Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (48 page)

46. Ibid., p. 40.

1. As Erdman notes, a key theatrical, semiotic marker of the belle juive was her arms, shoulders and throat revealed (ibid., p. 44).
   

2. Tamar Garb, “Introduction: Modernity, Identity, Textuality,” in
   The Jew in the Text
   , p. 27.
   

3. See Al LeValley, “The Great Escape,” in
   Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture
   , ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 60–70.
   

4. Garb, “Introduction,” p. 26.
   

5. This scene apparently caused some friction during rehearsals for the play, as Streisand invented many of the one-liners and much of the schtick and turned the song from Nick’s seduction number to Fanny’s parody of it. Sidney Chaplin, who played Arn- stein on Broadway, objected to his diminished role in this and other songs. “It had been an emasculating process for Chaplin” (Riese,
   Her Name Is Barbra
   , p. 227).
   

6. On typical Hollywood musical narrative structures, see Feuer,
   The Hollywood Mu- sical
   .
   

7. Spiegel calls this song one of Streisand’s “arias of self-intoxication” (“The Vanishing Act,” p. 272).
   

8. As I note above, my reading is based on the film’s 1968 release, when the JAP image no doubt influenced the production and consumption of this number. A reading of “Sadie,” a song that asserts a working woman’s desire to be a married, middle-class home- maker, would be different in the context of
   Funny Girl
   ’s pre- and post-WWI setting. Thanks to Carol Batker for helping me to clarify this point.
   

9. Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Jewish Culture,” in
   People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Em- bodied Perspective
   , ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 331.
   

10. Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses,” p. 331.
    

11. Riv-Ellen Prell, “Rage and Representation: Jewish Gender Stereotypes in American Culture,” in
    Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture
    , ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon, 1990), p. 258.
    

12. Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses,” p. 336. 59. Ibid., p. 336.
    

1. The second part of the film also downplays Fanny’s Jewishness and links her visu- ally to 1968 fashion through a boyish bob haircut and loose, silky fabrics of mixed textures and warm, bright colors. Streisand reenvoices Fanny, speaking in an almost British dialect, lapsing only into the “Jewish” accent, which dominates her speaking voice in the first part, when she cracks a joke. Fanny shows that she has remade herself. The parody of
   Swan Lake
   in which Fanny appears toward the end of the film reminds viewers that her markedly Jew- ish performance style is still authentic. She’s still Jewish.
   

2. Levine, “A Jewess,” p. 151.
   

3. Spiegel describes the male protagonists in Streisand’s films as “pallid, or feckless, or self-destructive, or in any event, fully unworthy movie lover of her immediate atten- tions.” He adds, “Each of her four most famous films allows her to lose this lover and gain herself,” but he harshly criticizes what he sees as her limitless ego (“The Vanishing Act,” p. 272).
   

4. Not only that, she was a Jew with an Arab who portrayed a Jew shortly after the 1967 war. The studio played it up as cultural diplomacy, but the film was banned in Egypt.
   

5. See Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” in
   The Jew in the Text
   , pp. 97–120; Alisa Solomon, “Queering the Canon: Azoi toot a Yid,” in
   Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender
   (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 95–129.
   

6. Riese,
   Her Name Is Barbra
   , p. 278.
   

7. George Bernard Shaw quoted in Solomon, “Queering the Canon,” p. 101.
   

8. Spiegel, “The Vanishing Act,” p. 271.
   

Tragedy and Trash: Yiddish Theater and Queer Theater, Henry James, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger

MICHAEL MOON

Not knowing whether to laugh or cry is a classic affective dilemma. The mixed sense of pain, absurdity, and ridiculousness that has been the common emotional lot of protoqueer children and adolescents over the past century has probably made many queer adults less patient than we might otherwise be with neat academic distinctions between the comic and the tragic. The in- tensity and unpredictability with which these two supposedly discrete dra- matic modes can interact with each other is a primary concern of this essay’s exploration of relations between two theatrical renaissances in New York, that of the Yiddish theater of the turn of the century and the queer theater of the 1960s and after.

