Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (17 page)

B
ERTHA KALISCH HAD APPEARED
in small productions back in her native Lemberg in the Western Ukraine, where she attracted Goldfaden's attention. He hired the dazzling young woman and made her a star in the provinces. But even the Father of Yiddish Theater could not retain her services for long. In 1896, at the age of twenty-four, she came to America and immediately picked up work. Four years later her name sat atop marquees and, unlike Bessie Thomashefsky and Sara Adler, she had climbed there without benefit of an impresario husband. Now she planned to do something no other
Yiddish actress had dared to contemplate. She would follow the lead of Sarah Bernhardt.

The year before, the great French actress had brought her notorious production of
Hamlet
to England and America. By playing the title role she provoked unceasing controversy. (In London, Max Beerbohm satirized her
Hamlet
as a “
tres grande dame
”; stateside, the
North American Review
found that “the great tragedy has been drained of its dignity, as well as robbed of its mysterious charm.”) The hullabaloo sold tickets and stimulated feature writers; Bernhardt loved every moment of it. Kalisch watched enviously, convinced that whatever the actress did in French and English she could do in Yiddish, and do it better. In 1901 she made up her mind to put on tights and cross the gender line.

THE YIDDISH ACTRESS
picked an ideal moment. The twentieth century's first year had already opened the way for enormous historical and social changes. In September, at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, a slender twenty-eight-year-old man stepped forward to greet President William McKinley. The disaffected son of Polish immigrants, Leon Czolgosz, had a large white handkerchief in his right hand. It hid a .32-caliber revolver. Two shots rang out and the president collapsed, the victim of a lone anarchist. only 20 years blared the headlines—the time between Garfield's and McKinley's assassinations. Was the United States becoming the dumping ground for agitators and revolutionaries? Was it to be the scene of more violence done by foreigners and their children? “Thank God it wasn't a Jew”—the phrase echoed through the streets of the Lower East Side for the next week. Ghettoites stayed indoors as much as possible, fearful of an anti-immigration backlash. Eight days after the attack, McKinley died of his wounds. The Jewish hope now lay in the new chief executive, former vice president Theodore Roosevelt. Placed on the ticket to balance the conservative Ohioan, this forty-two-year-old smiling
public man presented an aura of vigorous “trust-busting” Republicanism. No one took him seriously. Now he was in charge of the country.

The twenty-sixth president moved to calm the populace. He reminded the nation that he had not only been the governor of New York state, but the police chief of New York City. He knew all about criminals—here and abroad—and how they should be handled. Let no one doubt his firmness and moral purpose. At the same time, the “new Americans” should rest assured; all were welcome here, provided that they join the mainstream and obey the nation's laws.

But other forces had also been put in motion that year, energies beyond the control of American political power. Queen Victoria died in 1901. The “grandmamma of Europe,” the woman who had a relative in almost every continental court, had held the throne since 1837. Britons, their religious beliefs already shaken by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, began to wonder if the Empire really was as solid and permanent as Kipling's poems suggested. His “Take up the White Man's burden …To wait in heavy harness/On fluttered folk and wild—/Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half-devil and half-child” had already become choice material for parodists. Anti-Imperialist Leagues sprouted up in London and New York. The triumph in Cuba had established Roosevelt's name when he led a charge up San Juan Hill. But matters had changed over the next three years. Now American policy was under fire from a new kind of radical, repelled by foreign adventures and racial bias.

Figures of authority slowly began to lose their luster. The royal families of England and Germany, hostile cousins, moved inexorably toward conflict. Even as far away as Russia, the absolute power of Czar Nicholas II (another of Victoria's relations by marriage) was secretly questioned. Unprecedented strikes by students and workers took place in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. The czar moved to quell them, and, yet again, to seek out a scapegoat for the country's economic and social difficulties.

