Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (11 page)

Yomen's requirements were rigorous. He demanded a new sketch every week, and it had to contain at least one song and some accompanying choreography. Boris agreed to everything. Thus it was that the National's vaudeville bill included “Parker and His Dogs,” “The Bowery Belles,” and “Shmendrik's Wedding” the first week, and “Lost in a Pullman” followed by a scene from
Recruits
the next. The summer of 1884 proved to be a golden one for Boris—and for Yomen, who measured the laughter and applause that greeted the Jewish performers. Impressed, he made plans to present full-length Yiddish plays in the fall.

Boris's income allowed the Thomashefsky family to relocate. No sooner had they settled into new digs on Eldridge Street, though, when unsettling news reached them. Something called the Russian Yiddish Opera Company, a team of polished professionals fresh from “a triumphal tour of Europe,” had been booked to appear at Turn Hall.

Boris reassured his fellow actors. Manhattan was a big place with more than enough room for two Yiddish troupes, he said. Who knows, maybe even three? But Barsky, the playwright/tailor, knew better than to compete with the real thing. “Pack up, children,” he instructed. “You will soon be rolling cigars, pressing shirts.” He left them with a final admonition: “Forget theater!”

BARSKY'S WARNING
was on the money. Unlike the Thomashefsky bunch, the Russian Yiddish Opera Company disdained ad-libs and made no asides to the audience. They boomed their speeches, smote
their foreheads, and beat their breasts in a style calculated to impress the gullible onlookers.

In another scene from his autobiographical novel
The Education of David Levinsky,
Abraham Cahan describes an evening in the Yiddish Theater. The narrator beholds an actress playing a modern Russian girl: “She declaimed her lines, speaking like a prophetess in ancient Israel, and I liked it extremely. I was fully aware that it was unnatural, but that was just why I liked it. I thought it perfectly proper that people on the stage should not talk as they would off the stage. I thought that this unnatural speech was one of the principal things an audience paid for.”

At Turn Hall, the leading man, Maurice Heine, and the prima donna, his wife, Sara, played to packed houses every night. The following spring a Yiddish newspaper ran letters from enthusiasts—one demanding that the orchestra be a little more muted, the better to hear the “electrifying voice and speech of Madame Heine.” In an unprecedented review, the
New York Sun
's drama critic journeyed downtown to see
Bar Kochba.
He was overwhelmed by Goldfaden's “richly melodic score.” This praise and recognition were more than Boris could endure. “The Heines' success broke my heart,” he was to admit, and left town to start again, this time in Philadelphia with his father and a ragtag group of hopefuls. “When I come back,” he resolved, “the whole world will listen.” He was to make good on that forecast.

Now that the competition had bowed out, the Heines were the only show in town. But in June 1886, it came
their
turn to be rattled by an announcement. The Jewish Operetta Company of Romania had arrived in New York. The director was Sigmund Mogulesko, the clown who had gotten his start in Goldfaden's first company. The Heines reacted quickly, renting the two-thousand-seat Oriental Theater on the Bowery. They assured customers that the refurbished venue had improved seating, good ventilation in the hot weather, and steam heat in the winter. In short, a palace. (These assurances were a requisite: before the Oriental went legitimate it had been a museum, a menagerie, an aquarium, a low-ranking vaudeville house, and a saloon.) In answer, Mogulesko made an in-your-face move, leasing the National Theater right across the street from the Oriental. He renamed it the Romanian Opera House in honor of his country of origin.

Here began the serious rivalries that were to mark the Yiddish Theater throughout its fevered life. At the Romanian, Mogulesko's
group played on Friday and Saturday evenings. When the demand for seats increased, Monday and Wednesday evenings were added, and then Sunday nights went on the schedule. The National matched them, night for night, matinee for matinee. Admission prices in both theaters escalated from 25 cents for the back rows, to 35, 50, and 75 cents for seats closer to the stage. Boxes cost $1.00.

