Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (48 page)

In 1992, playwright Herb Gardner also looked back with affection in his Broadway play
Conversations with My Father.
The protagonist, Charlie, is dissatisfied with what he hears in everyday life.

That year also saw the irrepressible Fyvush Finkel starring in a oneman off-Broadway show,
Finkel's Follies.
The septuagenarian spoke of his debut at the age of nine. It took another thirty-four years for him to make his first appearance on the American stage. By then he could tell old jokes that Jews knew and the
goyim
hadn't heard yet: “ ‘Doctor, doctor,’
kvetches
the woman. ‘My arm hurts in two places. What should I do?' Doctor: ‘Don't go to those places.’”

Finkel was one of the few crossover actors who had leapt from Second Avenue to Broadway and then to television, and he had no regrets. Looking back only made him bitter. Gazing at the Hebrew Actors Union building one afternoon, he shook his head. “That was a barbaric place,” Finkel said. “They could literally make you or break you.”

The barbaric place no longer threatened; it had fallen on very hard rocks. Inside, Seymour Rexite, president of the union, sat among old photos of headliners and famous visitors: Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Mayor La Guardia, Frank Sinatra. “There isn't much for me to do anymore,” the old man confessed. “All the great stars, it seems, have passed on.” Paul Muni, long gone; Joseph Buloff, Luther Adler,
Herschel Bernardi, Molly Picon, Ida Kaminska—yes, and Miriam Kressyn and Ben Bonus, too. The sons of Boris Thomashefsky, Harry and Teddy—father of the conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas—gone as well. And as if there were not enough sad news, in early 1996 Abe Lebewohl, restaurateur and worshipper of Yiddish performers, had been murdered while bringing the day's receipts to the bank. “The deli is still in operation,” Rexite observed. “It isn't the same, of course. But then, down here what is?”

AS THE
1990s came to a close the Folksbiene edged toward bankruptcy. Most of the board of directors were in their seventies and eighties, stubbornly clinging to the notion that the old repertoire would keep their organization afloat. Two younger members, composer Zalmen Mlotek and director Eleanor Reissa, disagreed. They believed that new plays, new styles, new approaches were the key to survival.

A power struggle took place. In the end, youth prevailed. The board elevated Mlotek and Reissa to the position of co–artistic directors and eliminated Zypora Spaisman's title of executive producer. The injured party resigned. Historian Nahma Sandrow called it a “multigenerational drama” not unlike the ones that used to be put on the Second Avenue stage. She listened to both sides of the story. “We wanted the Yiddish Theater to have a future, not to take it away from her,” Mlotek insisted. “We wanted to honor her work, her stubbornness that had kept it alive.” Reissa explained that having two Folksbiene artistic directors was difficult enough. “Three isn't possible. We wanted to have her on the board and as a consultant. Performing, if there was a part. We tried to give her honor. She's a formidable presence, she devoted her life to this, but it was just time for the theater to move on.”

Spaisman was having none of it. “They wanted to give me a nice party, to get money in my name and give it to the Folksbiene. And I
should step down. My heart was bleeding. They say I retired. I never retired.”

The severance was too deep to mend. The Folksbiene began the 2000–2001 season with
An Amerikaner Mishpokhe
(An American Family), an adaptation of a Broadway show with musical interludes and bright English-language supertitles above the curtain. Spaisman's splinter group, the Yiddish Public Theater, presented the honored chestnut
Grine Felder.
More plays were scheduled by the latter organization. Plans were scuttled when on May 18, 2002, Zypora Spaisman suddenly died. Obituaries quoted the Polish refugee: “My whole life has been about preserving the Yiddish language. Hitler didn't kill it. Neither did Stalin.”

Five months later Rexite passed away at the age of ninety-one. Sharp-minded to the end, he had stopped performing after the death of his wife. Although his voice remained in shape, he couldn't bring himself to go onstage anymore. Appraising the situation of his life and art, he said sadly, “I have nothing to sing about.”

Neither did Caraid O'Brien. An Irish Catholic immigrant, the actress had fallen in love with Yiddish drama as an undergraduate at Boston University. The unlikely student learned the language well enough to render a couple of Sholem Asch works into English, and lecture knowledgeably about the history of the Yiddish Theater. “I have a long, long list of plays I'd like to translate,” she told a reporter in 2004. “It's hellish work. It makes me want to tear my hair out. My advisers are dying.”

ALMOST EVERY MONTH
the papers ran an obituary for a bygone celebrity of the Yiddish Theater. Ultimately there came a valedictory for the institution itself. In an article for the English-language
Forward,
Robert Brustein paid homage to the vanished performers and to the dramas in which they starred. But he refused to mourn what had been.
In “American Theater's Debt to Yiddish Stage” the Yale professor pointed out that “in the theater, the Jewish theater particularly, everything comes round, and everyone and everything is an influence.”

His point was inarguable. In the theater, as with history itself, nothing entirely dies. It is subsumed by the next culture, the next movement. Through the centuries Latin refracts into English, Italian, French. The Grecian idea of democracy does not perish with Ancient Greece. It is taken up and revised by the Romans, and when their empire falls, finds expression in the Magna Carta in England, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, the Constitution of the United States.

In America, Yiddish is spoken fluently by only a few thousand. But hundreds of words, along with the attitude embedded in their syllables
—mavin, shlepper, chutzpah, shtick,
etc.—have entered and altered the American vocabulary. The language has an academic existence as well. Harvard, Columbia, and Ohio State offer full-fledged programs in Yiddish. According to the Modern Language Association, enrollments in these courses are almost twice the rate of growth of other foreign-language studies.

