Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (27 page)

Egged on by a group of agitated congressmen, Palmer and his special assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, began a series of raids, targeting “radicals” of every persuasion. Thousands were arrested and held without trial. In December 1919, the raids were capped by the deportation of 249 aliens, put aboard the USS
Buford
and shipped off to the Soviet Union. Jewish names were of particular interest to Palmer's agents, and Hoover expressed a singular pleasure after the arrest of Emma Goldman, a high-profile deportee whose views about free love and birth control were a favorite subject of the tabloids.

The times hardly seemed right for a radical Jewish theater group— especially one whose purpose was to stage a new kind of Yiddish Theater. Yet that was exactly what the avant-garde had in mind as its members gathered in clandestine meeting places, operating under a variety of false names. In his study
The Jew and Communism,
Melech Epstein describes a typical “club” in New York City, occupying a floor in an office or apartment building. “The inner walls were taken out, and a stage built on one side. The walls were painted and decorated with posters and placards, and the ceiling was festooned with colorful crepe paper. Facing the stage was a buffet for sandwiches and hot and cold drinks, served by the girls.” The organizations with sufficient membership “also maintained dramatic groups, dance groups, mandolin bands, sport sections, libraries, and the inevitable
samizdat—
wall newspaper—brought over from Russia.”

Things eased up a bit in the early 1920s, when Woodrow Wilson was displaced by the new president. Warren G. Harding wanted nothing to do with controversy—and very little to do with politics. The Red Scare diminished in a period the Republican president defined as “Less government in business and more business in government.” Scandals quickly undid him, however, when it was revealed that several of his associates had used their official positions to line their own pockets.
Depressed and unnerved, Harding went on a tour of the West in 1923, accompanied by his untainted secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. The president confessed in a quiet moment, “My friends—they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!” and asked Hoover, “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” Hoover urged the president to go public as soon as possible, to save the GOP. Whether Harding planned to take Hoover's advice would always remain a mystery; in August 1923, he died in San Francisco of a heart attack. Vice President Coolidge replaced him, assuring the country that prosperity, not partisanship, was his main concern.

That summer a group of clubs felt secure enough to found the Folks Farband far Kunst Teater (The People's Association for Art Theater), a mix of communists and socialists. At first, the
Forward
socialists maneuvered the communists out of the executive committee. In a show of strength, they wrote an official declaration, honoring the memory of Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor. The communists wanted no part of it. They argued that Gompers had been against immigration, that he had opposed teaching the working class any language but English, that he had been far too conciliatory to management in union negotiations.

A vitriolic debate followed. In the end, the socialists walked out, leaving the communists in full control of the Farband. No longer was it an umbrella organization representing the entire gamut of Jewish labor. The hard left had won. Once in the hands of the communists, the Folks Farband became the Arbeter Teater Farband (Workers Theater Alliance), which went by its acronym, Artef. The group determined to go against the zeitgeist.

Wherever the personnel of the Artef looked, it seemed that Americans sought to avoid reality. Frivolity was the main theme of Broadway shows, crystallized in Ira Gershwin's verse:

Men were only too happy to flout the laws against liquor by drinking in speakeasies; women impudently mocked conventions by wearing
short hair and abbreviated skirts. It was, as John Updike points out, “a light-hearted era” in which Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd could dominate the silent screen, and Dorothy Parker could encapsulate an era in a quatrain:

Against the national tendency toward ridicule and derision, Artef made its stand. The irony was that this innovative group could defy any convention and any leader, save for one who lived six thousand miles from New York. The anti-Semitism of the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was no secret even then. But whenever the subject was raised, the true believers confronted doubters with two essential facts: a) the Soviet Union had promoted many men and women with Jewish names. And b) Yiddish theaters flourished in Minsk, Odessa, Kiev, and some smaller cities.

So how bad could it be for the Jews of Russia? What sane Hebrew would choose a return to the days of the Romanovs? The Soviet Yiddish Theater had rubles to work with, directors, lighting, and set designers. Why, there was even a star, Shlomo Mikhoels.

