Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (9 page)

The city was full of these scrambling big shots, and downtown ghettoites wanted in on the game. Adam Gimbel and Lyman Bloomingdale rose from salesmen to retail giants. Joseph Seligman, who had started his career by trading cotton for hens, wound up as a leading banker. Citing them as exemplars, Lower East Side merchants worked out several ways to rise from humble beginnings. One was selling; opening small stores and building up a chain. Another, more prevalent, one was manufacturing. Rather than buying ready-made garments to peddle to the city's burgeoning population, they set up factories (“sweatshops” in the argot of the immigrants). There, cloth was sewn and stitched into shape by severely underpaid workers who had no recourse: it was either take the job or starve.

In
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob Riis describes a trip up “flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man.” He finds “five men and a young woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers, ‘kneepants' in the Ludlow Street dialect.”

The floor is “littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of ‘pants' ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working.”

In this situation the immigrant Jews were victimized by more enterprising and seasoned co-religionists who had learned the ropes a few years earlier. There was no social safety net for the poor in the 1880s, and precious few charities. In his autobiographical novel,
The Rise of David Levinsky,
Abraham Cahan recalls the protagonist's first day in Manhattan. He and a tailor, whom he had met aboard ship, run into a sweatshop operator on the street. The employer has come down to the Battery to look for cheap labor. The tailor is immediately hired; then comes a question for Levinsky. “And what was your occupation? You have no trade, have you?”

“I read Talmud.”

“I see, but that's no business in America.”

Out of pity the contractor hands out a quarter and departs. Levinsky is on his own. In a few days he, too, finds piecework in the garment trade.

The oppressed and crowded newcomers sent word back to their relatives overseas; America was not quite the Golden Land of their dreams. On the other hand, it wasn't the Pale, either. As David Levinsky finds, “The sign boards were in English and Yiddish, some of them in Russian. The scurry and hustle of the people were not merely overwhelmingly greater, both in volume and intensity, than in my native town. It was of another sort.” The swing and the step of the pedestrians, the voices and manner of the street peddlers “seemed to testify to far more self-confidence and energy, to larger ambitions and wider scopes, than did the appearance of the crowds in my birthplace.”

Fresh arrivals added to the vitality. They came into the tenements, wave upon wave, until by the end of the nineteenth century the Jewish regions of lower Manhattan were more crowded than the slums of Bombay. If Levinsky and his friends found this perversely heartening, the uptown journalists did not. In the opinion of the
New York Times
the Jewish district had turned downtown into “the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent.” The paper's correspondent thought it “impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be.”

The
Times
was not alone. “These people” became the bane of New York City reformers. They had a particular distaste for the Eleventh Precinct in Manhattan, the gerrymandered Jewish district. Mother
Mandelbaum was a particular irritant. The 250-pound fence, her husband, Wolfe, and their three children lived at 79 Clinton Street in a duplex elegantly furnished with furniture and draperies stolen from the homes of uptown aristocrats. Mother's dry goods were supplied by a series of colorful burglars, among them Mark Shinburn, who invested his profits in foreign money orders payable to relatives in Prussia and then returned to Europe, identifying himself as Baron Shindell of Monaco.

All this was a source of amusement in the New York ghetto, where the right kind of outlaw could assume heroic proportions. But outside that district, the words “criminal” and “Jew” were becoming synonymous.
The Great Metropolis,
first published in 1887 and popular for at least a dozen years afterward, devoted a long chapter to “New Israel, A Modern School of Crime.”

Strangely enough the author, Frank Moss, displays little of the antiNegro bias of his time. The Jews are his main concern, and he notes that the “colored people who once lived in Baxter Street were a decent population and were zealous in church going and other religious duties. They moved away, and the people who took their places were of such abandoned character that Baxter Street became the vilest and most dangerous of all the streets.”

At first he seems to view the immigrants with sympathy, describing scores of little factories and garment centers “where men and women labor far into the night, without holidays or vacations, at the lowest possible wages, barely sustaining life with the utmost expenditure of force and the most unremitting application.” But he quickly discerns the reason why these unfortunates cannot extricate themselves. They exhibit a “stubborn refusal to yield to American ideas, religious habits and requirements, clannishness, and hatred and distrust for the Christians.”

The dwellers in the New Israel are “addicted to vice, and very many of their women have no other occupation than prostitution.” In this they are aided by “a fraternity of male vermin (nearly all of them being Russian or Polish Jews) who are unmatchable for impudence and bestiality, and who reek with all unmanly and vicious humors. They are called ‘pimps.’” In sum: “The danger of giving these ignorant and illiterate people the ballot as we do is one that cannot be lightly considered.”

No help was to come from the established Ashkenazis and Sephardics. In their view, the new arrivals were speaking too loud—and
doing it in Yiddish, a language that grated on the ear. Moreover, the ruffians who were not involved with felonies caused offense in other ways. Hardly had the Eastern Europeans moved in, for example, when some of their leaders began shouting for social justice, complaining about conditions in the places where they lived and worked, calling for a six-day workweek, attempting to keep children out of the shops, forming labor unions.