Even postmodernism has found a place among doctoral candidates: “I'm currently writing a chapter on the cross-dressing work of Molly Picon for my dissertation,” reads one Web item. At a Yale University conference on Sholem Asch, a paper is concerned with “The Brothel As Symbolic Space in Yiddish Drama”; another is titled “The Ambiguous Muse: Lesbianism and Torah in
God of Vengeance.
”

For generations, as we have seen, the shadow of the Yiddish Theater fell across the stages of Broadway and the soundstages of Hollywood. Its lineaments appear in the family plays of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller and Neil Simon. Its resonances can be heard in the tunes written by two men whose fathers were cantors in Yiddish-speaking homes. Harold Arlen fused the Jewish lament with the sounds of the blues in a manner so unprecedented that George Gershwin called him “the most original of all of us.” Irving Berlin, of course, was the preeminent tunesmith of the Lower East Side. Although he married a Roman Catholic, he remained militantly proud of his ancestry. When Irving's prospective father-in-law rejected him for his undistinguished background, the composer replied that he could trace his family back to Exodus. (“Here's another exodus for you,” grumbled Clarence Mackay. “Get out!” But Ellin Mackay became Ellin Berlin anyway.) And there was always a subversive Second Avenue element in Berlin's
deceptively simple lyrics. In
Operation Shylock,
Philip Roth mordantly observes, “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade' and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”

Today, the Yiddish Theater's tone and style can be discerned in the works of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwrights Donald Margulies (
Dinner with Friends
), who recently translated Sholem Asch's
God of Vengeance,
and Tony Kushner (
Angels in America
), who did his own version of
The Dybbuk.
“Our generation is forging new versions of Judaism,” Kushner believes. “The assimilationist experiment has run its course.”

The Yiddish Theater remains present in the performances of Al Pacino, whose attention was caught by Paul Muni in a revival of the 1932 film
Scarface.
“The film just stopped me in my tracks,” he remembered. “All I wanted to do was imitate the central character. The acting went beyond the boundaries of naturalism into another kind of expression. It was almost abstract what he did. It was almost uplifting.” Several years later, Pacino assumed the title role in Brian De Palma's remake. Thirty years later his acting still bears traces of Muni's stark performance.

Marlon Brando's words retain their power: “If there wasn't the Yiddish Theater, there wouldn't have been Stella Adler. And if there hadn't been Stella, there wouldn't have been all those actors who studied with her and changed the face of theater—and not only acting, but directing and writing.”

Among the Adlerians were John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Sanford Meisner, who was to become another influential acting teacher, as well as the Greek immigrant's son Elia Kazan (an honorary Jew to the Yiddish Theater people), who would forsake acting in favor of directing.

The Yiddish Theater style found its way into the work of Harold Clurman, a devotee of Lower East Side productions. Stella's feisty exhusband directed more than forty Broadway and off-Broadway plays, including Odets's
Awake and Sing!
, Maxwell Anderson's
Truckline Café
(Brando's breakthrough role), William Inge's
Bus Stop,
Eugene O'Neill's
A Touch of the Poet,
and Arthur Miller's
Incident at Vichy.

The Yiddish Theater could also be felt in the work of Sidney Lumet,
whose father, Baruch, was an actor in Second Avenue productions. The boy planned to follow Lumet Sr. onstage but changed his mind as an adolescent. Like Kazan, Sidney moved from acting to directing, working on Broadway and Hollywood with Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Paul Newman.

The Yiddish Theater contained the manic clowning of Sigmund Mogulesko and Aaron Lebedeff, and the styles of those men were reborn in the comic art of Mel Brooks and Robert Klein and Woody Allen and Mike Nichols and Elaine May—whose father had directed Yiddish plays in Philadelphia.

The Yiddish Theater had its effect on the Broadway star Mandy Patinkin (
Evita, Sunday in the Park with George
). Untutored in the language, he learned Yiddish for
Mamaloshen,
a bestselling album of songs by Secunda, Rumshinsky, et al.—along with a Yiddish version of “God Bless America.”

The Yiddish Theater showed itself in the efforts of Lee Strasberg, the legendary director of the Actors Studio. His students included Anne Bancroft, Maureen Stapleton, Sidney Poitier, and Dustin Hoffman. Strasberg's famous “Method” (of using personal memories to intensify a performance) had two bases. One was the discoveries of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the other, the naturalistic acting of David Kessler.

Brando cordially detested Strasberg; he claimed that the Method man stole credit away from Stella and “constantly told the world he was the mentor, the teacher, the worshipped philosopher and the possessor of the Holy Grail” of acting. Unfair, perhaps, but what would the Yiddish Theater be without an internecine quarrel?

Yet the Yiddish Theater had an additional, and perhaps more significant, role in America. It was one that had nothing to do with showfolk. The plays and musicals of that art form held a mirror up to the immigrants, helped them define who they were and what they might become in their adopted country. The options offered by the New World were not always attractive.
God of Vengeance
related a story of sexual temptation in the wide-open Promised City.
God, Man and Devil
and
Uncle Moses
addressed the corrosive nature of money in America, the sin of avarice that turned Jew against Jew. But along with these melodramas came other tales—uplifting stories of newcomers who triumphed over destitution and despair. In the end, those stories were the audience favorites, the ones that spurred them on.

Morris Raphael Cohen, who was to become a prominent professor of philosophy at City College in New York, was uncertain of his birth date. As the boat from Eastern Europe passed the Statue of Liberty on July 25, he impulsively chose that day, because, he wrote, “my mother, my sister and I reached the harbor of New York and a new chapter of my life began.” Many another immigrant regarded the Lower East Side as a kind of Holy Land, reached after much painful wandering, a land that would allow them to be born-again Jews.

In “Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” poet Delmore Schwartz portrayed these Jewish immigrants as American royalty: