Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (47 page)

In fact, for all his noble defense of Yiddish, Singer had benefited mightily from translations. Without them he would have remained a cult figure known only to the diminishing readership of the
Forward.
With them he had become renowned throughout the English-speaking world. That truth was taken to heart by publishers and by theater people, who sensed that the tempo and attitudes of Yiddish might still be commercially viable,
if
it could be made accessible to an American audience. Several years before, Arnold Perl had found a way with
The World of Sholem Aleichem.
Where was it written that another translator couldn't give Aleichem a fresh interpretation, this time on Broadway?

Composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick had won Pulitzer Prizes for the score to
Fiorello!,
a 1959 Broadway musical about the bygone New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his war with Tammany Hall. Since that time they had written several other shows with varying degrees of success. In 1963 they began writing songs for a new project, with a book by Joseph Stein. The trio's first thought was to adapt Aleichem's Yiddish Theater novel
Blondzhedeh Stern
(Wandering Star), about a Jewish troupe during the Goldfaden era. A surfeit of subplots slowed them down, and they turned to their second choice: the Tevye stories.

The finished result, soon to be known as
Fiddler on the Roof,
attracted the attention of director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, and stage designer Boris Aronson, who knew more about the Yiddish Theater than the rest of the team combined. Borrowing heavily from the floating
images of Marc Chagall, Aronson gave the show a highly tinted, romantic background. And Robbins, perching the title character on the slanted top of a
shtetl
dwelling, emphasized the precarious quality of Jewish life under the czar. Bock's melodies echoed the minor-key airs of Yiddish songs, and both Harnick and Stein caught the ironic attitudes of the language.

The out-of-town tryout in Detroit began poorly; the local reviewers found little to like, and the man from
Variety
wrote the worst critique of all: “None of the songs is memorable.” After a considerable reworking,
Fiddler
opened in New York in the autumn of 1964.
Herald Tribune
critic Walter Kerr found the show inconsequential and crass: “It might be an altogether charming musical, if only the people of Anatevka did not pause every now and then to give their regards to Broadway with remembrances to Herald Square.” Howard Taubman disagreed. His “money” review in the
Times
also found fault with a show that sometimes made “a gesture that is Broadway rather than the world of Sholem Aleichem.” But he entered this objection “because
Fiddler on the Roof
is so fine that it deserves counsels toward perfection.” Otherwise, things were “marvelously right,” “faithful to its origins,” “filled with laughter and tenderness,” and brimming with “uncommon quality.” As for Zero Mostel in the part of Tevye, his was “one of the most glowing creations in the history of the theater.”

The musical took off after that. Before the year was out, no Jewish wedding was complete without a recital of the Bock and Harnick number “Sunrise, Sunset” with its sweet, derivative melody and insistent Hallmark card lyrics:

And Mostel's rendition of “If I Were a Rich Man” was cited by reviewers as a classic summing up of Aleichem's attitudes about money and wisdom:

Mostel, a larger-than-life character who reminded the
New York Times
caricaturist Al Hirschfeld of “an exploded ventricle,” soon added
new lore to the Broadway book of legends. For one thing, when he sang on the original cast recording, he did “If I Were a Rich Man” in only one take—an astonishing achievement for such a complicated number. But according to
Playbill
archivist Louis Botto, the “temperamental and eccentric” Zero had another distinction: he almost kept the show from its destiny. “On the opening night they had a terrible time with him because he sat on the curb in front of the Imperial and wouldn't go into the theater. Jerome Robbins had to practically drag him in.” Moreover, “after the show had been running for a while, he had been ad-libbing like crazy, which drove the authors up the wall.” Especially when he improvised in Yiddish, at once delighting and mystifying the onlookers—after all, the show was supposed to
be
in Yiddish, magically translated for American audiences.

Nevertheless, thanks to Zero and Co.
Fiddler
won nine Tony Awards including Best Costumes (Patricia Zipprodt), Best Producer (Hal Prince), Best Director and Choreographer (Jerome Robbins), Best Musical, Best Composer and Lyricist, Best Leading Actor, and Best Featured Actress (Maria Karnilova, as Tevye's wife Golde). The show was eventually presented throughout Europe, South America, and Asia in more than twenty languages and was a hit in every one of them. The musical went on to inspire a parody in
Mad
magazine. Entitled “Antenna on the Roof,” it pictured the lives of Tevye's descendants, living in suburban America.

It took Irving Howe to cool the atmosphere surrounding this megahit. On the subject of Jewish history and tradition, the public intellectual had better credentials than either Bock, Harnick, Stein, Robbins, or Aronson. While others grew weak from laughter as they watched Mostel/Tevye plead with the Almighty and negotiate with his five daughters, and while record stores could barely keep up with demand for the original cast LP, Howe cast a cold eye upon
Fiddler.
Sholem Aleichem, he declared, “is deprived of his voice, his pace, his humane cleverness and boxed into the formula of a post
-Oklahoma!
musical: the gags, the folksy bounce, the archness, the ‘dream sequences,’ the fiercely athletic dances.” No doubt the lead actor was “a genius,” but an inspired performer was not enough to save this travesty of Jewish tradition. “Too many matchmakers have crossed up the union between Sholem Aleichem and Mostel: hack lyricists and composers, a choreographer whose work has become so slick as finally to be sterile.”

