Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (13 page)

ALL THIS TIME
, another actor had also been yearning to come back to New York. Jacob Adler's Midwestern venture had not gone well. The troupe had run out of material early, recycled the fare and watched the audiences dwindle before their eyes. Internecine fights broke out and accusatory questions were asked of the leader. “Why did we come to Illinois, where Jews are as scarce as diamonds?” “Why didn't we take other scripts with us?” “Why weren't we accompanied by a playwright to furnish new material?”

It was time to move on. Jacob left his young son with friends and stopped off in Manhattan. He discovered that he was old news; David Kessler was all anyone talked about. Adler's autobiography spends little ink on this part of his life. “I spent some time looking at the sky between the tall buildings of New York,” he writes, “and finally realized it was time to go.”

The distraught actor wandered to London, where he saw the wife and child he had abandoned, then pushed off to Warsaw, where there were active Yiddish theaters. He enjoyed a considerable success there; a visiting American had glamour to sell. Once Jacob regained his confidence he returned to London, performing in a start-up company. In self-imposed exile he compiled a thick set of clippings, rave reviews and personality pieces. The best of these he sent on to Maurice Heine in New York.

Heine needed a box office draw; he invited Jacob to join his company, promising star roles and a livable salary. Jacob was not in a position to bargain. In the spring of 1889 he again set foot on the American shore. “A very different arrival in New York this time,” he remembered fondly, “and with a very different welcome. If my chariot was not hung with flags and trophies of my triumphs in Europe, it was at least greeted on every side by posters screaming in huge letters that the ‘Great Eagle' of the Yiddish stage had flown to the shores of America.”

For his comeback Jacob chose
The Beggar of Odessa.
As a rival was pleased to note, “The Eagle was plucked clean.” The actor had labored long and hard to establish himself as an interpreter of tragedy; and tender melancholia was what his audience was led to expect. Instead he gave them farce. Silence greeted his punch lines, and scattered catcalls grew into an uproar of hisses. The manager panicked. At intermission he came onstage to complain that it was not his fault; he had never seen Adler before; who knew that this was “a terrible, a third rate” actor?

Jacob tried another trifle later in the week. The public stayed away. “He did not succeed,” recalled a supporting player, “until he appeared with his own handsome, naked face, and in the uniform of
The Russian Soldier.
Adler played this role with high melodrama, shouted beyond human strength, and when the curtain fell, the walls shook with applause.” The Great Eagle had at last done what Heine expected, and in the ensuing months he was to do much more. That was the trouble. Adler not only tried to attract the general public, he worked to become the heartthrob of any woman who paid attention to his entreaties. One
of them was Sara Heine, Maurice's wife. What began as a dalliance was to change the course of many lives.

It was not the only difficulty prompted by Jacob's ego and id. Playing a victimized Jew in
La Juive,
Adler had a series of affecting monologues. They amounted to arias, each one building to a crescendo followed by tears and wild acclaim. Abba Schoenfeld, a handsome actor used to playing leads, was cast in the lesser role of a cardinal. His one moment came late in the play, with the confession that he once fathered a child—a girl condemned for apostasy. After a week of playing second banana, Schoenfeld devised a scheme to give himself the spotlight. In a confrontation with Adler he suddenly improvised a speech: “Do you think it's easy to ask you to forsake your religion? Know then I am a Jew forced to hide his Judaism.” From under his red robe he produced the prayer shawl he had been hiding all night, wailed the Jewish prayer, “
Shema Isroel, Adonoy Elohanu
!
,” and exited to a deafening ovation. Jacob was genuinely fond of Abba; after the performance he inquired about the ad-lib out of curiosity rather than ire. Schoenfeld replied, “Do you think you will always have the whole delicious goose to yourself? Give
me
for once a taste of the gizzard!”

A more unpleasant occurrence took place the following year, when Jacob and Maurice Heine nearly came to blows over money. Heine had promised his star a sizable portion of the take—too sizable, he now thought. Particularly if those rumors about the Great Eagle and his wife were true … The two men started to wrangle early one evening and were still quarreling at curtain time. Jacob refused to go on without a written contract. An understudy was called in. The following week Heine hired David Kessler to play the role.