In his appreciation of the Lower East Siders, Hutchins Hapgood observed that the Yiddish Theater was now “practically the only amusement of the ghetto Jew.” The folks who made $10 a week in the sweatshop bought a balcony seat because they lacked “the loafing and sporting instincts of the poor Christian, and spent their money for theater rather than for drink.” But it was not only for the play that the poor Jew attended the performances. It was “to see friends and actors. With these latter, he, and more frequently she, tries in every way to make acquaintance, but commonly is compelled to adore at a distance.”

The Romanian opened the 1888 season with an extravagant five-act opera,
Rashi, or the Persecution of the Jews in France.
The dialogue was by Moishe Isaac Hurwitz, one of those extraordinary hustlers who could only have come from Europe, and who could only have flourished in America.

Hurwitz entered the Yiddish Theater in Jassy, Romania, where he saw
Recruits.
After the final curtain, the short, thickset visitor, bearded and dressed
èla mode,
went backstage and wangled an introduction to Goldfaden. He identified himself as the renowned Professor M. I. Hurwitz, specialist in world geography and playwriting.

Something about the man didn't seem kosher, and Goldfaden asked a few questions around town. The “Professor,” it turned out, was nothing of the kind. He had once taught Hebrew on the elementary level and was summarily fired from that position. Shortly afterward he converted to Christianity, and was currently a missionary in Bucharest. Confronted with the facts, Hurwitz acknowledged that he had indeed abandoned his old faith. “Hard times,” he explained. “I didn't earn much with the old God. The new one brought me 90 francs a month.” A man may do what he likes, Goldfaden told him, but there was no way a Jewish audience could accept the work of a Christian missionary.

Hurwitz stomped off into the night. However, the success of Goldfaden's troupe made him think twice about the possibilities of Yiddish Theater. Over the next few weeks he gathered a
minyan.
Before these ten Jewish witnesses he pronounced himself a Hebrew once more,
altered his name to Hurwitz-Halevy, hired a bunch of amateur actors, and began to stage his own plays in the back room of a Jassy restaurant. When the Russo-Turkish War emptied the town of its middle-class Jewish population, Hurwitz got out with the rest.

He popped up in London in the mid-1880s, then made his way to New York City, where he contrived to meet Mogulesko. After a tryout, he signed on as the Romanian Opera House playwright. It was a bargain for both men. Over the next several years play after play spilled from Hurwitz's pen, some original, most plagiarized, all crowd pleasers.

To counter the man they referred to as “the sausage machine,” the Heines summoned one Joseph Lateiner to the Romanian. This unique figure had been an actor, prompter, and translator in Goldfaden's company, rendering Russian, French, and German plays into Yiddish. In Europe it was his custom, as one scholar put it, “to take a foreign play, squeeze every drop of juice out of it, change the Gentile names to Jewish ones, slap on manly beards and
peyes
(sidelocks) and let them parade across the stage as Jews.” He followed exactly the same process in America.

But at least Lateiner tried to adhere to historical truth. His rival Hurwitz had no standards at all; his strength was his speed. The Professor's “history plays,” for example, freely mixed the events of two centuries, falsifying events whenever it suited his purpose. Once, in a self-created emergency he cast himself as a sultan in an Oriental drama. The purpose was to save the final act, still incomplete on opening night. “Whatever I say, nod your head,” he hissed to the company just before the curtain rose. The playwright came onstage spouting high-sounding phrases for forty-five minutes. It sounded deep; the audience clapped and cheered just as if they knew what was going on.

Lateiner attempted to keep up. At first he celebrated Jewish history; then tried contemporary realism. His most earnest effort was
Tizla Eslar,
the true story of a rabbi recently accused of ritual murder in Hungary. This was supposed to show up Mogulesko's old-fashioned repertoire. But Hurwitz immediately went on the defense. Two weeks later, the Romanian advertised a
two-
play cycle by the rapid Professor.
The Trial at Tisla Eslar,
plus
The Conspiracy at Tisla Eslar,
would be presented on successive nights, a Yiddish Theater first.