“The accent of the very ultimate future, in the States, may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity,” Henry James writes in
The American Scene
, “but whatever we shall know it for,” he goes on, “certainly, we shall not know it for English.”
1
James rarely indulged in science fiction, so his speculation here about the transformation or supersession of English in the United States by some other language or lan- guages in “the very ultimate future” may sound odd in a text primarily de- voted to the author’s impressions of America on his return to it after a twenty- year absence. However, a context can be provided for this by noting that James made this remark apropos of the English he heard being spoken as he sat in the Cafe Royal, on the Lower East Side, a favorite resort at the time of Jewish journalists, artists, playwrights, and actors. What was James hearing, and how did he come to be in this place?

It would be wrong to assume—as readers probably have often done—that the languages James was hearing that moved him to make this prediction were primarily Yiddish and Yiddish-accented English. According to Nahma Sandrow, the leading English-language historian of the Yiddish theater, the

Cafe Royal at the turn of the century was a principal social headquarters of New York’s Russian Jewish intelligentsia, and the dominant languages spoken there were Russian and Russian-accented English. “These intellectuals re- spected Russian as the language of the Russian people and as the vehicle of a great literature,” she writes; “they sweated to learn English: but they scorned Yiddish as the
jargón
of pietism, lullabies, and
shund
[Yiddish for “trash”].”
2
James’s host on his visit to the Lower East Side was Jacob Gordin, who had made himself into the Yiddish theater’s leading playwright in the preced- ing decade.
3
Growing up in the Ukraine, Gordin spoke and wrote Russian more comfortably than Yiddish and, as a teenager, began publishing articles and other writings in Russian newspapers. Arriving in New York in 1891 at the age of thirty-eight, a refugee from the czarist police with a wife and eight children, Gordin still found writing in Yiddish hard work, but writing for one of the new Yiddish newspapers on the Lower East Side was the job he found

available, so he took it.

Gordin and his fellow Russian Jewish intellectuals were contemptuous of the popular Yiddish theater, which at the time was only in its second decade, and still consisted primarily of slapdash adaptations of old and new theatrical classics, clunky operettas set in a vague romantic past, and creaky domestic melodramas. This theater, which had a large and fervent audience composed of both lettered and unlettered working folk, shamelessly mixed elements from the theatrical grab bag: high tragedy and low comedy, stagey heroics and patter songs, ritualized “business” and antic improvisation.

Gordin saw his first Yiddish play the year he arrived in New York. Both repulsed and excited by the spectacle, he set to work on his first contribution to the theater, which was produced later that year. Subsequent plays of his—
God, Man, and Devil, The Jewish King Lear, Mirele Efros
—became the back- bone of the Yiddish repertory and the signature roles of some of its most pop- ular stars: Jacob P. Adler, Sigmund Feinman, Bertha Kalish, Esther Rokhl Kaminska (“the mother of the Yiddish theater”), David Kessler, Keni Liptzin, Sigmund Mogulesko.

Gordin’s struggles to reform the Yiddish theater are legendary. Perform- ers commonly “raised the tone” of language they found too plain, delivered stirring speeches or crowd-pleasing wisecracks ad libitum, and eked out their roles by interpolating songs and dances at what were supposed to be mo- ments of gravity.
4
In a marked departure from tradition, Gordin forbade all these practices. He rebuked some of the stars of his plays during performance for reverting to what he saw as their old bad habits, even breaking out of character if he was also in the cast, or railing at them from his box in the the- ater (thereby at least momentarily contributing to the chaos on which he was

otherwise dedicated to imposing order). In 1904, around the time he es- corted Henry James through the Lower East Side, Gordin had attempted to establish a theater that would perform his plays in repertory and had seen the venture fail financially. Five years later he was dead, at the age of fifty-six. Ac- tors in the Yiddish theater mourned that without him to show the way, it was “back to the wooden swords and paper crowns” of the Purim plays in which Yiddish theater had had its long gestation.
5

