Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (15 page)

JUST AS THE YIDDISH THEATER
was evolving, so was life on the Lower East Side. Fear of government persecution—city, state, and federal—slowly ebbed away. People encountered anti-Semitism on the streets, but this was local stuff, hostility from one immigrant group, like the Irish or the Italians, to another. This the Jews could handle. They had their own toughs when it came to confrontations, and children quickly learned which neighborhoods to avoid. Denizens of the Lower East Side were heartened by the actions of a man they'd dismissed a few years before. After losing the mayoralty, Theodore Roosevelt had accepted the next-best job: New York City police commissioner. A hate-monger named Rector Ahlwardt came to town, imported by antiSemites to work up the populace and test the cops. Roosevelt made no open comment, but he saw to it that the rabble-rouser was guarded by a phalanx of forty Jewish patrolmen. The rector got the message and quietly got out of town.

With a new assurance the Lower East Siders inched toward confidence and sophistication, outgrowing the simple formulae of Goldfaden, Hurwitz, and Lateiner. Boris Thomashefsky, Mr.
Shund
himself, commissioned a play from Gordin. He paid the fairly large sum of $60 for
The Pogrom in Russia,
and offered the playwright a part. Gordin was no actor, but he needed to feed his large family and accepted the small role of a Russian policeman for an extra $5 a week.

By now Thomashefsky knew of Gordin's insistence on naturalism, and the playwright was familiar with the actor's flamboyance. During run-throughs they circled each other like boxers in the early rounds. Thomashefsky wanted flashy costumes; Gordin demanded plain peasant clothing, and won. The actors at the Oriental, like the ones at the Union Theater, pleaded for show-stopping melodic interludes. They got a handful of traditional folksongs in a minor key—the kind their characters would have sung in the Russian provinces. Gordin made the
mistake of skipping a rehearsal; when he returned a little dance had been inserted in a scene. He slammed his script closed and stomped to the exit. The number was excised.

Authoritative as he was, the playwright let down his guard on opening night. When he came on as the czarist policeman, the reception was overwhelming. People recognized him, applauded and whistled, threw hats in the air, shouted “Hurray, Gordin!” In all the excitement he forgot his own lines. Thomashefsky supplied them, sotto voce
.
Gordin recovered. In the next act he felt strong enough to criticize a fellow player onstage. Invited into a Jewish home, the Russian officer was presented with a meal. Instead of wishing him good appetite, the actress delivered an aside: “The Cossack should only choke on it.” Gordin banged on the table. “That's not in the script!” The audience let out a collective gasp. There were no more improvisations.

Ironically, Gordin's fight for a more elevated theater was given impetus by Thomashefsky's most flamboyant and retrograde spectacle. In the heyday of the new century, Boris could do no wrong. His purring
r
s and liquid
l
s, along with his somewhat
zaftig
good looks, seemed to hypnotize female audiences, who bought tickets to every one of his productions. Nothing could faze him; he was in rehearsal with Hurwitz's operetta
Rouchel
when he learned that his beautiful co-star, Sophia Karp, could not memorize a long monologue. With only two days to go, Boris replaced her speech with a song, cobbling together verses from the 22nd Psalm (“My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?”), half in Hebrew, half in Yiddish. The chorus master thereupon set it to music. That number, “Eli, Eli,” performed with heartbreaking conviction by Karp, became a hit not only in New York but in every Jewish community in the land.

The cocky young man had become the prince of the Thalia Theater; whatever he wanted to produce was automatically done. Some stage works were ambitious and serious; most were high trash, elegantly presented, enthusiastically acted, empty of content. Boris happily ceded the high ground to Adler and Kessler. While they staged the classics, he gave the Lower East Side the biggest shows it had ever seen, culminating in Hurwitz's grand
Alexander, Crown Prince of Jerusalem,
starring Boris in the title role, wearing his customary tights. Cahan's memoir asks, “Who among the older Jews does not remember how the whole East Side stormed when Thomashefsky played Alexander? He was tall and strong, with a wonderfully sculptured form. A handsomer prince could
not be imagined. Shopgirls gave up the necessities of life to buy tickets to this play.”