Jacob's momentum came to an abrupt standstill. He remembered that Boris Thomashefsky had headquarters in Philadelphia and wrote asking for work. As soon as Boris could get free, he traveled to New York. Jacob was holed up at the Occidental Hotel. Thomashefsky recalled the meeting in his memoirs: “It made my heart ache to see the great Adler with his beautiful, clever eyes staying in this rundown place. We sat and joked, his majestic form in a torn silk jacket, his feet in out-of-shape slippers. He made everyone laugh, but in spite of his jokes, I felt his heart was bitter.”

The two men got along well and hammered out a contract that day. Adler wanted a good salary; Boris craved respect. The Great Eagle's high-priced agreement to star in
Uriel Acosta
satisfied both parties. The
play would open in a large Philadelphia theater mutually agreed upon. There was only one last thing, Adler said. Sara Heine, the actress? She would be ideal for the big part of Judith, Acosta's wife. Thomashefsky, who knew all about the gossip, kept his face straight and agreed to cast Sara in the role.

Uriel Acosta
opened at the Standard on South Street and became an overnight smash, attracting Jews from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. A week later Boris moved it into a larger theater. The production might have played at Dramatic Hall right through the summer of 1890, and perhaps gone over into fall. But Adler lived under the banner “Why have it simple when you can have it complicated?” One day, without warning, his wife, Dinah, came to Philadelphia. The distressed Sara left the cast to avoid a confrontation. Jacob dropped out a day later and headed for parts unknown. The loss of one star would have been difficult; the absence of two stars was impossible to bear. Boris was about to close the show when a letter arrived from Chicago. Jacob had just arrived in the city. Things had changed since he last lived there. The town, he discovered, was now loaded with middle-class Jews in need of entertainment. Boris must come and see for himself.

Boris did go west, with Sara Heine beside him. In town less than a day, she spotted Jacob with another lady and told Boris she had not come all this way to play second fiddle to a Jewish roué. By now Boris had enough
tsorus
without dealing with sexual jealousy between his star players; he booked Sara into a local inn and went off to consult Jacob on business. Surely by now the Great Eagle had at least located a theater and a backer or two. Not a chance. “I thought he was a businessman,” Boris lamented. “I found out you could not depend on him. A great artist, tried and tested, who knew every trick of the trade. He liked to tell funny stories, to play practical jokes, to sleep late. In business however—a child!”

Boris hotly confronted Jacob: this whole thing was his fault. Without quite admitting his irresponsibility, the actor offered an idea that might bail out both of them. He knew that Sara owned several expensive bracelets and a valuable ring. These were in her possession right now. If she could be persuaded to pawn the baubles, Boris could borrow the cash, secure a theater, send for his players, and arrange for a Chicago production. The plan defined
chutzpah—
but then,
chutzpah
had brought the Thomashefskys a long way. Why abandon it now?

Boris went to Sara's hotel room and pleaded his case. She was not in
a forgiving mood, but he was eloquent and Sara didn't really want to lose Jacob. Anyway, in her mind art was always more valuable than mere sentiment, even when the sentiment was love. She sighed, she remonstrated—and then handed over the jewels. She did have a proviso: her lover must come to the hotel and apologize for his transgression. When Jacob did appear, Sara spoke first: “From you I have had nothing—only trouble and pain.” He attempted to defend himself, then gave it up. She had spoken the truth, and he knew it. Two generations later, Adler's own granddaughter Lulla Rosenfeld wrote a damning assessment: “Truly, he was a cause of grief to every woman who loved him.” However, he was also the lodestar of every cast who worked with him. Boris used the pawnshop money to rent the place that had always brought the Thomashefskys good luck—the Standard in Philadelphia. In the fall, the Adler-Thomashefsky troupe moved in, delighting the Jewish population of that city. When the lease was up they transferred to another big venue and filled it to overflowing for the rest of the season.

Before they left that venue, the tangle of romantic complications had been resolved to Jacob's satisfaction. The Heines had divorced rancorously, making Sara available, while Dinah and Jacob Adler split amicably. “We remained friends,” he stated proudly, “and would appear onstage together.” Sara became Jacob's third wife in the fall of 1891; afterward the new husband hosted a champagne supper at the Atlantic Garden, with every consequential Yiddish actor and journalist in attendance.