IN
1925 Artef leased an office in Union Square, the heart of radical life in New York. Incorporated, the group began a fund-raising drive, selling $5 bonds to member organizations. In statements to the community, members exhorted New York's Jewry to abandon the “bygone idylls, Hasidic legends, all kinds of tall tales,” and to forget “the notion of bourgeois life, family drama and romantic complications.” Inserted in a Goldfaden play, two lines crystallized their new aesthetic. As a
funeral procession passed by, an onlooker inquired, “Dead? Who died?” The enthusiastic answer: “The old Yiddish Theater!”

But Maurice Schwartz refused to be elbowed aside by the leftists. He staged dramas with political content (although carefully set in the past), among them
Danton,
Romain Rolland's portrait of the French revolutionary, and Ernst Toller's
Machine Wreckers,
based on the Luddite anti-industrial riots in England. The communists condemned these productions as “insincere and hollow.” Nathaniel Buchwald, a propagandist for the communist monthly
Der Hammer,
predicted that the commercial Yiddish Theater would return to “dybbuks, domestic dramas and shtetl idylls.” He was correct. The socially conscious plays failed to draw, and Schwartz quickly reverted to his standard fare.

In response, the Artef set up its own theater in 1926, the year of Jacob Adler's demise. Actors were recruited and taught by Jacob Mestel, a director/theorist who had toured with Ben-Ami and written about the theater for various periodicals. Mestel believed that his co-religionists had a knack for vocal mimicry and physical gesture, and that this talent was responsible for the abundance of great character actors on the Yiddish stage. On the other hand, Jewish performers spoke a low-class jargon, a language that had changed very little since the Goldfaden days. A drama studio was set up on East Eleventh Street, where young Yiddish actors would learn “speech melody and collective language instrumentation; how to forge out of the old pathos and the modern tempo a rhythm suited to our times.”

When they were fully schooled, the actors went public. Three projects were produced, one right after the other. The Artef debuted with an immense, booming pageant entitled
Mass, Play and Ballet of the Russian Revolution.
The work took place not in some ordinary clubhouse or middle-sized theater; it was presented in Madison Square Garden, before an audience of twenty thousand. Led by their ballet teacher, the classically trained Russian émigré Michael Fokine, the troupe depicted the oppressed czarist nation, the upheaval, and life in the new nation improved a hundredfold under the Bolsheviks.

Well received, this naive spectacle led to a second production, attended by two thousand people at the Central Opera House in Manhattan.
Strike,
a stark Yiddish melodrama written by Buchwald, had been workshopped the previous summer at the communist Camp Nitgedayget. It featured a “Machine Dance” with oppressed laborers
and symbolic figures of the workers' enemies: the Union Bureaucrat, the Capitalist, the Militarist, and the Priest.

Their third production,
Red, Yellow and Black,
presented the history of the American Jewish labor movement in four scenes. Once again it was staged at Madison Square Garden. Once again its message was conveyed with choreography, dance, and aggressive songs in Yiddish, punctuated by fund-raising speeches and a final singing of the “Internationale,” the communist anthem.

Not until the early 1930s did the Artef awaken to a central fact: weighty symbolism and agitprop were not the ingredients of a satisfying theatrical experience. The studio alertly battened on to the late Sholem Aleichem. The beloved and apolitical author, who had once been a stockbroker, was enlisted in the fight against bourgeois capitalism. Aleichem's interest in Zionism, frowned on by the communists, went unmentioned in their presentations.

The first production of his work was staged at Carnegie Hall. Usually presented in monologue form,
Kasrilover Hoteln
(The Hotels of Kassirovka) was done as a group recitation, the comrades delivering their lines by popping their faces out in large placards. Later, they went at Aleichem again, turning a children's story into a turgid balletpantomime entitled
Lag Boymer
(Springtime).