Why couldn't these agitators keep quiet and go about their business? They seemed to bear a Bible in one hand and
Das Kapital
in the other. The older Jewish families had turned themselves into cosmopolites, pleased to remember that their ancestors once served as advisors to bishops and kings. To them, the Eastern Europeans were nobodies— peasants, proletarians, steeped in poverty and bound to Messianic dreams. The United Hebrew Charities in upstate New York crystallized the old-guard position. Its members, almost all of them of German extraction, told journalists the newcomers were “a bane to the country.” The Ashkenazis, they asserted, “have earned an enviable reputation in the United States. This has been undermined by the influx of thousands who are not ripe for the enjoyment of liberty and equal rights, and all who mean well for the Jewish name should prevent them as much as possible from coming here.”

Providentially, not all New Yorkers agreed with them. Lincoln Steffens, editor of the muckraking
Commercial Advertiser,
was so taken with the downtowners that he described himself as “almost a Jew.” He nailed a
mezuzah
to his office door, attended services on the High Holy Days, and fasted every Yom Kippur. The periodical's star reporter, Hutchins Hapgood, wrote of the city's public schools, “filled with little Jews; the night schools of the East Side are used by practically no other race. Altogether there is an excitement of ideas and an enthusiastic energy for acquiring knowledge which has an interesting analogy to the hopefulness and acquisitive desire of the early Renaissance.” Hapgood believed it “a mistake to think that the young Hebrew turns naturally to trade. He turns his energy to whatever offers the best opportunities for broader life and success. Other things besides business are open to him in this country.”

The most significant of those things, said Hapgood, was the stage. He described the nascent Yiddish Theater, with showplaces on or close to Second Avenue. The crowds in attendance could be as animated as a crowd at the Elizabethan Globe, or as rapt as children at a pantomime.
Hapgood paid close attention to “the sweatshop woman with her baby, the day-laborer, the small Hester Street shopkeeper, the RussianJewish anarchist and socialist, the Ghetto rabbi and scholar, the poet, the journalist.” He wrote without mockery about “sincere laughter and tears accompanying the sincere acting,” and cheerfully watched “pedlars of soda-water, candy, of fantastic gewgaws of many kinds,” as they mixed freely with the audience between the acts. “Conversation during the play is received with strenuous hisses, but the falling of the curtain is the signal for groups of friends to get together and gossip about the play or the affairs of the week.” Of greatest interest was a plump young actor who tended to go overboard with his interpretations. In matters of ego, the strutting figure was more than a match for Jacob Adler, and better connected. This was Goldfaden's spiritual second son, although Boris Thomashefsky preferred to bill himself as “America's Darling.”

THE SECOND SON

T
HE THOMASHEFSKYS
, mother, father, and five children, had left Kiev on the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II. The paterfamilias, Pinchas, held strong socialist beliefs. He was painfully aware that every movement was closely watched by the secret police. Just before they closed in, he, his wife, Chaya, and their five children fled to Belgium. From Antwerp, Pinchas booked passage for America. On the first day in New York, he moved the family into an overcrowded rooming house. On the next, he found work in a shirt factory. On the third, his
twelve-year-old son, Boris, got a job rolling cigarettes in a tobacco factory. Intimidated at first, the boy soon loosened up and began to sing Russian songs as he worked. One day a young, excitable redhead complained that a number was being rendered incorrectly—“Nyet! Nyet!” he would break in. “It don't go like that!” Abe Golubok offered his own version. It had to be the correct one, he insisted, because he knew from show business. After all, both his brothers were actors. Boris didn't believe him until the day Abe came into the factory with a rolled-up poster, sent from London.

It announced the production, in Yiddish, of Abraham Goldfaden's opera
Witch,
featuring Leon and Myron Golubok. To the cigarette rollers that notice was exhilarating—Yiddish Theater in England, of all places. Abe passed around a recent letter from Leon that was not so heady. It described deteriorating conditions for Jewish performers in London. Productions did take place now and again, Leon reported, but money was scarce. And besides, the chief rabbi discouraged his parishioners from attending. The company needed a new place to show off its wares. What about New York? Was there a chance that some rich American might bring the troupe across the Atlantic?

The ghetto immigrants heard about the uptown theater but never went there. They understood little English, and they were intimidated by the uptown crowds, the men dressed in fine frock coats and bowler hats, the women turned out in furs and feathered boas. The city's great legitimate houses were close to the Lower East Side, but to those who had fled the Pale, they might as well have been on the planet Pluto. A great pity, observed Hutchins Hapgood. The immigrants could have profited from the dramas, and been amused by the lighter fare. Situated not more than a mile from the Barnatos' rooming house, the Union Square Theater offered productions that ranged from Ibsen's
A Doll's House
(retitled
Breaking a Butterfly
for American consumption) to Alexandre Dumas's weepy melodrama
Camille.

Farther north came the Bijou, the Casino, with its brand-new roof garden, and the Empire, located way up at 42nd Street, in a place that would soon be known as Times Square. Thomas Edison was designing electric lights for the Lyceum. That venue would become the favorite of high society's Four Hundred, who made a point of dressing formally when they went to see a play. New York's elite had made much of Gilbert and Sullivan's new
H.M.S. Pinafore
and of Tom Taylor's
Ticket of Leave Man,
the melodrama of an ex-convict given a “ticket of leave”
when he is released from prison, who gets framed by a criminal mastermind and cleared by the detective Hawkshaw.