Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (25 page)

Next up that season was Gerhardt Hauptmann's
Lonely People,
with an important female role, a part coveted by Celia Adler. Mrs. Schnitzer
wanted it as well, and because her husband was the chief backer of the Jewish Art Theater she got the role. To Celia's immense satisfaction, the production of
Lonely People
did not meet with the expected approval. Abraham Cahan went out of his way to pan it. “Despite her beautiful figure,” he wrote, “Mme Schnitzer's performance was not good enough for the role she played.” Undiscouraged, the Madame continued to behave like a diva from the old days. She flouted the strict bylaws of the Hebrew Actors Union, declining to audition for major roles and refusing to appear in crowd scenes.

Out of the Schnitzers' earshot Celia sneeringly referred to Henrietta as the
balabuste,
literally a bossy woman, but meant in this case to signify the boss's wife. Most of the troupe agreed with Celia. Ben-Ami felt compelled to state their case to the money man. As long as things went Louis's way the rich man was all smiles; when they turned against him he reverted to the vulgarian he had always been. Ben-Ami was to remember that his financial partner “showed me the ‘fig' [a crude hand gesture], saying, ‘The lease is in my name.’” Emanuel Reicher heard about the confrontation and wasted no time. A few weeks later he took a better-paying and more influential position with the Theater Guild on Broadway.

Ben-Ami followed the director out the door. His English was almost unaccented by now, and he confidently auditioned for all the uptown producers. Several parts were available; he opted for a key role in the splashy Broadway production of
Samson and Delilah.
A review in
The Nation
indicated the general opinion: the play was “tawdry,” and therefore “the chief circumstance attending this production is the transference of Mr. Ben-Ami from the Yiddish to the English stage. He has given us this season of his youth and art.”

Less than two years after its promising start, the Jewish Art Theater went out of business. Maurice Schwartz wasted no time. He moved his troupe out of Irving Place and into the Garden, operating under the title of the Yiddish Art Theater. Great plays of almost all kinds would find a home here, from Shaw and Strindberg, to Pinski and I. L. Peretz. But there would be no Shakespeare. When someone suggested that Schwartz do his own interpretation of Shylock, the refusal was firm and permanent. “It's an anti-Semitic play,” he concluded. Upon witnessing a previous production, he “realized why they had the Kishinev pogroms.”

To the press and public, Schwartz presented himself as a bold new impresario. In fact, from the earliest days he was as cautious as he was
canny. One of the Yiddish Art Theater's most durable plays found a home in his theater only after it had made its mark in Europe.

The Dybbuk
was the creation of Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, a onetime Hasid, activist, poet, emergency aid worker, and ethnographer— an encapsulation of the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. Born in Lithuania, Rappoport wrote under the nom de plume of S. Ansky. He lived just long enough to see the Revolution take place. On his deathbed he urged a Vilna troupe of Yiddish performers to stage his Jewish ghost story, and they honored the request. A modest reception was expected;
The Dybbuk
turned into the sensation of the year.

It also ignited a furious counterattack. One critic wrote an entire book about the “pseudo-art” of a man who had the gall to invent a folktale and pass it off as authentic. He went on to excoriate the play's “philistine audience and its deluded admirers.” Defenders rose to praise Ansky, and the ensuing debate attracted more publicity. The Yiddish papers had carried item after item about the storm provoked by
The Dybbuk
in Red Russia, and a great curiosity ran through the Lower East Side. With maximum fanfare the Yiddish Art Theater announced that the play would open the company's 1921–22 season. At last Yiddishspeaking New Yorkers could see what all the fuss was about.

THE DYBBUK
(subtitled
Between Two Worlds
) reflected Ansky's belief that Judaic tradition had grown irrelevant. He predicted that it would soon be forgotten, covered over by current events. Ritual, liturgy, worship on the High Holy Days were no longer enough; art was the key to Jewish survival in the twentieth century.

The play's most awkward device was a celestial Messenger, a lastminute insertion suggested by Konstantin Stanislavsky when he was considering the play for his Moscow Art Theater. In the end the Master chose not to stage
The Dybbuk,
but Ansky took the idea and ran with it. The Messenger begins act one by stating the theme in an anecdote:

The plot is rudimentary. Khonon, an impoverished
yeshiva
student, has fallen in love with Leah. Her father, Sender, disapproves of the liaison, and arranges for Leah to wed another. Khonon experiments with the mystical Kabala, hoping to thwart the old man's scheme. A supernatural messenger appears with bad tidings. The Kabalistic rites were ineffective; the wedding will take place as planned.

Upon hearing the news, Khonon collapses. But as he crumples to the earth, the expression on his face changes from despair to ecstasy. “The twice-proclaimed name is revealed to me!” he says with his dying breath. “I…see it! I…I…I have won!” The words seem empty, the boast meaningless. But at her wedding Leah abruptly falls to the ground. When congregants lift her up, she speaks in a voice not her own—the voice of a man. A dybbuk has entered the body of the bride and she speaks with Khonon's voice: “You have buried me! But I have returned to my promised one and will not leave her!”

There is only one course to take now; there must be an exorcism. The rabbi in attendance calls for men in white robes, equipped with rams' horns and candles. “With the power of the almighty God and with the authority of the holy Torah,” intones the rabbi, “I sever all the threads that bind you to the world of the living and to the body and to the very soul of the maiden Leah…. I banish you from the community of Israel.”

The threat of excommunication is too much for the still religious dybbuk. Khonon surrenders and agrees to leave the body of his beloved. Leah returns to her normal state, assured by friends and elders that she's free from the evil eye and ready to enter life as a married woman. They encourage her to nap before the ceremony. When she awakens, she is alone. Or is she?

For decades, the cafés resounded with heated discussions of
The Dybbuk.
Even detractors admitted the enchantment Ansky had produced with images of floating lovers, the
shtetl
in phosphorescent twilight, the God-haunted life of peasant Jewry. But what was its meaning? Was Ansky saying that true love was more important than material goods? All very well in the world to come, but try getting along in this world without cash.

Was he glorifying the Almighty? In that case, why did the young couple have to suffer and die?

Was this just a collection of folktales with a frisson? Or was it a meditation on history, an interpretation of Thomas Mann's words about the Jews of the Bible: “Deep is the well of the past. Shall we not say it is bottomless?”

AN AMALGAM OF
FRANKENSTEIN AND MARX

I
N
1921, the year of
The Dybbuk
in New York, two giants stumbled. Jacob Adler leased a summer cottage in Pine Hill, a resort town in the Catskill Mountains. His children and grandchildren stayed there for days at a time; colleagues from the Yiddish stage made frequent visits. They prevailed on the paterfamilias to return as Shylock— so many young people had not been around when he astonished the
city with his interpretation, inaugurating the Shakespeare revival on Second Avenue.

Adler told them he would consider it. Did he do that to humor them? Or did he have a genuine desire to make, once more, the famous demand for a Venetian's pound of flesh? No one ever found out.

For on a hot day in July, as the sixty-five-year-old swung in a hammock, chatting away, his voice grew indistinct, and he suddenly seemed disoriented. Family members took him inside, away from the heat of the day. An hour later, the grandchildren were told to keep quiet; Grandpa Jacob was in pain. Within the house could be heard cries and sobs. Children were tearfully instructed to pray for their
zayde—
he was very ill. The following day the Yiddish headlines had the story:
JACOB ADLER FELLED BY PARALYTIC STROKE
.

Two months later David Kessler was rehearsing a play in Brooklyn when he doubled over in pain. Violent cramps forced him to cancel the run-through for that day. In a matter of twenty-four hours he shook off the pain and called for another session. The leading man spoke and strode with his customary vigor until the last act. At that point the cramps recurred. He passed out. Sirens blaring, an ambulance rushed him to a local hospital. The next day he was wheeled to the emergency room, where surgeons attempted to remove an intestinal blockage. The big, dominating figure, invulnerable for four decades, died on the operating table.

In a backhanded valedictory, Abraham Cahan observed that when David Kessler began his career he would declaim in the style of the day. Later, however, “In Gordin's plays Kessler began to
speak
on stage for the first time. This came
from
him, but the role had brought it
to
him. It ignited his powers of imagination. He got used to the role, sensing himself as a living human being, and the real-life tone came naturally to him. What was lacking in the words the actor put in with his performance. Kessler did not know this at first. Intelligent theater-goers explained it to him, and I was one of them.”