Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (16 page)

“I swear,” she said, trembling before the onlookers.

“That you will never go out with the man named Morris Finkel.”

“That I will never go out with the man named Morris Finkel.”

“Or ever see him or have any dealings with him again as long as you live?”

She had trouble getting the words out. “Or ever see him or have any dealings with him again … as long as I live.”

The audience responded with an immense ovation. “Women wept,” recalled an admiring witness. “Emma's eyes were dry, but everybody shook her hand. ‘It's for the best, Emma child. An old man and a young girl—it never works. You have been saved for some great love which will come to you when you are truly a woman!’”

The public humiliation was too much for young Emma. That night she sought out Finkel and ran off with him. They ended their journey in Philadelphia, where the newlyweds founded a small Yiddish theater.

Over the next decade the Finkels had three children and went about their business. In time Boris grudgingly made an uneasy peace with his brother-in-law, and Emma was invited to appear in her brother's productions. The Finkels relocated to the Lower East Side. Trouble began a year later, when Emma was cast opposite David Levinson, a goodlooking, rather withdrawn leading man. If drama was what Boris had wanted, he was about to get it in overplus.

The couple began to meet on the sly. Emma introduced David to her children, and they could not keep the secret from their father. Finkel confronted his wife. She admitted that she had indeed fallen in love. She wanted a divorce. He refused. There was too much at stake here, he reminded her. There must be a cooling-off period, during which
Emma and David would stay far away from each other. Passion must give reason a chance.

She gave in, took the three children to a rented farmhouse in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and resolved to think things out. Several weeks later, during a family outing in the woods, Emma looked up to see her lover impulsively walking up a path. David and Emma embraced, held hands, and strolled in the dappled sunshine. The little boy and his older sisters ran ahead.

A voice rang out behind the couple.

They looked back to see the drunken Morris aiming a pistol at them. He had followed his rival from Manhattan. The trigger was pulled. A bullet whizzed harmlessly by David and split the wood of a nearby tree trunk. Emma gave a galvanic twitch, turning around to see if the children were out of range, just as Morris fired again. The shot intended for the man hit the woman instead. Emma fell, unconscious. Morris, certain that he had slain his wife, turned the gun on himself and fired once more. Death was instantaneous.

The children retained memories of their father's body being carted off. Their mother was also carried away, but the ambulance took her to a hospital, not the morgue. She would never walk again. Misery upon misery followed the shooting.

At first, Levinson moved in with his crippled amour, acting as surrogate father to the trio of bereft children. The Yiddish proverb
Die velt iz a redl un es dreyt zikh—
The world is a wheel and it turns—had special relevance a few years later when the burden proved insupportable. David abandoned Emma for a younger woman.

Boris gave his sister enough money to live on, yet found it impossible to forgive her for breaking that long-ago public vow, and for bringing ruin on herself. But he would not punish the next generation. He found a place in his productions for Emma's prettiest child, Bella Finkel. Early in the rehearsal of a musical the girl was introduced to her leading man. She found him irresistible. Two years later she married Muni Weisenfreund. He would become better known by his stage name, Paul Muni.

GIVEN THE DIFFERENT STYLES
, extravagant temperaments, and monumental egos of Jacob, Boris, and David, conflicts were unavoidable. At first these were confined to the rehearsal hall. But the trio's irreconcilable differences soon erupted in public. During a weekend performance Kessler upstaged Thomashefsky, aping the younger man's broad gestures. Boris caught the mockery in the corner of his eye. The scene called for him to break a plate; furious, he smashed two. Staying within character, Kessler, who was not supposed to touch the plates, broke four. Partisans in the audience cheered on their favorite. Adler was playing a mild-mannered rabbi, but he had no intention of missing out on the excitement. He broke some plates himself. The others shattered more crockery. At the end of the play the floor was covered with shards of china. Jacob, David, and Boris were starting in on a table and chairs when the curtain was lowered to prevent further damage.

The debacle was too much for Kessler. He dropped out to seek other opportunities. For all their differences, Adler and Thomashefsky remained partners, tied by contract and, in some strange way, by an emotional bond. For a time they and their families lived at the same address, 85 West 10th Street, Jacob on the second floor, Boris on the third. Adler's morning routine never varied. After ablutions he would stick his head in the dumbwaiter shaft and yell: “Thomashefsky, a black year on your head! Thomashefsky, the devil himself go into your bones!” Only then could he face the day. Boris, amused at this exercise, rarely replied. Let the downstairs neighbor have his little rite; the Thomashefskys were making plans to relocate. They would settle down in the quiet green borough of Brooklyn, away from the Manhattan madness.

Boris's advance in fortunes had come because of a distress sale. The People's Theater, a small Bowery venue, long the home of Irish melo-drama,
had just declared bankruptcy. The neighborhood had changed; the Hibernian populace had been replaced by Jews and, to a lesser degree, by Italians. Boris seized the real estate opportunity and signed a cheap long-term lease. Settling in, he encouraged playwrights to give him overheated melodramas with big star parts—the kind of
shund
that had made his reputation. Professor Hurwitz came up with an odd play,
Yefestoyer
(A Beautiful Woman), designed for the broad Thomashefsky style. The star played a moonstruck figure who believed that he was about to give birth. “As Hurwitz read us the play,” says Boris's memoir, “I feared that the audience would burst out laughing when they heard that a man was going to have a child. I was mistaken. They took it very seriously. Ladies cried, girls sobbed that Thomashefsky, poor thing, had such a misfortune to bear. The play went on for many months with packed houses.”

