As a group, American Jews had never been happy with the string of Republican presidents— Harding, Coolidge, Hoover—even though a small number of Jewish plutocrats appreciated their pro-business attitudes. The rank and file were under-salaried laborers who needed more in the way of fair working
conditions and a decent paycheck, more in the way of social opportunities for their families. To a great many, the bosses were the enemy, represented by the GOP. If not directly responsible for the Depression, Hoover and the other leaders of his party had proved indecisive and callous. Now one third of a nation was ill-clothed and ill-fed and ill-housed. Roosevelt knew it and he would do something about it. In this effort he would be aided by brilliant Jews, among them financier Bernard Baruch, jurist Felix Frankfurter, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Surely FDR was a man to follow into fire, and from 1932 on the Jewish vote went Democrat and stayed Democrat.

Those in the president's inner circle knew a different figure. Roosevelt's mother, Sara, was a lifelong anti-Semite, and raised her son to distrust those who, in her term, were NOKD—“not our kind, darling.” Nevertheless, FDR was the very definition of a political animal, and when he felt that Jewish intelligence was necessary for his administration's “brain trust,” he put his biases aside for the good of the nation. It was only later that his personal feelings came out, and then only in private circumstances. He was heard to say that America “is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance.” And when Adolf Hitler began to move against German Jewry he would condemn the reichschancellor in speeches, but otherwise offered no help. To placate the isolationists in and out of his party, he suggested that Jewish immigrants be “resettled” in Venezuela, Ethiopia, or West Africa. Allowing them into the United States was out of the question.

None of this news reached the average Jewish citizens. Even if it had, they would probably have clung to their faith in the leadership of their country. For both they and the leadership failed to understand the nature of the new enemy. Early news reports made clear distinctions between the brutalities of the past and present. In the
New York Evening Post,
the paper's Berlin correspondent left little to the imagination: “Not even in Czarist Russia, with its ‘Pale,’ have the Jews been subject to a more violent campaign of murderous agitation. An indeterminate number of Jews have been killed. Hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured.

“Thousands of Jews have fled.

“Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood.

“All of Germany's 600,000 Jews are in terror.”

Yet at this juncture hardly anyone wanted to deal with the news from
Europe in a realistic manner. Walter Lippmann, the most respected political columnist of the time, called one of Adolf Hitler's speeches “statesmanlike.” And when books were burned in a public bonfire in May 1933, he wrote that the persecution of his fellow Jews, “by satisfying the lust of the Nazis who feel they must conquer somebody,” was “a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe.” Decades after the fact, the executive editor of the
New York Times
acknowledged that “No article about the Jews' plight ever qualified as the
Times
's leading story of the day, or as a major event of a week or year. The ordinary reader of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the Nazis' crime.”

On the rare occasions when members of the Roosevelt administration criticized the racial policies of Nazi Germany, warnings came from America Firsters—among them the iconic Charles Lindbergh. The aviator was to make a public statement enumerating the troublemakers in the United States. “The three most important groups pressing the country toward war,” he warned, “are the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration.” In his judgment the Jews were the most dangerous of the trio because of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Moreover, it was not only the see-no-evil journalists and officials who turned away from the obvious. Stephen Wise, then the most prominent rabbi in America, obtained an audience with President Roosevelt. During the interview Wise declared that tourists just back from Germany “tell me that they saw the synagogues were crowded and apparently there is nothing very wrong.”

Even blinder than the self-styled authorities were the entertainers, who still insisted that mockery and derision would neutralize hate, no matter how virulent, no matter how local. Picon was typical of her profession. She was fond of describing an incident in Portland, Maine. Fresh from the railroad station, she asked her cabdriver to stop at a rather grand hotel. He turned around and inquired, “Are you Jewish?” Molly chirped, “I've been Jewish for years.” The chauffeur got serious: “They won't take you in there, lady. No Jews and no dogs.”

She found a more tolerant place and went her own way. She was an autonomous sort, had been since childhood. When she got back to New York, Molly urged her fellow performers to ignore the insults of anti-Semites and find their own place regardless of the hotel owners and the politicians. There was plenty of room for Jews in America, she
pointed out; you just had to have a thick skin and an attitude of selfreliance. Her message echoed the subtext of one of Sigmund Freud's favorite anecdotes, related in
Jokes and Their Relation to the Subconscious.

“Itzig had been declared fit for military service in the artillery. He was clearly an intelligent lad, but intractable and without any interest in the service. One of his superior officers who was kindly disposed toward him took him to one side and said, ‘Itzig, you're no use to us. I'll give you a piece of advice: buy yourself a cannon and make yourself independent.’”