Against this shifting background, the Jews of the Lower East Side struggled to define themselves. Appraising the international outlook and the national psyche, Abraham Cahan grew wary. As America's Jewish population increased, he wrote, “animosity grows with it. Nations love only themselves, not strangers. If we get too close to the Americans with our language and customs, they will be annoyed. The Americans can't even get along with the Germans, so imagine the
chasm between the shtetl Jews and Yankees—it's like two different worlds. When there are only a few Jews, gentiles go slumming to inspect the novelty. When the Jews fill up the streetcars and parks, we are resented.” Others expressed the same radical/conservative view— strive for social justice, but not alone. Move in groups, keep your voice down, don't attract attention.

THE WARNINGS WERE IGNORED
. Second Avenue wanted what Broadway had, and the people of the Yiddish Theater had no intention of blending into the scenery. The whole purpose of becoming an actor was to arouse interest and curiosity, wasn't it? Manifestly Bertha Kalisch believed so, and when she defiantly stepped into the part of a Yiddish Hamlet the entire town took notice. The critic for the
New York Morning Journal
happily reported, “There were no airs, there were no frills. There were no poses, no struggles for elusive effect.” The female star “got down to the solid bedrock of the idea and hammered at it.” As Professor Joel Berkowitz points out in his study
Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage,
Bertha Kalisch's Hamlet “was no mere drawing-room experiment. It was popular theater—popular enough not only to remain in her repertoire as long as she remained in the Yiddish Theater, but also to appeal to the ‘uptown' critics.”

Those critics would come to Second Avenue that year to see the most significant portrayal in Yiddish Theater history. Kalisch's effort was a novelty; Jacob Adler's was art. On reflection, Jacob said that he had once derived enormous pleasure from playing “simple Jews, Jews who were clowns, fools,
shlimazls,
unfortunates.” But these characters were as walk-ons, cameos, compared with “the Jew of high intellect, proud convictions, and grand character.” That personage was, of course, Shylock. The Adler version of
The Merchant of Venice,
presented at the People's Theater a few months after the female
Hamlet,
was not done to provoke clamor. Indeed, it had only one unusual aspect: a Jewish
actor was playing the stage's most infamous Jew. That had never happened before.

Jacob refused to follow the lead of Henry Irving. The English actor had made the Venetian moneylender a resolute gentleman, forced to defend himself against Christian malice. His radical and sympathetic interpretation was well received in the late 1800s; but Adler, who had seen Irving's striking performance in London, wanted no part of it. He saw in Shylock “a patriarch, a higher being. A certain grandeur, the triumph of long patience, intellect, and character has been imparted to him by his teachers: suffering and tradition.”

To give Shylock “the prominence he deserved,” Adler vigorously edited
The Merchant of Venice,
excising scenes he thought unnecessary and altering the text so that his character remained onstage for more than half of the time. Aided by Joseph Rumshinsky's mood music, Adler redefined Shylock in two pivotal scenes. The first was the shattering discovery that the Jew's daughter, Jessica, has eloped with a Christian.

In the Irving production, Shylock knocked at the door of his house three times, growing louder and more desperate as the curtain lowered. Irving's contemporary, Sir Beerbohm Tree, played the same scene more explicitly, pacing across the stage, crying out in sorrow and covering his head with ashes. Adler opened the front door with an immense key and entered silently. After an almost unbearable pause, he spoke his daughter's name. Silence. He spoke it again, the voice hopelessly booming out “Jessica!” and echoing in a vast and empty room. He came out, bowed down with sorrow, and settled on a bench, his voice quavering with a barely audible Yiddish lament. As the curtain fell he slowly tore his garment—a sign of mourning for the child who has left the faith and thus, in his Orthodox view, life itself.

The court's verdict goes against the Jew in the final scene: he must forsake his gold and convert to Christianity. Shylock's enemy Gratiano sneers, “In christening thou shalt have two godfathers. Had I been judge, thou should'st have had ten more, to bring thee to the gallows, not the font.”

In all the other productions, Gratiano pushed Shylock to the ground, where he sat whimpering and defeated, the old Hebrew
in extremis,
victim of his own avarice. In the Adler version, Shylock was also forced to earth, but after a few moments he rose up. From his garment he brushed the dirt of the ground and, symbolically, the stain of anti-Semitism. With an air of moral superiority and innate dignity he
made his exit. “Weighty and proud his walk,” the star recalled, “calm and conclusive his speech, a man of rich personal and national experience, a man who sees life through the glasses of eternity. So I played him, so I had joy in him, and so I portrayed him.”

