Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (26 page)

Kessler left no memoir, no instructions, no disciples. His only legacy was the instinctive naturalism that had eluded Yiddish players for so long. Widely imitated, it drove them on, and enabled some of them to make the crossover to mainstream theater. But that was not enough to sustain his name. If anyone ever needed proof that the actor's life and art are writ on water, David Kessler stands as the prime exemplar—the most obscure celebrity ever to occupy center stage.

By the time of Kessler's death Adler had begun a slow and incomplete recovery. After much concern and consultation, the family told him what had happened. His reaction was so distressing that from then on, Jacob's granddaughter Lulla recalled, “all bad news was kept from him.” The following summer, “newspapers were hidden when Caruso died.” The suicide of an admirer was also concealed, and one night Adler startled his family by asking why this friend was not there. Somebody found a hasty explanation, and a short uneasy silence followed.

“I suppose he is already under the earth,” Adler said. Nobody contradicted him.

The bent, white-haired figure had planned to write his memoirs; now he was forced to dictate them in his Riverside Drive apartment. Adler's tone suggested the lament of Ishmael: “Where are they now, the true ones of yesterday? Where is Goldfaden, my rabbi, my teacher? Where is Mogulesko, the young companion whose career flowered together with my own? Where is Gordin … where is David Kessler— though we were competitors we loved one another. Better than any one he understood and appreciated my art, and knew, too, that better than anyone, I understood and appreciated his. Where are they all? The dark undertaker has laid them all away and left me here alone, the last of my generation.”

Money had never meant very much to Jacob, but it took on a crucial significance during his decline. Even with the help of his children he needed funds for daily assistance. The situation was not very different from the way Bertha Kalisch would deal with old age. Almost blind, she was led onstage for a series of “Farewells,” and they produced enough cash to pay her medical bills. A similar benefit was staged for Jacob at the Manhattan Opera House, advertised as “The final appearance on any stage of Jacob P. Adler.” The sold-out house watched a variety program peopled with celebrities, among them the vaudevillians Al Jolson, who sang and whistled, and Will Rogers, who cracked jokes and spun a rope. A Metropolitan Opera tenor concluded the tribute with “Pack Up Your Troubles.”

Adler himself appeared. He read from the first act of Gordin's
A Yiddish King Lear,
unable to stand, but vigorous of voice. The profits of the night—$15,000—went to the honoree. Heartened, the family scheduled a series of “Final Appearances.” The last occurred at Kessler's Second Avenue Theater, where Jacob went through a scene from Gordin's
The Stranger,
typecast as a stricken old man. Wiping their eyes, audience
members made repeated requests for yet another bow. Adler's wife, Sara, kept track; there were eighteen curtain calls. In his dressing room, she spoke in wonder. “You made them cry as they never cried before.” The old man's head was not so easily turned. “It was not my art that made them cry.”

One morning he read that the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky was in town with the Moscow Art Theater. Jacob demanded an audience. He was frail, but two of his eight children, the actors Luther and Julia, got Jacob up in his best suit and drove him to the Russian's hotel. As the car pulled up, their father abruptly changed his mind; he felt too ill to get out of the car. Word was sent upstairs. A few moments later Stanislavsky showed up in bathrobe and slippers. He had heard much about the work of Jacob Adler. Climbing in back, he embraced the actor. The two men spoke effusively in Russian, embraced, wept, and said their farewells.

“Lonely as I am,” Adler related to his stenographer, “I have my memories of the Yiddish Theater, memories I must set down so that, dipped in blood, lit with the tears of a living witness, the world may know how we built, out of the dark realities of Jewish life, with our blood, with our nerves, with the tears of our sleepless nights, the theater that stands today as a testament to our people.”

Jacob was not as forsaken as he wanted the reader to believe. Three of his grown children were starring on Broadway: Luther in
Humoresque,
playing opposite the popular actress Laurette Taylor; Julia, as Jessica to David Warfield's Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
; Stella as the lead in Karel Capek's drama
The World We Live In.
All of them acknowledged his influence. Yet this was not enough: Jacob Adler needed time and attention, and above all he needed to organize his memory, to provide a coda to his career. Shortly after his seventieth birthday, he dictated ruefully, “I am now at the time, the poet tells us, when the soldiers, the hands, begin to tremble, and the watchmen, the feet, begin to falter. The sun is growing darker. Clouds begin to cover the moon. What was deepest, most satisfying, most beautiful in my rich life is every day fading.”

On he went, talking and mourning and writing, completing his memoir just before he was gripped by a grand mal seizure. Jacob Adler died on March 31, 1926. For a moment, the heart of the Yiddish Theater stopped beating. The actor was certainly not fault-free; he could be self-centered to the point of solipsism. Yet he was also aesthetically
ambitious; he chose to appear in plays of stature even when it meant diminished profits, and he was the first to show the English-speaking world that a ghetto actor could have the power and glamour of a Barrymore. Other Yiddish performers had taken up his fallen banner and run with it. They did so with equal courage and more polished skills. But they operated in a postwar world. The stage was shifting under their feet.

The administration of President Calvin Coolidge had set down roots, and callous immigration policies had gone into effect. Workingclass immigrants were no longer welcome in the United States. The Jews who did manage the high hurdles of Ellis Island were skilled tradesmen and professionals, equipped to enter the middle class as rapidly as possible. These people already had a smattering of English and wanted more. They had little interest in immuring themselves in the Lower East Side, and less in watching ghetto stage productions.

The bleak future of the Yiddish Theater was Topic A at the Hebrew Actors Union on East 7th Street, as Adler's colleagues gathered to speak about his contributions, and to mourn his loss. A
New York Times
obituary had just called Jacob “the world's leading exponent of the Yiddish drama.” In a rare follow-up piece, the paper had added, “Thirty years ago the folk of the east side ‘Ghetto,’ for the most part immigrants lately arrived, lived in the cultural atmosphere of Middle Europe.

“In the technique of the theater they were Victorian, but in nature and spirit Elizabethan. They argued and wept and cheered, not only unashamed, but with joy and pride in their emotions. To this folk Adler brought a drama as primitive as themselves, touched with a broadly human sympathy and illumined by moods of nobility.” Sad to say, “with Jacob Adler passes the heroic age of the Yiddish Theater. Whether or not his King Lear ranked with the Hamlet of Edwin Booth, it unquestionably belonged to the same great school.” In one judgment the paper was inaccurate. Adapting to survive was second nature for American Jews; the Yiddish theater was down but not out. In fact, it was about to enjoy a powerful resurgence. Even as Jacob Adler was laid to rest, the rescuers were entering from stage left.

NOTIONS OF A FINAL SOLUTION
were given added fervor by the humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus, framed as a spy by a group of antiSemitic officers in 1878. More agitation against the Jews came after the ravings of the czar's minions, anxious to convert, deport, or kill the Russian Hebrews during the early part of the century. But the most powerful impetus for the Holocaust rose from the mud of Verdun and the trenches of the Marne.

A cease-fire took effect eleven minutes after the eleventh hour of November 11, 1918. A day later, the statisticians went to work. When their ghastly arithmetic was finished, they calculated that ten million lay dead in the soil of the battling nations. Another twenty million had been maimed, the victors limping home to an empty celebration, the losers to an intolerable humiliation. The Great War, the war to end all wars, had actually laid the foundation for a new and unimaginably atrocious one. Because of the global conflict, Europe's balance of power had been wrecked, a rising generation of potential leaders had been slaughtered, and the economies of practically every nation lay in disarray.

Someone had to be blamed for this international catastrophe. The generals and the elected officials pointed away from themselves, and the novelists and poets whose colleagues had died in the war had their say as well. “The glory of combat,” once a phrase that stirred millions, no longer had any meaning. The new catchphrases were “moral fatigue” and “international malaise.” A search for scapegoats got under way, as it did after every war. Leading the literary pack, T. S. Eliot found a specific group to blame, deliberately placing them in lower case:

The wrong people seemed to have money in the postwar period, and without much warning, portraits of the beaky Hebrew predator came back into fashion. There was Meyer Wolfsheim, for example, the conniving gangster of
The Great Gatsby:
“He's the man who fixed the World Series.” “Why isn't he in jail?” “They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man.”

There was Robert Cohn, the rich and unlikable Princetonian of
The Sun Also Rises,
who had been overmatched in a boxing ring. “It gave him a certain satisfaction of a strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose.”

E. E. Cummings, who had been in a concentration camp during the war, could not shake the prejudices of his youth:

The result of all this was something George Orwell was later to define as doublethink: the ability to weld two false ideas in a way that defied all systems of logic. During the postwar period, the specter of the wily Jew was raised yet again in international consciousness. He and his kind were supposed to have caused the war in order to fatten their coffers. When the profits ran out they ended the conflict, thus stabbing Germany in the back. That was Adolf Hitler's charge, and he would maintain it until his dying day.

Unmentioned in his autobiographical
Mein Kampf
was the fact that a Jewish officer had awarded him the Iron Cross. Or that the German troops had mutinied all by themselves, refusing to follow Kaiser Wilhelm (who had saved his own skin by slinking away to a safe Netherlands exile). Or that Alfred Krupp, Germany's principal merchant of death, was in fact a well-known anti-Semite.

The wartime profiteer was but one aspersion cast upon the character of the Jew. Another, diametrically opposite, pictured the Bolshevik Hebrew as manipulative and half mad, an advocate of free love who would despoil Christian women, who called religion the opiate of the people, who stole from the treasuries of the world in order to fund godless communism. Unmentioned was the fact that Karl Marx, co-author of
The Communist Manifesto,
warned the world against Judaism. Born of a Jewish mother converted to Lutheranism, he wrote a very specific caveat: “Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew. What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.

“Very well: then, in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.”

To the paranoid spirit of the Germans, and to many of their neighbors, to be both an ur-capitalist
and
a Bolshevik at the same time was beyond the talents of any people on the planet—except of course the Jews. This mind-set was not exclusive to Europe; it infected America as well. Russian Jews were never more than 5 percent of the general population, but they were disproportionately represented in the new government. Leon Trotsky had become chief of Soviet foreign affairs; Yakov Sverdlov was chairman of the Executive Committee; Grigori Zinoviev led the Communist International. U.S. anti-Semites were thus furnished with new material. More was to come on the heels of the Revolution.

In 1920 Prohibition took effect. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment gave rise to a new criminal class of distillers and importers—as well as the spread of speakeasies, illegally serving booze to patrons anxious to flout the law. Two of the biggest bootleggers were Canadian Jews, Sam Bronfman and Louis Rosenstiel, and much was made of their ethnicity. This was coupled with the Red Scare, exacerbated by Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. The most prominent of the president's cabinet appointees, Palmer pointed to a series of warning signs from the left. Bombs had been detonated in eight cities, including Washington, D.C., where Palmer's own home had been damaged by an explosive device. In addition, a series of violent strikes had taken place in the early postwar period, led by communist and socialist agitators. Palmer also looked disapprovingly at the
rising divorce rate and the feverish Negro music and abbreviated clothing made popular by a new generation coming of age. These, too, he blamed on communism.

In a widely quoted essay he wrote that the Bolshevist movement was “eating its way into the homes of the American workman,” and “tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”