The reigning paradox of the moment was that everything depended on independence. The country was trying to make its way out of the Depression. Who had time to worry about the Jews except the Jews themselves? And among the American Jews, who had time to worry about what was going on overseas? True, many an immigrant had relatives who wrote, complaining of racial laws and smashed storefronts. But these were incidents, not a trend. The tribe of Hebrews had outlasted the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans. The Nazis would pass like all the other enemies, and everything would be the way it was.

A GIANT MADE OF CLAY

C
HILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS
naturally picked up American habits and spoke the language of their host country. In the 1930s, even the most insular parents and grandparents began to employ a Yiddish peppered with Anglicized words like “allrightnik” and “subvaystop.” Maurice Schwartz needed no charts to tell him that the demographics on the Lower East Side were undergoing a drastic change.

The flow of immigrants had become a trickle. Depression or no Depression, the Jews were moving out as fast as they could—uptown
and to the outer boroughs. Very well, let them. From now on Schwartz would present two versions of standard Yiddish Theater works, one in the original tongue for the traditionalists, the other in English for the modernists. Up went Israel Joshua Singer's
Yoshe Kalb.
Singer's younger brother, Isaac Bashevis, once spoke of the novel's genesis:

“Father told about a rabbi's son named Moshe Haim Kaminer, who deserted his wife. When the husband, Moshe, came back years later, the people accused him of being someone else, a beggar named Yoshe Kalb who had deserted his own wife, a woman of low origin. A story which is as dramatic as this had to be told in a dramatic way.”

I. J. Singer told it with all the flair at his command, resurrecting the departed world of Polish Hasidism, with its violent clashes of fervor and repressed emotion. The book created a furor when it was excerpted in the
Forward.
Schwartz, who recognized an epic when he saw it, quickly came up with a sixty-two-role adaptation. It received the kind of notices producers dream about. When the Yiddish-language rendition was done in the spring of 1933, Charlie Chaplin dropped in; so did Albert Einstein. The elegant
Arts and Decoration
magazine labeled Schwartz's direction and acting “theater at its best.” Uptown producer Daniel Frohman said the play offered “a cross-section of life that no Broadway production equals in intensity and originality” and planned to bring an English-language version to Broadway.

Brooks Atkinson, emerging as the
Times
's most discerning theater critic, filed a long rave: “If
Yoshe Kalb
looks and sounds exhilarating at the Yiddish Art Theater, it is because Jewish actors understand that sort of mystical drama and Jewish audiences are kindled by it.” While the Anglo-Saxon stage was preoccupied with musicals and empty chatter, “the Yiddish stage can still tell a full story and invigorate the scenes with pictorial figures. Mr. Schwartz's theater is alive.”

Producers, adaptor, and cast naturally assumed that the Frohman production would be a smash. That December, when it debuted, they were traumatized to see notices like the one in the
American:
“Down on Second Avenue this product of Mr. Schwartz's talents was hailed, hallowed and pronounced a classic. Here at the National on 41st St. it is, I fear, simply so much gefilte fish out of water.”

Harsher appraisals followed. Though Israel Joshua Singer kept his opinions to himself, Isaac Bashevis Singer grumbled about the presentation. Schwartz, he said, “was by nature a kitsch director or dramamaker. He wanted everything to be like a super-colossal Hollywood
production. So he made it more sensational than my brother wanted it to be.” The Yiddish Theater production ran for more than three hundred performances; the Broadway one closed after four. Schwartz was not much for lost causes; he returned to the place he knew best, and that knew him best, Second Avenue.

AS THE IMPRESARIO TRIED
to reestablish himself in a narrower scope, a new kind of Jewish expression began to work its way from the Yiddish Theater into a wider world. Jacob Adler's daughter Stella had appeared in more than one hundred Yiddish productions, as well as several Broadway plays. Dissatisfied with the kind of acting she saw around her, she joined a new American company called the Group Theater, founded by three young idealists, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford. Strasberg had been introduced to the world of performance when, as a child, he was taken to see David Kessler—“Clearly an actor of great temperament,” he told his colleagues. Clurman recalled his first exposure to theater on the Lower East Side where his father practiced medicine. The actors “were among the best I have ever seen. Most stimulating of all were the audiences. For to the immigrants in the early years of the century, the theater was the one center of social intercourse. Here the problems of their life, past and present, could be given a voice; here they could get to know and understand one another.”

Adler immediately felt at home in the Group; so did another young actor, Clifford Odets, who would eventually find his voice as a playwright. Odets's idiom contained the trenchant intonations and inversions of Yiddish: “For myself I don't feel sorry”; “If it rained pearls—who would work?”; “Strong as iron you must be”; “To your dying day you won't change.”