Jacob's portrait thrilled the Lower East Side—but then, it was supposed to. What Adler could not have predicted was the clamor outside the little world of the Yiddish Theater. The mainstream press embraced his production. In a reference to the prominent English eighteenth-century actor/impresario,
Theater
magazine dubbed Jacob Adler “The Bowery Garrick,” and the prominent producer Arthur Hopkins came downtown to make an unprecedented offer. He wanted to present the Adler
Shylock
on Broadway. Jacob refused; he thought his English too heavily accented to recite Shakespeare in the original.

Hopkins had an answer to that: Adler could speak in Yiddish. The other members of the cast, Americans all, would recite their lines in English. The offer seemed bizarre but too flattering to refuse. Adler signed the contract.
Shylock
first tried out in Boston and Washington where patronizing critics described it as gimmicky. Never mind, Hopkins assured his cast; New York would be different.

And so it was. With the original title restored,
The Merchant of Venice
opened at the American Theater in Manhattan on May 24, 1903, and was showered with rave reviews. adler scores in shylock role, said a headline in the
Herald,
and went on to call Jacob's version “that rare dramatic experience on Broadway, the coincidence of a great play and a great actor.” The
Evening Journal
proclaimed Jacob a genius who “played the character in a way never seen on the American stage and defying imitation.” Shylock was “revealed as the Jew of the ages.” And in the judgment of
Theater
magazine, the Jewish actor offered “a striking and original conception, wrought out not only of careful study, but from a racial sympathy, an instinctive appreciation of the deeper motives of this profound and complex character.”

It was to be expected that the Jewish press would
qvel
as one of its own received such glowing notices. But surprisingly, most of them paid more attention to the audience than to the actor. The
Yiddish World,
for example, was pleased to find “a deep seriousness on the faces of these Americans. They understood Adler just as well as they did the rest of the actors, and in places even better. They showed this with both the attentiveness and the applause with which they greeted the end of every scene in which he appeared.”

As Adler basked in his triumph Goldfaden ended his self-imposed European exile, tiptoeing back to New York City, unnoticed by people in and out of the Yiddish Theater he had invented. Only Jacob was kind enough to drop by occasionally. Out of guilt or gratitude he sent $5 every week so that the old man and his wife, Paulina, could live without starving. Otherwise the star kept his distance. He had become the darling of the establishment press and needed to maintain the image of a modern actor unburdened by the past. After all, it was because of Jacob that critics and reporters urged their readers to take the subway down to the Lower East Side. Even if they couldn't understand a word, they would apprehend the gestures and the themes of “the best theater in New York.” The prominent writers George Jean Nathan and Stark Young came to the Yiddish actor's dressing room; so did the matinee idol John Drew.

In the days to follow, the spirit of the ghetto took a galvanic leap. What the public schools taught Jewish children was demonstrably true now: humble beginnings were no bar to achievement in America. Old hands and greenhorns endlessly discussed this in cafés, social clubs, and sweatshops. A Yiddish proverb had new meaning now:
Men ken machn dem kholen gresser vi di nakht,
One can blow up a dream to be bigger than the night.

DURING ITS EARLY YEARS
the Yiddish Theater had depended on word of mouth rather than press notices. With good reason. There was no press. There were
attempts
at newspapers, including the penny daily, the
Yiddisher Recorder,
which claimed to have a circulation of over ten thousand—and which collapsed in 1895 after five years of publication. But late in the nineteenth century a true journalistic enterprise had begun. Like the Hearst and Pulitzer papers, the
Forverts—
the
Daily Forward—
dabbled in sensationalism. But the paper had a more earnest purpose than merely titillating its readers. It wanted to educate the
masses—to help them get on in the alien culture of America. To do that, the management eventually called upon Abraham Cahan.