Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (21 page)

In the end, despite every effort of the czarists, the jury voted six to two to acquit Beilis—a verdict of not guilty in Imperial Russia. News of the verdict spread almost as fast as the Yiddish hacks could scrawl. A lot of Lower East Side greenhorns considered these plays nothing less
than three-dimensional newsreels. Asked about the headlines, a new immigrant could not understand the commotion. A reporter was within earshot when she was informed:

“Mendel Beilis is free! Have you ever heard such news?”

The young woman waved her arm dismissively. “I knew that last Saturday night.”

“What do you mean?”

“With my own eyes I saw Mendel Beilis released at the Metropolitan Theater.”

IN CONTRAST TO SECOND AVENUE
, which was feeding off contemporary world events, the Yiddish theaters of Europe seemed to be caught in a time warp. In Scandinavia, Strindberg was attempting new forms of expression, and Ibsen was wrangling with once verboten subject matter. English and French theaters offered the kind of experimental works that George Bernard Shaw described as “the 19th century hating itself.” For the Moscow Art Theater, Anton Chekhov wrote strange new comedies of mood and misdirection, breaking the heart as they mocked Russia's hopeless dreamers. All this caused a buzz in the cafés of New York. But overseas, where such experiments might be expected to be a powerful influence, Yiddish Theater went on as if it were still 1880. Not that this was displeasing to ticket buyers, among them that most revolutionary Jewish intellect, the twenty-something Franz Kafka.

He had become a habitué of the Café Savoy, Prague's Yiddish venue. His presence was well known even then. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's 1970 short story “A Friend of Kafka,” an old Yiddish actor recalls his friendship with the Czech author: “In the theater I saw all the defects that Kafka saw in literature, and that brought us together. But, oddly enough, when it came to judging the theater Kafka was completely blind. He praised our cheap Yiddish plays to heaven. He fell madly in
love with a ham actress. When I think that Kafka loved this creature, dreamed about her, I am ashamed for the man and his illusions. Well, immortality is not choosy.”

An entry in Kafka's notebook shows the validity of Singer's fiction. The diarist may have gone to mock, but he stayed to admire: “Day before yesterday among the Jews in Café Savoy.
The First Evening of Passover
by the playwright Feinmann. At times (at the moment the consciousness of this pierced me) we did not interfere in the plot only because we were too moved, not because we were mere spectators.”

Kafka felt that assimilated Jewish actors—Rudolph Schildkraut, for instance—served as intermediaries, “enlarging the horizons of nonJews, without illuminating the existence of the Jews themselves.” That radiance could only come from “the poor Jewish actors who act for Jews in Yiddish. By their art they sweep away the deposits of an alien culture from the life of the Jews, and display the hidden Jewish face which is sinking into oblivion, and so give them an anchor in the troubles of our time.”

In her study
Kafka and the Yiddish Theater,
Evelyn Torton Beck notes, “The tiny stage of the shabby Café Savoy, its simple sets and extravagant costumes, the exaggerated acting style, the fusion of the comic with the tragic, and the use of stage devices as visions and tableaux” were salient features of the Prague troupe. It is these characteristics that reappear in Kafka's work. “The simple settings of many of his narratives, particularly those directly following the theater experience ('The Judgement' and ‘The Metamorphosis'), bear a close resemblance to the atmosphere and setting of the Yiddish Theater.”

Indeed, when a friend objected to the Savoy's overstated stage effects, Kafka's reply might have issued from an American immigrant witnessing a Second Avenue production for the first time: “So it should be. To create the desired effect their emotions and actions must be larger than the feelings and actions of their audience. If the theater is to affect life, it must be stronger, more intense than ordinary life. That is the law of gravity. In shooting one must aim higher than the mark.”

WHILE KAFKA WAS MAKING
his observations, the Yiddish Theater in New York again lurched forward, though not without objections, jealousies, and recriminations. In May of 1911, the Schildkrauts of Vienna were back in New York, where Rudolph offered his own interpretation of
The Merchant of Venice.
A cartoon in a Yiddish paper seized this occasion to play up the rivalry between this Shylock and the previous one. Jacob Adler is caricatured in a box seat at the theater, as he warily peers at his onstage competitor. The actor's thoughts send up the Merchant's most famous speech: “Am I not a human being, as he is? If the actors union hands me its demands, do I not cry? And if I am sued for breach of contract, do I not laugh? And if I cut a fresh porterhouse steak, do I not draw blood? So why can he act better than I?”

Schildkraut's production turned out to be legendary, but for the wrong reasons. Years later hardly anyone could recall his interpretation, but thousands swore they were there for a certain matinee. The star's reputation as a womanizer was on a par with Boris Thomashefsky's. One Wednesday afternoon the audience was filled with sighing young housewives, many of them with infants in tow. The babies were left in their carriages, parked in the lobby under the supervision of a doorman, who charged 10 cents per pram. As the court scene began, a yowling could be heard at the back of the theater. The doorman burst in: “Baby's crying!” Schildkraut froze. He resumed, taking the speech from the top. He halted once more. Two dozen mothers had dashed out, each assuming her child was the offender. Schildkraut began where he had left off, only to be interrupted by the rush of women returning to their seats. One had her baby with her. It was still caterwauling. The seat holders loudly shushed the pair and the mother desperately opened her blouse and offered the baby her breast. Schildkraut's son recorded the next few moments: “At last there was silence. But in a minute the wailing started again, topped by the high-pitched
voice of the frantic woman: ‘Hush, hush, darling! Take it, take it, quick! If you don't take it, I'll give to Schildkraut!'

