Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (32 page)

An admiring actor said that the young man seemed to have written his scripts with a baseball bat, and he intended it as a compliment.
Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Till the Day I Die
supplied the galvanic jolt the Group Theater had been seeking, and heralded a new generation of playwrights, mostly Jewish, mostly from the left—Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and others who would be heard from in New York and later in Hollywood. These writers wanted to express themselves in English, and radical as they were, stayed clear of the Artef—they had too much individuality to be swallowed up by the communist noheadliners approach to theater.

BECAUSE OF THE WRITERS
' independent attitude, the struggling Artef found itself without any homegrown talent. The troupe turned to the Soviet Union for
Rekrutn
(Recruits). This play shared the title of the old Goldfaden service farce, but otherwise the two works had nothing in common. The script, adapted by a Bolshevik writer, had a serious intent interspersed with sarcastic asides and musical interludes.

The year is 1828, and the czar has decreed that the
shtetl
of Niebivala (“Anywhere” in Russian) must furnish the army with one of its sons. Aaron Klinger, the richest man in town, argues that this is a good sign—Jews are about to be recognized as citizens. He suggests the man for the role of soldier: Nachmen, a radical, troublemaking tailor, who represents the new spirit of labor agitation. The youth is the sole support of his blind mother, but this means nothing to the capitalist Klinger. Through a series of connivances and subplots, he convinces the town leaders that Nachmen must go, entices the tailor to a place where he thinks his sweetheart is waiting, and hands him over to the Cossacks. In the penultimate scene, Nachmen's mother gropes her way through the streets, crying, “Give me back my son, give me back my son!” That was the way the original play ended, but it would not do for Artef to have such a downbeat finale. An additional scene was tacked on, in which one of the betrayers, consumed with guilt, turns on the townspeople for collaborating with the rich.

Doctrinaire communists gave
Recruits
the backs of their hands; the reviewer of one publication remarked that no one would be prompted to go to the barricades after watching the production, and that revolutionary activity must be the aim of proletarian theater. To do what Artef had done, at a historical moment “seething with class conflict,” was a
shanda,
a scandal. This was a time “When every ounce of energy in our cultural front ought to be devoted to the organization of the emotions of the masses in the direction of our ideology, in the direction of a Soviet America—at a time like this taking a leap of 100 years in the past, and in addition offering no more than a beautiful spectacle … means going in a false direction.”

Outsiders disagreed. They admired the acting, the direction, the scenery, the costumes. Theater people had been fans before this, but
Recruits
attracted bigger names than ever before. One of Artef's historians marveled at the presence of a major producer and two Hollywood stars in the audience. He wondered “whether it was Sam Jaffe or Herman Shumlin or Edward G. Robinson, or all of them, or just a natural concatenation of events which brought the Artef into the high glare of fame. Because they started to pour in—the people from Broadway and the people who had hitherto thought all Yiddish theater was restricted to the carnival noise and glitter of Second Avenue.”

By now the Artef had already outlasted most of its detractors. Some, of course, would never forgive the company for its opposition to Zionism, but these were in the minority, drowned out by the cheers from mainstream newspapers and magazines. A reporter from the
WorldTelegram
went on about the sets and lighting; he thought they suggested “something out of Rembrandt…the necessity of understanding Yiddish as good as disappears while a performance of
Recruits
is under way.” The
Daily Mirror
reviewer praised the company's “joyous bawdiness.” After attending the Artef play, the
Daily News
critic had bad news for the Yiddish Art Theater: “I came away from the second act with a profound conviction that Maurice Schwartz had better be looking to his laurels, if he is interested in laurels.”

IT SO HAPPENED
that Schwartz was currently indifferent to laurels. It went without saying that art was first among equals, but what was wrong with fame and money? These last had not been forthcoming after the Broadway failure of
Yoshe Kalb,
and Maurice was forced to look elsewhere for them. Hollywood had shown some interest in Shakespeare following the critical success of
The Taming of the Shrew
with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1929, and
Romeo and Juliet,
starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, in 1936. It was known that Warner Brothers was exploring the possibility of filming
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
directed by Max Reinhardt. Schwartz got it into his head that he would be an ideal interpreter of the Bard, revising his opinion of Shylock as an anti-Semitic caricature, and fancying himself as an attractive and plausible King Lear.

Negotiations with MGM began. While the agents and executives bickered, the actor/impresario embarked on a European tour. He left his troupe behind, and they carried on in his name with a hastily assembled theater company called the Yiddish Ensemble Art Theater. The troupe had big plans: a classic Yiddish tale had been working its way, yet again, into the public consciousness, and the members voted to bring it to the stage.

In the Middle Ages, when anti-Semitic scourges were fevered and sadistic, a legend gained wide circulation among the Jews.
The Golem,
a fantasy that took literary form in the seventeenth century, told the story of a giant made of clay and brought to life by fervent prayers and mysterious rites. These were conducted by one Rabbi Loew of Prague, who had come upon the secret of the
Shem-ha-Meforash,
the hitherto undiscovered and therefore unutterable name of God.

