Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (34 page)

The romantic view of rural life is a Russian credo; in the nineteenth century Tolstoy made it a cornerstone of his art. But his was a Christian interpretation, and no comparable voice existed for the Jews. All they had was Baron Maurice de Hirsch. The German philanthropist believed that peasants were not only a repository of goodness, they were a solution to the age-old Jewish Problem. He issued a series of grants “to give a portion of my companions in faith the possibility of finding a new existence, primarily as agricultural workers, and also as handicraftsmen.” His warm statement was tinctured with more pragmatic considerations. “All our misfortunes come from the fact that the Jews want to climb too high,” the baron confided privately. “We have too much brains. My intention is to restrain the Jews from pushing ahead. They shouldn't make such great progress. All the hatred against us stems from this.”

Grine Felder
crystallized those sentiments in a tender, Chekhovian manner, following a young rabbinical student, Levi Yitzchok, on a trek through the countryside. Levi encounters two semiliterate Jewish farming families—lowest on the social ladder, disdained by the townspeople who are better educated and possess more marketable skills. Both families have young daughters. Predictably, the girls compete for this most eligible bachelor. But Levi is uncomfortable with each of them. “It's not my real life here. Here I don't have any holy books. I don't have the things I need. I miss the voices of the scholars in the study house early every morning. I miss the light in the faces of the pious Jews. It's for the sake of their merits that the world exists.”

Over the course of the summer, he learns that piety can be found in places other than the synagogue. In a poem H. Leivick described the Milky Way: “God's sweet scent still rides around the sun,” and that was the feeling conveyed by the play. God's sweet scent can also be found
below, in the country—in a heightened sense of the green crops, of the radiant illuminations on the hills, the tilled soil, the domestic animals, the steady, honorable, sunrise-to-sunset labor. Levi comes to realize that intellect alone cannot sustain him. A phrase from the Torah occurs to him: “A man without land is not a man. Heaven is the Lord's heaven and he has given the earth unto man.” At the denouement the visitor speaks with Dovid-Noich, father of the barefoot farmgirl Tzineh, the most spirited of the young women.

Won over by the land, smitten by Tzineh, Levi abandons his city life to marry into the farming community, setting up as a teacher. The female rival for his hand is disappointed, but all turns out well—this is, after all, a rustic romance as well as a commentary on the dignity of labor.

The play had gone over very well in the 1920s. Ten years later, as history closed in, Hirschbein's celebration of the simple life exerted a different appeal. As historian Nahma Sandrow observes, when
Grine Felder
was first presented there was no suggestion of the poverty and dislocations that occurred in the wake of World War I. The world that so enchants Dovid seemed “a faraway paradise to émigrés and even to people who stayed home. There is no anti-Semitism. The subtext is nostalgia for a lost homeland and a lost innocence.” The longing was so
powerful that in 1936, when Ulmer began working on the film version, the management of three Yiddish newspapers, the
Forward, Der Tag,
and the
Freiheit,
asked for an exclusive piece of the action.

Ulmer shrewdly turned them all down; he knew if one paper was allowed to back the movie, the others would have it panned upon release. He cobbled together a small bank loan, plus cash from Paul Muni and some lesser performers. Over $10,000 came in—or so the director claimed. In any case, it was enough to get the cameras rolling in the farm fields of New Jersey.

After Ben-Ami explained each scene to the cast, Ulmer took over. Recalled Helen Beverly, the ingénue of
Grine Felder,
“we were standing in a straight line in front of the little hut as actors do sometimes on the stage, facing the audience, and we were doing our parts, and Ulmer stopped us: ‘No, no, no, no, no! You can't do that in front of a camera.’ Then he explained the whole business of close-ups and detail shots, and how you didn't have to face the camera. You were to behave perfectly natural, and the camera would look for you to shoot you.”

Herschel Bernardi, who played Tzineh's amusing thirteen-year-old brother, called the director “a school unto himself. