Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (22 page)

As a youth in New York, Maurice attended every Yiddish play he could afford, indiscriminately joining with random groups of
patriotn
claquing for Mogulesko, Thomashefsky, Adler, Kessler. In his eyes they were all masters, and he resolved that somehow he would work his way into their company. Even to paint scenery or move a spotlight would have seemed a heavenly assignment. But the way to the big time was blocked by experienced professionals, and he was forced to find work out of town. A small troupe in Bridgeport, Connecticut, gave Schwartz a walk-on in a Yiddish play. It ran one night. He came home enthralled, only to be mocked by his parents for wasting his time. Much like Kessler before him, he exploded in rage and moved out.

Hanging around the Yiddish Rialto he heard that a troupe in
Cincinnati needed an actor to play small roles. The young man auditioned, won the $8-a-week job—and earned an extra dollar for assuming the duties of stage manager. As Schwartz remembered it, for that additional money he spent nearly every evening “shoving furniture and scenery around, packing and unpacking before and after the show, and helping the extras with their makeup.” Before long he got the break he had been hoping for.

His boss in Cincinnati was a temperamental impresario/actress who quickly became infatuated with her actor/stage manager. He reciprocated—or pretended to, no one was ever sure. In any case, she fired the company's director and replaced him with Maurice. To justify her faith in him, he spent $30 of his own money on klieg lights, and began experimenting with them. These were used to great effect on tour. When the troupe reached Philadelphia, they became the talk of the city. It was then that the Czech actress Esther Rokhl-Kaminska came to town and dropped in at a matinee. She planned to stay for five minutes. She remained until the final curtain. After the audience had left the theater, she went backstage to meet the young man whose production had so impressed her. Just before she returned to Europe, she mentioned Maurice's name to David Kessler, one of the few New York actors who had won her respect. A month later David came down to Philadelphia and offered Maurice the small part of a lawyer in the Yiddish adaptation of
Madame X,
a popular French drama of adultery, prostitution, and murder. Schwartz quit the company and headed for Manhattan that night.

Energized by the new New York, he appeared onstage in several plays during the 1912 season. Things came to a halt when someone at the Hebrew Actors Union discovered that this upstart had not auditioned for the guild members. The union had established a rigid policy about performing on Second Avenue: any actor, no matter how big his out-of-town reputation, was required to audition before a group of union members. Failure to please them meant a blacklisting throughout the city. Confident, poised, Schwartz appeared and read some lines. The committee turned him down.

Perhaps, Maurice reflected, he had been too arrogant. He avidly prepared for his next shot, and this time presented himself humbly, and read his lines with close attention to detail. Again they rejected him.

Maurice was frantic. A three-strikes-and-out policy was in effect; one more rebuff and he would be kaput. Other actors who had been
similarly treated rarely passed their third audition; crushed, they usually left the city, hoping to catch on with some regional organization. But Schwartz was made of sterner stuff. Even then he could pick up the scent of power wherever it resided. On the Lower East Side, the
Forward
was a font of influence, and Abraham Cahan
was
the
Forward.
Schwartz obtained a private audience with the great one, and in the offices of the paper staged his own private audition. Cahan was impressed enough to intervene on Schwartz's behalf. On the third try, the union gave its approval. Maurice was on the wing.

OF ALL WRITERS
whose works were staged by the Yiddish Theater in New York, none was more beloved than Sholem Aleichem. Perhaps that was his trouble.

Born in the Ukraine in 1859, Sholem Rabinowitz simultaneously pursued careers in finance and literature. Shortly after the turn of the century he made a clean break from the stock market. From then on he earned a living—often precarious—as the pseudonymous Sholem Aleichem (“Peace be with you” in Yiddish), writer of stories, novels, and sketches. In time he was drawn to the theater, as were many of his fellow Zionists. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote plays; so did the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber and Israel Zangwill, the first person to describe America as “the Melting Pot.”

Aleichem's early plays displayed the author's distinctive touch—a bit of comedy suddenly brought up short by a revelation. In
Mentshn
(People), Fanitshke, a servant girl, leaves a family, then pops up years later, overdressed, Frenchified, and bursting with forced laughter:

In Yiddish writing, Aleichem became known as a sprinter rather than a distance runner. The one-acters tended to outshine the fulllength dramas; the short stories rang truer than the novels—and they had a longer life. Issued in book form, the newspaper pieces sold phenomenally well. Especially the ones about a recurring character called Tevye. The public couldn't get enough of the simple milkman working his route, speaking about his five daughters (“Girls have a bad habit of eating during the day and growing at night”), giving his customers a précis of his past life (“With God's help, I starved to death”), all the while addressing the Almighty with a pungent, weary tone (“A Jew must hope, keep hoping, and if in the meantime his life is full of grief and disaster, well, that is what we Jews are for, chosen from all the people in the world, all of them envying us”).

Tevye's popularity reached beyond the bounds of Eastern Europe, and as New York's Jewish residents learned of Aleichem, so he learned of them. With a combination of fulsome praise and an odd candor, the playwright sent an appeal to the Yiddish Theater's leading light. “Incomparable Master!” began his letter to Jacob Adler. “I send you a play which I have composed from several works written by me. Great Maestro … only an artist like yourself is capable of creating and showing the soul of this character.”

The flattery continued, followed by a sales pitch. “Great Master of the Stage! In my play you will find none of the effects on which the Jewish public has for so many years been nourished. You will find no soul-tearing scenes, no corpses in cribs, no demented women, no patriotic songs or nationalist speeches, no transient boarders seducing innocent maidens, and no vulgar jokes. You will find only a simple Jew,
father of five daughters, an honest, clean, wholesome, and greatly suffering character who, with all his misfortunes, will make the public laugh from beginning to end.”

