Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (33 page)

In the introduction to his modernized version of
The Golem,
playwright David Fishelson speaks of “the anguish that comes of fighting fire with fire.” He quotes the agonized demand of the character who confronts the Rabbi: “Won't those who lift the sword fare worse? In doing so won't they lose their share of the world to come?” The Rabbi's equally distraught reply: “Whether in this world or the next: There may be no tomorrow for Jews who meekly lay their heads on the block.” The drama of the Golem lasted on the boards for nearly three months. The entreaty “
Who will save us?
” was shortly to be amplified. The answer would remain eternally elusive.

TOTAL, UNQUESTIONED
CHUTZPAH

J
OSEPH BULOFF HAD COVERED
a considerable distance since his days with Schwartz's players. He had not only acted in a troupe visiting from Vilna, he also turned his hand to directing. Artef hired him to lead its performers in a Leivick play called
Keytn
(Chains). The realistic drama charted the sorrows of political prisoners behind bars in czarist Siberia. One of them, Levinai, is an
homme engagé
who organizes a violent plan of escape. The march to the barricades is
turned back by the guards. Undiscouraged, he plans a larger uprising. Dissent breaks out, and Levinai ruthlessly suppresses anyone who dares to oppose him, even betraying former comrades who waste time and energy in fruitless debates, delaying action and weakening morale. The organizer eventually gets what he wants, but the prison-wide clash amounts to mass suicide—the well-equipped czar's troops outnumber the prisoners six to one. Levinai survives and makes no excuses when the Cossacks put him in chains. Proudly he marches to his fate: death before a firing squad. He is the first martyr of the Bolshevik Revolution to come.

To the communists
Keytn
was red meat in every sense. The trouble was that Buloff believed in the primacy of the actor and the credibility of the text. That was all very well with the uptown critics who lauded the production and hailed Buloff as a “director of genius.” The
Daily Worker,
the communist newspaper, disagreed. “The acting,” it said, “lacks that community of playing that has always distinguished the Artef. There is too little of the ensemble, too much of the individual.” In other words, the Buloff version failed to glorify the masses, and committed the sin of stating that political movements may be comprised of vastly differing personalities and temperaments.

He moved on to another company, the New York Art Troupe. Its most audacious production was an adaptation of
The Trial,
by the late and still obscure Czech writer Franz Kafka. Audiences scarcely knew what to make of the story. What kind of drama was that—a man whose crime was unspecified, yet whose guilt was a foregone conclusion? At the end of the 1936 season, the Art Troupe went out of business—just in time for Maurice Schwartz to reenter the scene, fresh from his last European tour. For the season of 1938, he produced a play about an assimilated Frenchman who turns back to his Jewish roots when the fever of anti-Semitism reaches his city. The playwright, Jacques Berson, was unavailable for interviews; evidently he had remained in France. Later it was discovered that he did not exist. Berson was one of Schwartz's many noms de plume.

The next season Schwartz ventured uptown again with a new allYiddish company. They played at the Venice Theater at Columbus Circle, a place where Al Jolson had capered for many years. I. J. Singer's
The Brothers Ashkenazi
was his production of choice. This panorama told the story of a patriarch and his twin sons in Lodz, Poland, scrambling for recognition and material success. The Ashkenazi family experiences
the benefits, and the soul-destroying aspects, of the industrial revolution. Later its members deal with the rise of capitalism, the advent of communism, the ravages of the Great War. At no time are they untroubled, because whenever Poland is devastated by events, the Jewish community always suffers the blame.

Singer offers a despairing view of the future, as if he had some premonitory sense of the Holocaust to come. Schwartz related the tale as faithfully as he could, with more than twenty of the actors doubling and tripling in their parts. Naturally, he played one of the principal roles, prompting a story to go around: a friend of the impresario overhears someone accusing him of monopolizing all the best roles, and gets defensive. “On the contrary, Mr. Schwartz has been exceedingly generous with leading parts. Take, for example,
The Brothers Ashkenazi.
Did he play both brothers?”

In the beginning the spectacle attracted large audiences. A second wave came and applauded—and then, suddenly, attendance dwindled to half-filled houses. A postmortem showed that the patrons of Yiddish art theaters had been expecting several plays per season, not just one. They didn't mind attending
Brothers
twice; there was no way to take it all in at once. But the second time around they noticed severe flaws. Schwartz had allowed his cast to settle into the roles much too comfortably. Speeches had become flat, and movements mechanical.

In addition, as one actor put it, Schwartz had made a grave error at the outset, when he “attempted to satisfy with one and the same play people of different political philosophies.” In short, there was no way he could make the communists happy merely by showing a few revolutionaries bearing red flags onstage, and no way he could stimulate tired businessmen with a melancholy pageant, no matter how loud or flagrantly illuminated.

Schwartz was never one to acknowledge a mistake; he merely gave out the word that next season there would be an entire repertory of plays—four at the bare minimum. But what plays? Maurice was of two minds about Sholem Asch: he was probably the best-known Yiddish writer, but he was also the most controversial one. Asch was known to be attracted to the utterances of Jesus, for example, though he had never converted to Christianity. As for his most talked about powerful drama,
God of Vengeance,
it had gotten a lot of people in trouble when it was staged on Broadway fifteen years before.

The drama concerned a Jewish brothel keeper in America. Yankel
Chapchovich lives upstairs over the whorehouse he operates, convinced that he can literally raise his pretty daughter Rivkele above it all, keeping her chaste and observant. Translator Joseph C. Landis observes that “Like Jay Gatsby he seems to have remained strangely uncontaminated by the evil of the world in which he moves and with which he deals.” And, like Gatsby, Yankel is undone by his own illusions.