Loew's intimidating, nonhuman monster rose up from the ground to become a protector of defenseless Hebrews, keeping their enemies
at bay by the use of force. Plots against the Jews were continually foiled by the Golem; in one of the most typical, he overhears evildoers planning to hide bottles of blood in the synagogue before Passover. They intend to plant a child's corpse in the temple, “evidence” that the Jews employ Christian blood in the baking of their matzohs. Thanks to the giant, the plotters are revealed and killed.

The Golem's power is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, however; as time goes on, he destroys as much as he protects. In the end, the Jews have to acknowledge that the creation of life is not the province of man—even a holy man. Rueful and chastened, Rabbi Loew breaks down what he had made, lest the Jews be cursed by God for trespassing into His territory.

In outline, the tale was not dissimilar to the story of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein,
written 150 years later. The essential difference lay in the subtext. Shelley's version implied a criticism of science without conscience and experimenters without ethics. The Czech story had no such lofty aims in mind; it was simply the consoling wish-dream of a tormented people.

The Golem
was to have many resurrections over the years, surfacing whenever there were pogroms or blood libels against the Jews. Leivick Halper, who later assumed the nom de plume H. Leivick, wrote the Yiddish version that seized the imagination of theater directors and filmmakers. For him the Golem had a very personal meaning. In 1895, when he was seven, he strolled to
cheder—
Hebrew school. “I passed a large market square,” he remembered, “and turned off into the street on which stood the Polish church. As I passed the church entrance a tall burly Pole bounded over to me, slammed his fist across my head, tore my hat off and threw both it and me to the frosty ground. He beat me, shouting, ‘Dirty Jew! When you pass our church you have to take your hat off! You dirty Jew!' I got up with difficulty, grabbed my hat from the ground, and ran off to
cheder
in tears. My heart cried out within me: Why did that big Pole beat me, a child of seven years? And why is it that when he, a gentile, passes a synagogue, no one makes him put
on
a hat?”

Leivick's experience was echoed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews at that period. It would have been abnormal for them not to imagine scenarios of revenge. Some twenty years later, the playwright gave form to their feelings. To the traditional materials of
the Rabbi, the clay monster, and the malefactor Taddeus and the monk who serves as his henchman, he introduced his own flourishes. Jesus makes an appearance in the free-verse drama; so does Elijah.

What emerged, notes Leivick's translator, Joseph C. Landis, was “far more than a play about an incident in Jewish history. It is a play in which the Jews become symbolic of a mankind suffering innocently, suffering in spite of its innocence, suffering
because
of its innocence.”
The Golem
is “not only a philosophical morality play; it is also a political parable about the relationship of ends and means in which the figure of Force, the Golem, reveals the dangers inherent in violence.”

The subject was a natural for cinema, and in 1920 a grave, overacted German version appeared, with the monster galumphing through the flickering twilight. In the mid-1930s a French company offered a subtler version. But it was on the Yiddish stage that the Golem made the deepest impression. Hershel Zohn, who was in the ill-fated Broadway company of
Yoshe Kalb,
recalled the ensemble's production of
The Golem
as “a great cultural event. The German director Egon Brecher was engaged. A guest artist from Europe, Alexander Granach, was brought over to portray the unusual character of the Golem. The rehearsals, one recalls, were most exciting. So were the performances.”

But only up to a point. One weekend, an hour before the Saturday matinee curtain was due to rise, the stage manager reported that Granach was not in his dressing room, nor was he at his rented apartment. No one knew where he was. Backstage hysteria, so much a part of Boris Thomashefsky's time, was assumed to be a thing of the past. Not so. Granach, it came out, had been pining for a lost love. The reason he was not in his dressing room was that he was on the Atlantic Ocean, headed back to his European amour without so much as a note to his colleagues.

An oversize actor, Avigidor Packer, took over the difficult role at the last minute and brought it off. The reviews were uniformly good—and yet not one of them discussed the very obvious parallels between the sorrows of seventeenth-century Jewry and the fate of its twentieth-century descendants. The reason had been stated three hundred years before by the French duke François de La Rochefoucauld (a real-life contemporary of the Golem): “
La soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarde fixement.
”—Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

IN THE FIRST ACT
of
The Golem,
the Rabbi of Prague addresses “Joseph,” the bewildered creature he has just created. A tragic blood libel has circulated, along with planted “evidence” that the Jews use Christian blood to make their matzohs. The entire ghetto appears to be doomed. The Golem is ordered to “see through walls and floors and into the hearts of those that would destroy us.”

Empowered by Kabalistic magic, Joseph Golem slays one of the conniving enemies with his ax. Outraged, an anti-Semitic mob marches on the neighborhood ghetto. One by one the monster cuts them down. But after his vengeful triumph, a second tragedy occurs. All the Golem knows is violence and destruction, and even his attempts at tenderness turn lethal. After the battle he finds himself alone with the Rabbi's beautiful daughter, Devorale. Aroused, confused, he burbles uncontrollably:

Guilty and bewildered, the Golem heads for the synagogue, ax in hand. The Jews who try to stop him are felled by his blows. Burdened with guilt, the Rabbi addresses heaven: