Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (46 page)

“Like the rest of us theater bugs,” Yablokoff concluded afterward, “Schwartz suffered failure in the past, but, as sole boss of his theater, he carried on for years striking success again and again. The audience was willing to forgive and forget. But this was different. The enterprise was run by the people, and the blame for hammering the last nail into the coffin fell on the heads of the community.”

As Schwartz's projects sank,
The World of Sholem Aleichem
took on a life of its own. One touring company starred Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalisch. In 1957 they did a two-week stint in Atlantic City, with Kalisch as Mendele the Bookseller. Picon threw in a couple of songs that were not in the New York production, and the Kalisches played to standees for the entire fortnight.

Perl, having proved that Sholem Aleichem was still a bankable author, came up with a new project,
Tevye and His Daughters.
Would Jacob be interested in playing the lead role? And what about Molly? Would she like to take a part? The actors could hardly wait to read the script. When they did, however, their hearts sank. “We disliked every page,” wrote Picon. “I didn't like the script or the part, and neither did Jacob. The role was too long, unfunny, and the entire play seemed labored.”

Unlike Secunda and Yablokoff, the Kalisches did not suffer in silence. Jacob turned down the role, Perl fumed, and a relationship died. The show opened in September 1957, at the little Carnegie Hall Playhouse. For Molly and Jacob, any lingering doubts about their decision evaporated when they attended a performance. Mike Kellin, who later went on to a distinguished career in stage and film, played Tevye
.
He looked tired, and his lines seemed prosaic and lifeless—the opposite of Aleichem's appealing milkman. The Kalisches walked out at the first act intermission. Serious Yiddish Theater limped on, ill-clothed,
ill-fed, ill-housed. Revues, musicals, wink-and-nudge comedies had taken over. Jacob did small parts on network television dramas, customarily playing an old Jewish merchant with a marked accent—a role for which he needed no training. When he was not rehearsing he and Molly retreated to their Catskill country house, Chez Shmendrik, where they worked on his new operetta. Kalisch did the book for
The Kosher Widow
; Molly wrote the lyrics to Sholem Secunda's melodies. A typical quatrain:

The show was built around her comedic abilities; for the first time she played two roles, an older wife and a young sweetheart, and this feat made her an epic box office draw. Every night, 1,500 people came to the Phyllis Anderson Theater to see Molly, even though at sixty-two she was long past her vocal prime. Looking back, she conceded that Secunda “had a little trouble writing for me, because by the time I worked with him, I had very little voice left.” But time had not eroded a phenomenal stage presence and a fifty-year ability to connect with an audience. Secunda's son Gene was in attendance when Picon was in mid-song. “Suddenly there was this unbelievable crash outside the theater. Somebody had smashed a car into a store window or something, and there was this tremendous commotion and sound of things breaking.

“Molly turned to the audience and said, ‘
Ah, der kinder
[children].’ It broke up the house.”

Despite its large cast,
The Kosher Widow
was really a one-woman show, and that woman had other commitments. The musical closed in January 1960, because Picon had been cast in the London production of
A Majority of One.
The banal romance, about a Japanese businessman and an aging Jewish woman, was as big a hit on the West End as it had been on Broadway.

Picon never returned to the Yiddish Theater. Even if she had wanted to, there were fewer and fewer venues to receive her. In the fall of 1958, the wrecking ball banged in the sides of the Second Avenue Theater, and bulldozers began to clear away the debris, making way for a parking lot. Nearby, the National was marked as the next theater to go; the City Council had determined that it was in the way of a new Christie Street subway spur connecting the IND and BMT lines. A last-minute reprieve allowed one more Yiddish production to take place before the wreckers moved in.

Nice People
was a simple play of reminiscence, nowhere near as powerful as the memories exchanged by the actors in rehearsal. They spoke of the forty-six-year-old theater that would house them all for the last time, and of the stars who had played here—Adler, Kessler, Kalisch, and especially Thomashefsky, as flamboyant offstage as on. One of the older performers talked about Boris's many pairs of cloth shoes, each covered with material to match a particular suit. Another remembered that the superstar had the first chauffeur-driven limousine, and the first Japanese valet on Second Avenue. None of the actors mentioned a smaller auditorium in the same building.

The Rooftop Theater was currently showing
Ulysses in Nighttown,
an adaptation of the James Joyce novel. It starred Zero Mostel, another Yiddish-speaking fugitive from the blacklist. In 1958 the Rooftop meant no more to these troupers than it did to Yiddish Theater performers a generation before. In those days, the theater was known as the Minsky, featuring coarse chorines and pig-bladder comedians— strictly
traife
(non-kosher) to the crowds who had come to the National for art and uplift.

The veterans could only point to two positive signs these days, and one was ambiguous.
The Tenth Man,
Paddy Chayefsky's restatement of Ansky's
The Dybbuk,
was the hit of the Broadway season. Led by the Yiddish Theater luminary Jacob Ben-Ami, it was to be the longest running of Chayefsky's Broadway efforts, and the only one with an indisputably Jewish heart.

In it, a group of worshippers gather at a run-down Long Island temple. Beset by illness and age, they complain about their ungrateful families (“May my daughter-in-law live to be a hundred and twenty, and may she have to live all her years in
her
daughter-in-law's house”) and visit their own cemetery plots. One of their number has a beautiful but schizophrenic granddaughter, and the men believe that she is possessed
by an evil spirit. A Kabalist is engaged to remove it. During the rite a strange thing happens. A neurotic young lawyer, dragged in to form a
minyan,
suddenly falls to the floor, screaming. He turns out to be the possessed one, not she. After much disturbance, the pair go out into the world together, purged of their mental ailments. Two old men, Shlissel and Alper, wonder at what has just occurred. Echoes of Second Avenue fill the air.