Still, it was not a happy time. It was during this period, Boris lamented, “that I bore a great misfortune in my private life. My beautiful little daughter, my Estherl, the one who had prayed for my Hamlet, became sick with diphtheria and died. She was buried on the same day she took her last breath, and that night I had to play in
Yefestoyer.
In that work a father laments his dead child. I had to play this very scene right after my own child's burial. I broke down on the stage and the curtain was lowered. When they resuscitated me and I went back out on the stage, I did not know what I was doing. I mechanically repeated the prompter's words, which he called out to me from his booth. Naturally the audience noticed this, but they forgave my horrible performance.” The tragedy changed Boris; afterward he seemed to aim higher, encouraging the efforts of better dramatists. He took a particular interest in Leon Kobrin, a new writer with a lot to say.

Like his
landsman
Marc Chagall, Kobrin was raised in the little town of Vitebsk, Russia, victimized by anti-Semitism and suffocating czarist decrees. In his early twenties he fled to America. With all the bias Leon had encountered, however, he still regarded Russian as the language of choice. In his opinion, Yiddish was for serving up “simple tales for servant girls and ignoramuses.” He clung to that belief while working long hours in Pennsylvania dairy farms, then washing and drying laundry on the Lower East Side—anything to support his wife and infant.

Eventually the surrounding culture got to him, and he started to write stories and novels in Yiddish. These attracted the attention of
Gordin. He took Kobrin on as a protégé, encouraging him to write for the theater. The older man then played good editor–bad editor with the dialogue, alternately flaying the speeches and admiring them, sometimes totally changing plotlines until the original was unrecognizable.

Of all the plays, Gordin thought the best was
Nature, Man and Animal.
He took it to Adler, who saw possibilities—with some changes in the lead role. Up until then, Kobrin thought Gordin the toughest taskmaster imaginable. He was about to learn otherwise. Gordin's main concern, after all, was about the work. Adler's main concern was about Adler. On opening night, having locked Kobrin out of the rehearsals, the actor introduced a new finale of his own devising. “When I confronted him,” said the playwright, Adler replied that the fourth act of the original script “had gotten lost; either someone had stolen it or the mice had eaten it.” Yet Leon could not find it in his heart to condemn Jacob. “He wrote a new act himself. Still, how marvelously he performed in that play!”

In fact, Kobrin needed all the help he could get.
The Blind Musician,
a drama about immigrant life in America, was typical of his early writings. The play derived from Russian themes, but also showed the increasing (if undigested) influence of Shakespeare on the Yiddish Theater.

The protagonist, composer Yosef Finklestein, is going blind. Consumed with self-pity, he pushes his wife, Rosa, away—but when an acquaintance pays undue attention to Rosa he becomes irate and violent. His tirades become intolerable. Rosa makes a vow: she will stay with the musician until his Carnegie Hall concert; then all will be finished.

In the final act, a storm rages outside the windows, echoing the fury in Yosef's mind. His mother has been staying with them; she lies asleep in another room. Rosa is also undisturbed by the lightning and thunder. The woman's calm only serves to agitate him. He awakens Rosa and begs her to sing the ballad he wrote when they were courting. She obliges, and that sets him off.

“That was created out of self-deception!” he shouts. “I should not have created a love song, but a song about a deluded artist!” He rips up the pages of music, reaches out to Rosa in what seems an embrace, then strangles her. His horrified mother enters. “Yosef, what have you done?” His acidulous response: “You have eyes; you can see. Mama, at
least be a mother and strangle me.” A patrolman breaks the door open, arrests the blind musician, who slips out of the policeman's hold and falls, sobbing, on the body of Rosa.

Often referred to as the Yiddish
Othello,
this tale of jealousy not only lacked an Iago, it also tended to repeat itself with painful woe-is-me scenes and farcical subplots. Just the same, it struck a nerve; audiences turned out for it, not least because Kobrin had been shrewd enough to introduce the subject of sightlessness. Trachoma is still the leading cause of blindness in the Third World, and in the early years of the century it afflicted the poor of Eastern Europe. The bacterial disease scars the cornea; left untreated it causes irreversible loss of vision. Customs inspectors were instructed to bar all trachoma victims from entry into the United States. As Ronald Sanders points out in his study of Jewish immigration,
Shores of Refuge,
the painful ocular inspection at Castle Garden “was to become a virtual medieval horror in immigrant folklore, all the more so because the possibility of rejection at this point was frighteningly real.”

The Blind Musician
meant more to audiences than to critics, however. The reviewers thought Kobrin an effective scene writer but a coarse playwright. “There are in the drama a few strong moments,” observed one, “a number of psychological insights, a few living characters, and healthy humor in some places.” These were not enough. “In short,” he concluded, “the Romanticism of Shakespeare's play does a dance with the burlesque jokes of a vaudeville show.”

Ultimately, two authors benefited from the popularity of
The Blind Musician:
Kobrin and the Bard. The Yiddish playwright went on to write a series of popular plays about the subject he knew best—the price of Jewish assimilation in the United States. And now that a Yiddishized
King Lear, Othello,
and
Hamlet
had proved commercially viable, a Shakespearean renaissance got under way on the Bowery.

The next few years saw adaptations of at least ten plays in the canon, including
Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III,
and, inevitably,
The Merchant of Venice,
with its complex Jewish centerpiece, Shylock. Of all the productions, none aroused more curiosity than the
Hamlet
played by someone named Kalisch. The Lower East Siders knew who this was; the uptowners learned soon enough that the actor's full name was Bertha Kalisch, and that this Hamlet would be slender, blond, and beautiful.

THE JEW OF THE AGES