That evening was rescued by Boris Aronson's outstanding set and costumes. The man who would ultimately receive worldwide fame as the designer for a very different kind of Aleichem work,
Fiddler on the Roof,
had come of age just as the Revolution began. He wanted nothing to do with the fashionable realism of the day; for the young artist, Stanislavsky already seemed passé. He went on to Germany, published two books of his bold paintings and designs, then came to America, where he immediately found work in the Yiddish Theater.

Aronson's initial efforts, done for Schwartz, were undistinguished. It was not until he worked with Artef that he hit his stride.
Lag Boymer
featured dancers costumed as trees, and cubistic symbols that represented the cutting edge of theater design, far bolder and more inventive than anything on Broadway. A choir of raves greeted the production, capped by
Theater Arts Monthly
's appraisal: Aronson's work was “the bravest experiment in scenic design that the season has disclosed.”

Backstage, however, the designer met with unexpected hostility. Schwartz, intrigued by the Artef when he thought he could control it, turned against Aronson's aggressive designs and the company's stark
performances. His memoir ridicules the troupers as an arty and posturing crowd, basically “afraid to do a realistic play.” Under Artef's aegis, he claimed, “actors began making peculiar motions with their hands speaking in squeaky tones, rolling their eyes, sighing at the moon, began to speak the way people are going to speak in the future, millions of years from now …everything the reverse of natural: pointing at walls and furniture, holding a walking stick upside down, jumping instead of walking, and instead of natural human faces, backward noses and crooked cheeks.”

Schwartz's was a minority view—until Jewish settlements in Palestine suddenly came under attack from Arab militants in 1929. Dozens of unarmed
yeshiva
students were murdered. A great mourning took place on the Lower East Side. But the Yiddish-speaking communists refused to participate in the general grief. The
Morgyn Freiheit,
their unofficial organ, originally blasted the Palestinian incidents as a Middle Eastern pogrom. Orders soon came down to reverse engines and denounce their former position as “counterrevolutionary.” The next day the headline read zionist-fascists have provoked the arab uprising. The article went on to explain, “The roots of the revolt of the Arabian masses are to be found in the economic exploitation of the Arab peasantry, whose land has been appropriated by British imperialism through reactionary Jewish Zionism.”

The
Freiheit
was not forgiven for calling the Middle Eastern troubles a “Zion orgy.” For five days, Jewish-owned newsstands refused to carry the paper. “Red” journalists were expelled from the Yiddish Writers Union for anti-Jewish activities, and the Hebrew Actors Union distributed a blanket condemnation of the communist newspaper. Members of the Artef found themselves similarly condemned or marginalized. They pressed on regardless, opening the 1931 season at the Princess Theater on West 39th Street.

By then the Depression had taken root, but the communists viewed this as a ratification of their core beliefs: harsh economic conditions served to reveal the sham of capitalism, thereby hastening a second American Revolution. An official statement quashed all competitors: “The bourgeois Yiddish Theater, without any exceptions, is saturated with national chauvinism, with hatred for the working man and with respect and sympathy for the wealthy and clerics.” That kind of fare “injects ideological poison into the hearts and minds of the working Jewish masses.”

Given Artef's refusal to depart from Bolshevik sloganeering, the company might well have become a hackwork assembly line. Oddly enough, that was not the case. Two productions showed unusual imagination for that season:
Jim Kooperkop
(Jim Copperhead) and
Brilliantin
(Diamonds). The first play centered on a mechanical figure (Kooperkop), brought in to replace human laborers. The robot unexpectedly joins the radicals and helps to vanquish their overlords.

Jim was an amalgam of Frankenstein, the medieval Yiddish legend of the Golem—a gigantic creature created by rabbis to rescue the Jews—and the screeds of Karl Marx. His story was located in a hellish America. Aronson's austere, futuristic sets evoked the overpowering atmosphere of Fritz Lang's 1927 film fantasy,
Metropolis,
with scenes of a bereaved mother losing herself in the wildness of jazz; a jobless worker starving to death; a quack; a pimp; a broker and an undertaker reaching out their hands for money.
Kooperkop
quickly attracted a cult audience of performers who jammed the theater, often crowding out the ordinary laborers it was intended to reach.