Across the street at his own theater, Adler watched the long lines at the Thalia box office and wondered how he could possibly top his friendly competitor. An inspiration came to him and arrangements were made. One evening, Boris was to recall, the pleasant atmosphere was shattered by an unpleasant bulletin. It came from one of his fans, who had heard a rumor and planted himself in the back row of the Union Square Theater to confirm it. “Adler has just announced from the stage that he will soon produce Shakespeare's world-famous sensational tragedy with music, the greatest work in all of world literature,
Othello.
He said in his speech that Adler will play Othello, that Kessler will play Iago, and they will switch roles every other night.”

Equally disturbing was the news that Jacob had insulted Boris from the stage, “saying that with a play like
Othello,
no one will be able to imitate
him,
that you had to be a real actor to be able to play Othello. Othello is no ‘Alexander, the little crown prince of Jerusalem.’” Without a plan in mind, Boris improvised his own shocker. Before a full house he declared that he would be the first Yiddish Prince of Denmark. Adler was not the only one disturbed by the news. Hurwitz, fearful for his career, exploded: “Thomashefsky! I will write you a better play than this
Hamlet
!” Boris paid no attention. He had seen the touring Edwin Booth play that role in Philadelphia, and insisted “A Yiddish actor of my stature can bring it off.” He commissioned a translation from Moishe Zeifert, a new playwright. “I was called to the Thalia Theater,” Zeifert was to remember, “and the company ordered me ‘to make Hamlet!’” Save for the salary, the adapter did not find this a happy assignment. He compared it to deconstructing a building. “I took out the foundation, the walls, and the roof. I did it partly out of patriotism—I wanted to take revenge on the ‘anti-Semite' Shakespeare; and I believe that up there in seventh heaven the Chairman was also happy with my ‘work,’ but Shakespeare, poor thing, could only bang his head against the walls of Hell.”

To Boris, fidelity to the text was entirely beside the point. If he was overweight for the role, if he could hardly project the Prince's “perturbed spirit,” he and his company were well rehearsed. For the star had done something unprecedented on Second Avenue: he hired an outside director, a German who, Boris recalled, “truly put every word in my mouth.” Fears of failure tormented him right up to opening night. As he was dressing to go to the theater, his little daughter
Estherl, then five years old, called out, “Papa, you're not going to kiss me good night?”

“I pressed to my heart my child,” he wrote, “who was dearer to me than my own life, kissed her, and said good night. The child embraced me with her little white arms and pressed my head to her head, saying, ‘Go, Papa, and I'll ask God to give you success.’ Tears choked me and I ran out of the house.”

The child's prayers were answered. The entire cast performed without a hitch, and played to standees. (Actually Boris could have recited the front page of Hearst's
American
and filled the house, at least with young women. One enthusiast actually started to strip in the aisle, hoping to attract his attention, before she was escorted to the door. And there were always calls for extra bows so that the famous legs could be glimpsed once more.) At the conclusion of
Hamlet,
calls of “Author! Author!” resounded almost every night. Boris didn't have the heart to say that “Shekspir,” as the audience called him, had been dead for almost three hundred years. A trouper volunteered to go out, claim authorship, and acknowledge the approbation. In the end, according to Bessie Thomashefsky, “We just used to ask them to forgive us, but Shakespeare lived far away in England, and could not come to see his play.”

Othello
thrived as well, and the double success gave Adler an idea. He arranged a private meeting with Thomashefsky at the Central Park Casino, far from the prying eyes of the Lower East Siders. There, wrote Boris, Jacob “offered me a three-part combination. Adler-KesslerThomashefsky—and we three will tear up America.” Negotiations were brief, and the three men signed a contract with much bonhomie and shaking of hands. There would be no egos in this, they all said; lots would be drawn to determine the headliner in any given production. That was the last time they agreed on anything.

BORIS STROVE
for popularity and Jacob for art. For his part, David wanted nothing more than to be believed. His personal life was drab— his wife dominated him the way he dominated actors. But onstage the man was electric. “Give me a person, a real person,” Kessler would urge erring cast members. He was forever setting them an example. When producers offered him the lead in Offenbach's
La Périchole,
he refused the role and took, instead, the part of an eighty-year-old bandit: “I'd rather play the old thief,” he explained. “I sense in him flesh and blood.” From his actors he demanded the same flesh and blood, nothing less, at every performance.