No patriotic songs, no vulgar jokes—this was fine with Adler. It was probably the lack of soul-tearing scenes that put him off. In any case, after due consideration he concluded that the story of Tevye the Dairyman was not his glass of tea and passed on it. Aleichem came to New York anyway, and hardly had he set foot on American shores when he was invited to a banquet of prominent Manhattan citizens. Elegantly turned out in a continental suit and pince-nez glasses, he was introduced as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” (Samuel Clemens, the other star guest, cheerfully responded by identifying himself as “the American Sholem Aleichem.”)

When Adler learned of that celebration he changed his mind and openly expressed an interest in the work of this gifted writer. Boris Thomashefsky followed suit. Each requested a private audience; each asked for a full-length play. Anything Aleichem handed them—anything at all, they assured him—would be guaranteed a first-class production. The author responded warily; he was disinclined to show projects that had already been turned down, and claimed that he had nothing on hand. However, he did suggest that some of his
books
might be adapted for the stage …

Thomashefsky moved fast; he bought the rights to
Stempenyu,
Aleichem's first novel, for a thousand dollars—a sum equal to the average annual salary for American workers. The book seemed a natural for
shund.
A blithe violin virtuoso plays with women's hearts—until he falls in love with the unhappily married Rokheleh and the complications and fireworks begin. Adler would not be outdone; for a thousand dollars he took an option on another Aleichem novel,
Samuel Pasternak, or The Scoundrel,
a portrait of naive speculators involved in a stock market they can neither afford nor understand. Adler knew that most of his audience had no idea how such a market operated. But he also knew they were pro-labor, anti-plutocrat.
Pasternak
would give them a chance to laugh at a Ukrainian version of Wall Street opportunists.

The two impresarios raced each other to the finish line, each anxious to open his own project before the other could complete rehearsals. In the Goldfaden tradition, Thomashefsky ordered tunes to be inserted into the text. He paid Joseph Rumshinsky to put Aleichem's rhymes to music. On closer examination, though, Boris decided
that the author's verse was not good enough for the notes. He inserted couplets of his own devising and tacked on a few of his own melodies. By the time the songs were edited and adorned, Rumshinsky wrote, the special Sholem Aleichem charm had vanished. “New words were added, so-called lyrics, and new bits of melody injected, which drowned the folk quality. The entire piece was inundated with cheap theatrical effects.”

Across the street Adler kept urging his cast to learn their lines quickly so that they could open before Thomashefsky's troupe. Matters had reached the point of hysteria when friends of Aleichem intervened— the widely advertised competition was no way to treat an author of such standing. Resistant at first, both Thomashefsky and Adler ultimately agreed to a truce. Both shows would open on the same evening.

In her biography, Aleichem's daughter, Marie Waife-Goldberg, refers to that opening night. The family had temporarily settled in Geneva, en route to the New World, and the playwright sent them an account. “I had to split up in two,” he reported. “I attended two acts in one theater and two acts in the other.” Audiences in both places called for the author as soon as the curtain was lowered—at the intermission of one and the finale of the other. “
Stempenyu
made an impression of something poetic and patriarchal.
The Scoundrel,
on the other hand, compelled the audience to keep its mouth open and laugh all through the performance.”

In Second Avenue cafeterias, the author affected an indifference to reviewers. To his family he was nowhere near as dispassionate. One communiqué gives an accurate summary of the situation facing playwrights in the Yiddish Theater. “I am confident about the non-Jewish press, since it is more honest than the Yiddish; the Yiddish is partial, and I expect nothing good from it. But that's not worth a farthing—the main thing is the public, the masses.”

Aleichem's intuition about the Yiddish press was on the money. Notices in the middle-class newspapers were favorable. One paper assured its readership that with these two new plays “Sholem Aleichem opened a new world for the theater public.” Another stated that “The hopes that Aleichem would bring a new spirit into the Jewish theater of America have been fulfilled.” Here at last was “the work of a real artist,” a true original and not an imitator of Shakespeare or Tolstoy or even Gordin.

It was the left-leaning press that did him in. Disappointed that the
playwright took no political stance, Cahan panned
Pasternak
in the
Forward.
The production was too long, too frivolous—more of a vaudeville than a genuine play. The Lower East Side's radical newspaper, the
Warheit,
greeted Aleichem with a one-two punch. First came the editor, who told readers that he had exited at intermission despite the evident skill of the star, Jacob P. Adler. The coup de grè¢ce was delivered by the paper's official critic. He condemned this as the worst play ever produced in the history of the Yiddish Theater.

Back and forth the reviewers went, some for, some against. Aleichem dared to hope that the controversy would provoke interest and stimulate ticket-buying. It was not to be. After two weeks of public indifference, both plays folded. The writer, ever resilient, completed another work and gave it to a representative. The script was brought to Jacob Adler. “A new play by Sholem Aleichem!” he gushed. “Father in heaven, quick, quick, let me see it, let me hear it!” Turning the pages, he could barely contain his zeal. “The dear hand of Sholem Aleichem! What a golden hand! What a golden language! How he writes! How his characters talk!”

Jacob's effusions should have been a warning signal; as he read, Adler marked up the script, changing the “golden language.” In the end, he turned down the play—there were simply not enough turns for a leading man. The Jewish Mark Twain sat down at his desk yet again. Conquering New York was never an easy task. Was it impossible? Was the author behind his time, or ahead of it? He refused to believe either alternative.

EVEN IN THE BEST
of seasons, Yiddish Theater audiences were distracted by business and familial obligations. Now came new competitors for their attention. Movies were getting longer;
Quo Vadis?
ran for nine reels—about two hours. Thomas Edison perfected disk recording; the ungainly cylinders were on their way out. And then
there were the topics of politics and paranoia. These often took precedence over everything else, including neighborhood gossip.