To Howe the accolades were worse than the material. American
Jews had lost touch with their past, and the guilt was compounded by indulging themselves in an unearned nostalgia. The more they had departed from their Eastern European roots, or even from the Lower East Side experience, the more they lauded it, pathetically grateful for any scraps of ethnicity. “A politician drops a Yiddish phrase, and they roar with delight. A TV comic slips in a Yiddish vulgarism, and they regard this as a communal triumph…. A play like
Fiddler on the Roof
exhibits the materials of Jewish family life, and the audience goes wild.”

Howe saw no way out of the paradox caused by assimilation. Jews had first been accepted and finally rewarded in America, but a price tag was attached. In a nation where, as Henry Ford had notoriously asserted, history is bunk, they had to relinquish the past and replace memories with yearnings. Howe concluded his thesis with a glum prophecy: “If a future historian of the Yiddish epoch of American Jewish life will want to know how it came to an end, we can now tell him. Yiddish culture did not decline from neglect, nor from hostility, nor from ignorance. If it should die, it will have been from love—from love and tampering.”

A SIGH INTO AN OPERA

I
N
1986, riffling through a book of photographs in Van Nuys, California, Teddy Thomashefsky remembered a place three thousand miles and eighty years distant, when his father considered himself America's Darling. Along with high art and some of the most vigorous performances in New York, the backdrop of the Yiddish Theater, said Boris's oldest son, “made the Left Bank of Paris look like a convent. There was every form of degeneration you can imagine: murder, suicide, drugs, sex deviations of all kinds. These were the emergent
Jews, after years of living a Torah-cloistered existence, suddenly free— and drunk with it.”

The intoxication had lasted for more than a hundred years. But by the 1980s, the Yiddish Rialto had become Hangover Square. A
Times
reporter stopped by the Hebrew Actors Union to check out the morale of the few survivors of Second Avenue's apogee. He ran into a hostile response. A veteran actress complained about the depressing stories in the newspapers. “Why do they bemoan us?” demanded Miriam Kressyn. “Why do they say we are dead?” A colleague chimed in: “If I'm buried I don't feel it.” Ben Bonus cited a list of positive items, showing that their profession was alive and well. All right, not well. But at least kicking.

Union bylaws specified that every off-Broadway musical had to employ a minimum of six musicians. Not so the people of the Yiddish Theater. By special arrangement, they could make do with one pianist. Actors were permitted to do the work of stagehands, and they could also design their own illumination and sound. Moreover, the New York State Council for the Arts had just promised the Folksbiene troupe a yearly grant of $10,000.

Bonus held up a clipping. The
Times
itself had just commended their new production: “The surprise is the general youth of the cast, as a result of which romantic leads are of appropriately youthful demeanor.” This is “no mean achievement in a theater where until recently, aging audiences commonly saw aging performers still playing the ardent lovers they had personified four decades ago.”

But truth to tell, that cast was not so springy. One of the stars, Zypora Spaisman, had been with the company twenty-eight years. When she was not onstage the elderly diva served as a Folksbiene executive. In her downtime she liked to regale the younger players (quite a few of them middle-aged) with stories of the old days. Zipora's favorite concerned her debut in
The Lonesome Ship,
a drama about the doomed voyage of the
St. Louis.
“The director cast me as a German with a Jewish husband. In the play I was on the ship with the old people. They were crying and asking for help, and I was a spy, giving signals to help the German submarines find the Jewish ship.

“The play was so realistic that I had to leave the theater disguised; the audience outside wanted to kill me for being a spy. ‘What the hell is she doing in the Folksbiene?' they asked. Here I was the victim of a concentration camp myself.

“And I want to tell you, at the time we didn't have a theater, we played in the Y on Stanton Street. Downstairs, they're playing PingPong. Upstairs they're playing handball. And every time they bounced the balls, it made the ‘ship' rock. It was so realistic. People wanted to know how we did it! They thought it was part of the set.”

Eyes rolled; she had related these stories many, many times. But the listeners responded out of more than mere politeness. This was a woman who had seen what they could only imagine: the last great moments of an art form expiring before her eyes.

THE JEWISH REPERTORY THEATER
came full circle in the 1980s. In the past, writers and musicians had forced songs into the unlikeliest dramas, among them
King Lear
and Tolstoy's
Redemption.
Now Jacob Gordin's earthy drama
Mirele Efros
was renamed
Pearls,
and supplied with arias and choreography.

Hirschbein's
Green Fields
was revived at the Young Men's Hebrew Association on 92nd Street. The Congress for Jewish Culture invented and presented “Goldy” awards, silver statuettes named for Abraham Goldfaden. These productions and prizes were given with great fervor and hope. None had any staying power.

Abe Lebewohl, owner of the Second Avenue Deli, tried to put a funny face on the situation in the mid-1980s. On the sidewalk outside his restaurant, thirty Stars of David were outlined in the cement, Hollywood-style, glorifying the names of Adler, Thomashefsky, Schwartz, Picon, and other top personalities of the Yiddish Theater.

By the time 1988 rolled around, Joseph Papp, impresario of the Public Theater and a Yiddish Theater enthusiast, wanted to have a final word. He mounted a revival of
Café Crown,
Hy Kraft's 1942 comedy about the Café Royal and its denizens. Frank Rich, the
Times
drama critic, cannily appraised the production as a “sentimental journey back through time, into the warm glow of two nearly extinct forms of theatrical
endeavor.” The two forms were a) a twenty-person “straight” play, once a Broadway staple and now too prohibitive for uptown. And b) the Yiddish Theater itself. This version of
Café Crown
proved “an occasion not just for laughter but for paying a grand, departed theatrical universe affectionate final respects.”