Ingénues would burst into tears when he bawled them out for some trivial error; and men were also known to cringe at his tirades. His idea of motivation was rage followed by grudging admiration: “May he burn,” he was heard to say after he had put a terrified performer through the wringer. “But the son of a bitch really played that scene.”

In another work, an actor underplayed a groom grieving over the bride who had just taken her own life. One of the apprentices watched Kessler pace and grumble in the wings. “When the curtain went down after the last act,” he remembered, “Kessler says to the performer in a compassionate tone, ‘I have something to tell you. Don't get upset—uh…’ he wavers, ‘your wife, uh … don't worry, God forbid it's not terrible, your wife…’

“The actor gets desperate and cries fearfully, ‘Tell me, Mr. Kessler, what has happened to my wife?' And Kessler turns on him, ‘You prima donna, you! Why weren't you so desperate and afraid onstage when they told you that your bride poisoned herself?’”

These manipulations, unkind as they were, evoked strong performances from every cast member, and in the end one of the actors conceded, “He was a tough bastard but he got the best from us. Audiences were always thunderstruck by what we did.”

Except for his relentless womanizing, Jacob Adler was a puritan. Supporting actor Boaz Young wrote admiringly, “He never drank, never touched tobacco, never touched cards. Theater!” That dedication to his art could sometimes border on mania. One evening Jacob was in the company of the composer Joseph Rumshinsky. Strolling down Second Avenue, they passed by a Yiddish production in which Adler had starred a few years before. Another actor now had the role, and, says the musician's autobiography, “I wanted to take Jacob to the stage door, but he ran into the lobby. By this time I was convinced he was insane.

“Adler ran down the aisle, stopped in the middle, and shouted in Yiddish, ‘I am here, I am with you! We'll play for you, we'll give you good theater!' The curtain descended on the other star. In the dressing room Adler began to apply makeup. He said to me, ‘Rumshinsky, my friend, I love theater! But I'm only onstage two or three hours a day, so I have to turn the rest of my life into theater!'

“When he was ready, the curtain rose and the play started again, from the beginning.”

In contrast to his colleagues, Boris was the classic lover of wine, women, and song—though surely he loved the mirror more. “His overwhelming masculinity,” wrote Lulla Rosenfeld, “was balanced by a softness even more dangerous. He saw himself, the world, and the Jewish destiny as matters of high romance.”

At times his intensity carried over from the stage into family life, with consequences that matched anything on the stage. The most melodramatic of them occurred when his adolescent sister acted alongside him. Emma was a comely girl, well developed for her age. Half the men in the company fell in love with her, but she refused their advances. Boris assumed that Emma was saving herself for marriage— and then made a shocking discovery. His sister had been secretly carrying on with Morris Finkel, the director who had brought Boris back to New York. Not only had this middle-aged Romanian émigré been married before, he had a son somewhere in Europe, abandoned at the time of the divorce. The Thomashefsky family descended on Emma and forced her to break off the liaison in a very public manner.

Boris selected an evening when the Thalia Theater was SRO. All 2,700 seats were taken as he stepped before the curtain at the second act intermission. Ticket-holders were advised to stay in place following the finale; there would be a
shvier,
an ancient rite rarely invoked in
America. According to tradition, life-changing vows were to be taken in public before a
minyan,
a gathering of at least ten Jews.

“We have here tonight, ten times ten a
minyan
!” Boris boomed, before exiting to the wings. The audience buzzed; what did the great Thomashefsky need with ten times ten a
minyan
? Some of them guessed correctly—the Lower East Side, after all, was like a small town, where
shandas,
scandals, were the lubricant of life. The others found out soon enough. After the last act, the curtain rose on two Thomashefskys, brother and sister.

The actor played the real scene, as he played all fictive ones, for maximum effect. “Before this audience, before God, do you swear …?” he asked his intimidated sister.