James appears to have attended two performances of the Yiddish theater during his time in New York. Leon Edel mentions his visiting “a Bowery the- atre with the cosmopolite name of Windsor” where, Edel writes, the audience was, to James’s eye, full of “alien faces, Moldavian, Galician, Hebraic.”
6
Actu- ally, although James mentions “the hue of the Galician cheek, [and] the light of the Moldavian eye” in his account of the occasion in
The American Scene
, the term
Hebraic
in Edel’s list seems to be his own addition; James leaves it at the vaguer and perhaps more euphemistic “Oriental.”
7
Edel seems not to re- alize that the Windsor was a major Yiddish theater at the turn of the century. Hutchins Hapgood, in his classic account of the Lower East Side
The Spirit of the Ghetto
(1902), mentions in passing that at that time (two or three years before James’s visit), the Windsor was under lease to “Professor” Moyshe Hurwitz, known to history as one of the early Yiddish theater’s two leading schlockmeisters (the other was Jacob Lateiner).
8

James describes his attendance at the Windsor at some length in the fifth chapter of
The American Scene
, “The Bowery and Thereabouts”; he introduces the episode by mentioning “the accident of a visit, one afternoon of the dire midwinter, to a theatre in the Bowery at which a young actor in whom I was interested had found for the moment a fine melodramatic opportunity.”
9
James represents himself as feeling distinctly an outsider, recalling the native Yankee audiences that had filled the theater when he was a child. His response to the performance itself takes the form of bemusement at the contradiction he sees between the “Oriental public” that now fills the theater and the “su- perior Yankee machinery” that provides the play with what little point it seems to have: “a wonderful folding bed in which the villain of the piece, pur- suing the virtuous heroine round and round the room and trying to leap over it after her, is, at the young lady’s touch of a hidden spring, engulfed as in the jaws of a crocodile.” What James took away from the occasion was a linger- ing sense of “a queer, clumsy, wasteful social chemistry.”
10

Apparently on the occasion of his visit to the Lower East Side, Jacob Gordin escorted him to the Yiddish theater as well as to the Cafe Royal. What he saw on that occasion he recalls as “some broad passage of a Yiddish come- dy of manners.” James again finds himself disturbed, as he had been listening

to the languages of the Cafe Royal. Once again, his unease arose from what he perceived as the threat of linguistic mixture and transformation: the stars of the Yiddish theater were beginning to appear in productions in other lan- guages, or, as James puts it, “in a language only definable as not in
intention
Yiddish—not otherwise definable.” This fault, if it was one, was not that of the Yiddish theater performers themselves so much, James claims, as a reflec- tion of turn-of-the-century New York audiences in general, where “auditors seem[ ] to know as little as care to what idiom they suppose[ ] themselves to be listening.” “Marked in New York,” James concludes, “by many indications, this vagueness of ear as to differences, as to identities, of idiom.”
11

It seems strange that when Gordin escorted James, a major celebrity of the Anglo-American literary world, on a visit to the Yiddish theater, he took him to see a characteristic piece of
shund
—“trash,” vulgar pop theater—rather than to one of his own plays or some other, worthy, “artistic” production of realist Yiddish drama. James soon expressed a desire to depart from the the- ater. Edel writes, embroidering James’s laconic account of the event, “The place was convivial; the ventilation left much to be desired, and after looking at some broad passage of a Yiddish comedy of manners he walked out—‘it was a scent, literally, not further to be followed.’”
12
Did the theater and/or the comedy James and Gordin dropped in on actually stink, or did James’s unease conduce him to respond with his own “broad” display of airy antisemitism? James’s views of life in New York and in the United States as a whole in 1904–5 are fairly uniformly pessimistic, especially with regard to the emer- gence of mass culture in this country, but his recurrent negative responses to New York’s Jewish masses are notably more visceral than his responses to any other group—except perhaps the sharp disgust he had privately professed with Oscar Wilde (“a tenth-rate cad”) at the time of his arrest and trial ten years earlier.

James was in some ways very much a product of New York’s antebellum Anglo patriciate, and his often patronizing and stereotyping remarks about Jews, in his published and private writings, were echoed by Edith Wharton and others of his fellow expatriate New Yorkers. Leon Edel in his familiar role as James’s principal apologist has defended James against the charge of anti- semitism with regard to his extended characterization of the “swarms” of Jews he unhappily observes on the Lower East Side; while this matter deserves clos- er attention than Edel gives it, other narratives Edel makes available in the course of his biography of James, such as James’s disagreement with his friend Paul Bourget over what he saw as Bourget’s indefensible attitude toward the Dreyfus affair, do suggest that while James shared some of the unexamined antisemitism of his class, he was quite capable of thinking otherwise—at least