Was the Yiddish Theater to survive only in translation and adaptation? Maurice Schwartz said no. The aging but indefatigable impresario had just taken over the Phyllis Anderson Theater to present four plays. Art was not exactly his first priority. The opener was
Loch in Kop,
the Yiddish version of
A Hole in the Head.
Arnold Schulman's Broadway comedy had been written about a Jewish widower, his son, and their Miami Beach hotel. The film adaptation starred Frank Sinatra and used Italian names, although it never bothered to change the locutions. Schwartz's production went back to the original conception. The accomplished vaudevillian Pesach'ke Burstein took the lead.
Loch in Kop
was followed by H. Leivick's
Shmattes
(Rags). Much was made of these works in advance publicity. Then they opened. The audience disliked them almost as much as the critics.

Not to worry, Schwartz assured friends. The Yiddish Theater was still very much alive. He would tour Israel, the Wandering Jew personified, looking for a home for his productions, confident that the young country would accommodate him. And when he got things going again, he would come back and make a triumphant American tour. Burstein,
who had played in the Jewish state many times, begged his seventyyear-old friend not to go: “I told him how difficult it would be for him to travel daily from town to town in the hot season.” Schwartz could not be dissuaded. Once in Israel he began a grand tour, finishing up each appearance by socializing with potential investors, returning to his hotel at 3:00
A.M
., rising early to begin rehearsals for the next stop on the excursion.

He wrote ecstatic letters home. Despite the government's hostility to the Yiddish language (Hebrew and even English were preferred in schools and in the theater) his tour had proved “extraordinarily successful. Here indeed is where the Yiddish Art Theater can have its home.” With an eye to the box office, he added that the locale had to be in Tel Aviv, home to so many Yiddish-speaking émigrés. “It is big business and better than anywhere else in the world…. We must have a permanent theater here and not scrounge as we do for rehearsal space.”

That theater never materialized. In May 1960, Burstein learned why. “We were broken-hearted,” his memoir records, “when we received the news that Schwartz had died of a heart attack. He had kept his heart ailment a secret from the world. Having known him intimately, I can honestly say that his death was also the result of a broken heart.”

The tragedy had not quite played out. Sholem Secunda happened to be visiting Israel at the time of Schwartz's death, and he was asked to give the eulogy. Immediately afterward the composer wrote to his sons, “The press here resents very keenly that Schwartz's body will be flown to the U.S. for burial. They argue that real Jews leave wills stating that they be buried in Israel, and here is a Jewish artist who wishes to have his returned to be buried among
goyim,
even though he was privileged to die in Israel. Oh well.”

THE FOLKSBIENE
, an impoverished, frail Yiddish theater company in constant danger of annihilation, had outlasted all the giants. The
year of Schwartz's death the little troupe moved into the
Forward
building, guaranteeing it a permanent home with four walls and a roof, plus heat in the winter, fans in the summer, and best of all, continuing subsidies from the newspaper and the Workmen's Circle. Sporadically, other Yiddish productions would take place in New York, but they were one-shots, musicals, and charity fund-raisers. Ensconced in their new place, Folksbiene managers claimed that theirs was the oldest continuously operating Yiddish theater in the world. As proof, all past productions were listed year by year, ranging all the way back to 1915. It was an impressive roster.

Among the authors included were Sholem Aleichem, Leon Kobrin, and both Singer brothers, Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis; also the Russians Alexander Pushkin and Maxim Gorki; and such American authors as Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, and Clifford Odets. It didn't matter how well attended those shows were, or how well acted, or the duration of their runs. The point was that the Folksbiene had survived, just as the Jewish people had survived. Together, they were the keepers of the flame. It was a very small candle in a very big city.

Another occurrence in that year gave the Yiddish-speaking public an additional reason for hope. The name Isaac Bashevis Singer had entered New York's literary world, emerging from the
Forward,
where “Gimpel the Fool” first appeared. That short story had attracted the attention of Irving Howe, who encouraged Saul Bellow to translate it from Yiddish to English for the
Partisan Review.

“This was not a big magazine,” Singer was to write later, “but it appeared that everyone of significance read that issue.” With the clarity of a folktale, “Gimpel” recounted the misadventures of a Jewish simpleton who is mocked by the crowd, cuckolded by his wife, tempted to vengeance by the devil—yet who manages through a hard and painful life to remain a purer soul than those with better minds and fatter purses. The resemblance to Bontche did not go unnoticed.

Singer was asked to contribute to
Commentary,
where his novel
The Magician of Lublin
appeared, chapter by chapter, in English translation. The protagonist is a Jewish Don Juan, working his magic in fin de siè¨cle Poland by juggling not only the objects in his stage act, but the many women in his private life. Singer's prose was erotic and vigorous, his characters incandescent.
Magician
was acclaimed in newspapers and
intellectual quarterlies, causing its writer to make the journey from obscurity to recognition in a matter of months.

The language in which he wrote was as defunct as Latin—or so it seemed. And then unexpectedly Yiddish came to life.
Mademoiselle
astonished its readers by publishing a translated Singer story.
Harper's
wanted in on this literary phenomenon; so did
The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy,
and the
Reporter.
At the same time, says the author's biographer, Paul Kresh, “the
Herald Tribune
and the
New York Times, Midstream, American Judaism,
and other journals were publishing Isaac's essays while articles about him were beginning to appear almost as frequently as articles
by
him.” Whenever he could, Singer championed Yiddish. He made a point of reminding the public that Hebrew had been five thousand years out of date until the state of Israel resuscitated it. Why couldn't this be true of a more recent Jewish tongue?