Rivkele becomes a wanton lesbian, and her father's bitter acknowledgment shocked audiences when the play was first performed on Broadway back in 1923. Addressing a prospective in-law:

References to sapphism, the explicit candor of the whores' dialogue, and the unhappy ending were enough to rouse the authorities. New York City police shut down
God of Vengeance
for “immorality,” and some of the actors spent a night in jail. The playwright was accused of indecency and anti-Semitism. Asch's defense was the terse self-appraisal “I am not a Jewish artist, I am a universal artist,” which failed to placate his accusers. The drama never reopened. Still, that was almost a generation before, and it had been staged uptown, where the censors were tougher.

Surely it could be performed in Yiddish now, in these enlightened times. Then again, maybe not. In the end, cold feet prevailed and another Asch project was chosen. Strictly speaking,
Three Cities
was not a play at all. It was a triptych of novels centering on the Russian Jewish experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The three cities are Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Within his works Asch includes the Hasidic villages, the fatal insensitivities of the Russian upper classes, the internecine strife within the White and Red armies on the eve of the Revolution, the plain folk and aristocrats, everyone vainly attempting to keep up with events.

As Asch scholar Ben Siegel observes, “they scurry often, for fate, in the guise of the Russian Revolution, cuts across all personal goals and pleasures to render them virtually helpless by a rapid succession of blows. Inevitably, character and plot soon diminish.” In short, it was just the sort of epic Schwartz loved to bring to the Yiddish stage: Cecil B. DeMille writ small. He hired a large group of actors, convinced Jacob Ben-Ami to star, and worked out a stage adaptation, battling Sholem Asch—or more accurately, Asch's wife, Matilda—at every turn.

Recollecting that time, Schwartz complained, “What trouble with Mrs. Asch! I had worked out a magnificent finish—75 people and a projection of five hundred more. What a finale!” But Mrs. Asch pointed out that the novel had no such conclusion—it ended quietly and on a small scale. Schwartz pleaded with the author, but “he said he was helpless and would not fight with his wife.” On opening night the grand penultimate scene was greeted with cheers. Then came an anticlimactic coda. “The day after the opening,” Schwartz bitterly recalled, “the English language press said, ‘At 11:10 last night, Schwartz met his Waterloo at the Jolson Theater.’”

The later reception was even worse. The
North American Review
described Schwartz as a pseudo-artist who seemed to have “everything there is to make the usual great big Hollywood director and adaptor. He can't write, he has the taste of a haberdashery salesman, and his notion of the perfect performer is the loud speaker.” All of Schwartz's productions were two-dimensional processions, and
Three Cities
was more of the same, “a lowly comic strip conception of the sufferings of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Lacking in dignity, devoid of dramatic unity, burdened with Mr. Schwartz's vulgar direction, it leaves one wondering what has happened to the Yiddish Theater of such firstrate actors as Paul Muni, the Adlers and Jacob Ben-Ami.” The latter was “made by Mr. Schwartz to act the part of a lover of his fiancée's mother. In one scene he shrieks out his love and grapples with the matronly lady of his heart in the same style that the heroes of the older films used to lasso a mustang.”

EDGAR GEORGE ULMER
, set designer for the 1920 version of
The Golem,
had come to America with big plans back in 1923. With a combination of persuasive patter and genuine, if limited, talent, he talked himself into jobs at Universal Studios in Hollywood as a production assistant and art director. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked with such future luminaries as Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. In 1934 he made an outstanding horror feature,
The Black Cat,
starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and later he directed several film noirs. On a visit to New York, Ulmer attended several Yiddish Theater productions and became aware of “a second Broadway down there.” Cognizant of the large Jewish audiences in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, Ulmer guessed that there were Yiddish-speaking viewers all across America thirsting for a well-made movie. Sooner or later somebody would provide one, he reasoned; why not me, and why not now, in 1937? His choice was
Grine Felder
(Green Fields), a kind of folktale by Peretz Hirschbein.

This was an unusual choice; then again, Ulmer was an unusual man. Although the moviemaker was born a Jew, his parents had sent him to a Jesuit school in Vienna. He knew no Yiddish. He needed help in casting, in understanding the script, in communicating with the actors. To that end Ulmer hired Jacob Ben-Ami to co-direct and aid with the casting—some performers from the Yiddish Art Theater, some from Artef, and not a bona fide star among them. From the beginning the two men were uncomfortable with each other, but they agreed on one thing:
Grine Felder
was going to take the high road. “I'm not going to do what Schwartz does,” declared Ulmer. “I'm not going to do the cheap things which Picon does. I'm going to have my own style and I'm going to do it like I see it—dignified, not dirty—not with beards where they look like madmen. The same decision which Sholem Asch made, which Chagall made.”

Like most of Peretz Hirschbein's dramas,
Grine Felder
looked back to his childhood in rural Lithuania. The Jews of that area led the severe, fundamental lives of farmers everywhere, and the budding author couldn't get away from them fast enough. In time, though, he came to regard those simple people as the true practitioners of
mentchlekhkayt,
the abiding moral obligation to one's family and neighbors. They were the last believers in the literal message of the Torah—that in the near future, the Messiah would arrive to deliver the Jews from injustice and deprivation, as promised in the scriptures. That trust in Holy Writ gave them a purity of faith undisturbed by circumstance or self-pity.