Each theater had its fanatical devotees. Some preferred the Oriental, others the Romanian. Each group detested the other, and loudly proclaimed their allegiance. The rivals called themselves
patriotn,
true
believers who lauded their chosen author, dressed in the manner of their favorite actors, bought tickets to hated productions so that they could razz the performers and playwrights, out-shouted the theater claques, and engaged in fistfights. No lives were lost in the rivalry between the Oriental and Romanian crowds. But blood was spilled and uptown journalists derided the ghetto's troglodyte behavior.

Ironically, as Nahma Sandrow points out, the harder Lateiner and Hurwitz worked to stress their differences, the more the public linked their names. They became “synonymous with vulgar dramatic baked goods of an uncertain freshness.” Both “plunged into the bakery business, until the two were almost continually bent over their respective ovens like cartoon madmen, jerkily kneading and shoveling in play after play after play.” The result of that madcap competition was not cheaper prices or a renewed public interest. Audiences came to resent the way Hurwitz rode around town like a Mittel-European prince, driving a phaeton and four horses and looking down on the very people who bought tickets to his fare. They also wearied of the raucous Lateiner supporters. By the late 1880s attendance had fallen off at both the Oriental and Romanian theaters. If those companies were bent on wrecking each other, the patrons asked, why should the public shell out for it? Let the
verdampte
showfolk pay for the demolition themselves.

FATHER AND SONS

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1887 a chorus of cheers went up at Castle Garden. The entire Heine organization had come to welcome the Father himself. They carried Abraham Goldfaden's luggage, looked after his wife, Paulina, conveyed them to a fine hotel, and presented them with a season's pass to the Romanian. That night the troupe played with special panache, a salute to the Father of Yiddish Theater. At a cast party afterward, they begged him to join the company. The word “gratitude” was not in his lexicon. “I must have my
own
company,” he replied imperiously. “I can be a part of no other.”

At those words, said one of his listeners, “we became as frightened as sheep that see a wolf. The stars saw they would be nothing more than Goldfaden's employees. The supporting actors were used to the old
tsorus
(troubles). They did not want new ones.” New
tsorus
was what they got, anyway. It came with the Father.

USING AN AMALGAM
of guile and guilt, Goldfaden persuaded the owners of the Romanian to grant him absolute power. Operating directly across the street from the rival Heine troupe, he would have the final say in personnel, set design, costumes, repertory. As a final thumbing of the Father's nose, the theater was renamed the Goldfaden Opera House.
Bar Kochba
was to be their first presentation. This opera, set in the year 137, would relate the tragic and glorious history of the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. It had already been done in Russia, and the New York posters asserted: “This is the finest of the Master's operas, so imposing and provocative that it hastened Czar Alexander III's prohibition of Yiddish Theater.” The claim was only a slight exaggeration.

In Romanov Russia, Goldfaden's work had exhibited a scope that was not to be equaled for another forty years, when C. B. DeMille began to direct his celluloid epics. The stage instructions alone gave new meaning to the term Grand Opera. At the finale: “The entire Jewish army comes running across the ramparts. They are met by the Roman forces. The battle begins: swordfights, stabbings, screams. We hear the clanging of swords and the creaking of walls. The Fortress is aflame, and all its towers tumble and break apart. Roman soldiers run to the central gate and rip it open.”

In what amounts to a series of close-ups, the gate swings open to reveal three atrocities: “One Roman soldier murders a child in its mother's hands as she kneels, pleading for his life; another Roman holds an old Jew by his hair, raising his sword above him; still another
holds a Jew to the ground with his foot, and runs him through with a spear. The entire scene is illuminated by green light from behind the gate and red light from above the ramparts. During the tumult, the curtain falls slowly.”