“Theater was never like this in Berlin.”

Later that season newspaper cartoonists depicted a second rivalry, this one between two Yiddish divas.
Mirele Efros,
one of the few Jacob Gordin dramas still in the Second Avenue repertory, was known informally as “the Yiddish Queen Lear.” The story—a resolute and powerful woman betrayed by her greedy sons—had not lost its appeal since the first performances in 1896, with Keni Liptzin in the title role. She had been playing that part, off and on, for more than fifteen years, and the notion of anyone else as Mrs. Efros was unthinkable. Then came the visit of Esther Rokhl-Kaminska—mother of the twentieth-century star Ida Kaminska. A celebrated actress in the Polish Yiddish Theater, Esther considered herself the equal of any English luminary and, with a nod to the great English actress, preferred to be billed as “The Yiddish Eleanora Duse.”

When the imperious star brought her production of
Mirele Efros
to New York, a newspaper drawing showed Liptzin and Kaminska similarly costumed in voluminous black dresses and shawls. Liptzin points to her rival and wails to an appalled onlooker, “Look who is coming to take my place!”

Madame Liptzin was not so easily dislodged. Reviewers acknowledged Madame Kaminska's “more modern, more realistic” Queen Lear, but nearly all of them preferred their local heroine. Cahan took it upon himself to speak for the Lower East Siders. Unlike Kaminska, “Mme. Liptzin did not go about the stage like a rich housewife of Grodna or Berditchev, but like a queen. Melodrama was the core of her
Mirele Efros.
Whatever one may say about the faults of her playing, her
Mirele
was among the outstanding interpretations created on the Yiddish stage.”

Kaminska realized that her understated style had no chance against the extravagant Second Avenue style. She confided to colleagues, “I can't explain it, but I could never act the way they do.” She preferred the audiences out of town—particularly in Philadelphia, where she drew large crowds and more appreciative reviewers. Another Yiddish Theater production was taking place when she arrived in that city, and she bought a ticket. She saw a young Jewish actor. Maurice Schwartz seemed to possess an unusual combination of energy, native intelligence, and ambition—everything but control. She resolved to change his life. In the process, she changed the Yiddish Theater itself.

WITH GOD'S HELP,
I STARVED TO DEATH

I
N
1912, Manhattan was still reeling from the shock of the Triangle Fire in Greenwich Village. Young women of Jewish and Italian extraction, 146 in all, had perished either in the flames or, more horribly, by jumping out of windows to their death. A United Press reporter happened to be in Washington Square on March 25, 1911. He called in the story: “Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two
thud—dead…. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet…. Then came love amid the flames. A young man brought a girl to the window. Those who were looking saw her put her arms around him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud—dead, thud—dead—together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.”

The doomed workers had been locked in by owners who wanted to keep their employees from going out on long breaks. The tragedy, overdue given the horrifying conditions in so many lofts, reverberated long after the bodies were interred. Angry at the inhumane treatment from the bosses, protesters demanded justice. The court refused it; owners were fined a mere $75 per casualty. But the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, joined by the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen's Circle) and the
Forward,
would not be turned away. They collected money for the victims' families and kept up a barrage of protest in rallies and editorials. Labor unions gathered strength, not only in local negotiations but in national politics.

A contretemps between Teddy Roosevelt and his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, split the Republican Party into the regulars and the Roosevelt “Bull Moose” outsiders. The newly invigorated Democratic Party, strengthened by union members and progressives, nominated Woodrow Wilson, an intellectual who headed Princeton University. He won a convincing victory and began a series of sweeping governmental reforms. The aura of change was everywhere.
New Masses,
a magazine dedicated to political and aesthetic radicalism, advocated revolution not only in Russia but in America, and its editorials were quoted all over the land.

The latest instance of feminism on the march, Margaret Sanger, a former nurse and advocate of birth control, began writing a column for the
New York Call.
It was daringly entitled “What Every Girl Should Know,” and dealt with such taboo subjects as sex and venereal disease.

A year later came the Armory Show. Held at the 69th Regiment Armory building on East 26th Street, it introduced Americans to nonobjective art. Marcel Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
seemed
emblematic of an exhibition designed to disturb and infuriate. A
New York Times
article was headed “Cubists and Futurists Are Making Insanity Pay,” and most readers agreed with the paper's assessment.

It was a heady time to be in town, and Maurice Schwartz's head was filled with big plans. He knew all about Strindberg and Ibsen and Chekhov. He would take these Slavic hicks, these untutored settlers, and introduce them to a new kind of theater, a theater of symbolism and innovation. He would be a secular rabbi, instructing with nuance and example.

For that, a man would need an ego as big as the Flatiron Building, and Schwartz was well qualified for the role. But he had something more than self-confidence. He nourished the same ambition for his people that he had seen in Jacob Adler and David Kessler and Boris Thomashefsky—a yearning to make the stage a part of the immigrant experience, to elevate the Jews of New York, to bring art into the lives of common laborers and their families. More inspired actors may have worked on the Yiddish stage at that time, but none had a nobler ideal.

The grain merchant's son was born in the Ukraine in 1890, traveled to England with his parents, and planned to sail to America with them. According to his memoirs, the budget did not allow for the whole family to emigrate, and he was stranded in Liverpool at the age of eleven. With unusual self-assurance for a boy his age, he made his way to London, got a job as a child laborer in a rag factory, fell ill from overwork, and drifted into a kind of Dickensian vagrancy until his parents rescued him and brought the youth to the United States in 1903. By then he was fluent in English as well as Yiddish. Bilingualism was to be a great asset in the coming years.