THAT WINTER
Adler grew restless; he needed to get back to New York and show the Yiddish-speaking world that the Great Eagle was ready to soar anew. Boris begged him to stay put, but Jacob wouldn't hear of it. He and Sara left for Manhattan. Boris did not have long to complain; days later he followed the Adlers upon receipt of a telegram:
COME IMMEDIATELY. YOU AND ENTIRE FAMILY ENGAGED AT
THE NATIONAL THEATER
. It was signed Morris Finkel, director. More would be heard from this gentleman in the near future.

Upon their arrival in New York the Thomashefskys learned the truth. Without warning, David Kessler had left the company, dissatisfied with Finkel's production. Boris was to be his last-minute replacement. The money was good, he allowed, but what were these posters announcing that “America's Favorite” (i.e., Boris) was to appear in Joseph Lateiner's
David ben Jesse
? “I don't know the operetta,” he complained. “I've never even seen it! Why have you done this to me? Why didn't you tell me?”

The notices were up, the cast was already in rehearsal. Boris had no choice but to join them. On opening night the trembling star did a lot of stressful throat-clearing and vocalizing. A Yiddish proverb circulated out of his earshot:
Ale Yidn kenem zayn khazonim, ober meystns zaynem zey heyzerik—
Every Jew is a cantor, but he is usually hoarse. Radiating a bogus confidence, Boris hummed in the wings, inwardly praying for a miracle.

It occurred a moment later when he stepped onstage as the young King David, heard the murmurs of approval from young women, recited with fervor, and sang out in a melodic, ringing voice. Numerous curtain calls induced him to come out for bow after bow, and when the uproar subsided he was presented with a harp made of flowers. Thomashefsky seemed to grin with his entire body. He had arrived yet again and this time he was not going away.

By moving into popular theater, Boris proceeded to fill a vacuum. Operettas, comedies, historical spectacles, trashy melodramas, in a word,
shund—
Yiddish for trash—became his specialty. He delighted in the self-designation “America's Darling,” and, as far as the shopgirls were concerned, the claim was an instance of truth in advertising. Abraham Cahan's memoir notes that in those days, stage heroes— even biblical ones—wore short jerkins that displayed their legs. “And Thomashefsky's legs were the finest in the Yiddish theater. An operetta at the National would run month after month, while Kessler and Adler had to change their program every week.”

The man with shapely limbs relished his new dominance, and taunted rivals with costumes and stage effects. He was to look back with enormous satisfaction on these accomplishments. “A star had to wear slashed doublets, golden crowns, cloaks of satin. All of us did it! Kessler wore a hat with a long feather, bare feet, and a shirt with red
patches. Adler, to outdo him, wore a bigger hat with three feathers, a naked throat, a spangled throw over his shoulders, and to make it more realistic, he put on chains, bracelets, and long Turkish earrings.”

Boris outshone them both. He assumed a crown, a sword, chains, bracelets, silk hose in three colors, and three cloaks, one on top of the other. “If they had thunder,” he crowed, “I had lightning. If Kessler sang the Evening Prayer, I sang the Prayer for the Dead. If they rode in on a real horse, I had a golden chariot drawn by two horses. If they killed an enemy, I killed an
army.
”

But what Boris and the Thomashefskyites relished, his rivals loathed. They all glad-handed each other in public, putting on displays of affection—professionals engaged in the same art with the same need to please a whimsical public. In private, however, the rivalry was intense. To his intimates Kessler complained about the
shund
that he was required to do. He detested the cheap music, the gaudy costumes, the trashy plots. “All day long I am a human being, I speak like a human being, act like a human being. At night I must dress myself up like a turkey, like an idiot! If I went out in the street like this people would throw stones at me for a lunatic. Here they shout bravo!”

Adler had his own dark view of such stuff. In a weak moment, Goldfaden had outlined his formula: “A song, a jig, a quarrel, a kiss.” And so it was. No makeup and no costume could change
shund
into art. With a dig at Boris, Jacob wrote, “From my earliest years I have leaned toward those plays where the actor works not with his feet, but with his voice, face, eyes; not with jests and comic antics.” The Great Eagle's desire was “not to amuse the public with tumbling, but to awaken in them and in himself the deepest and most powerful emotions.”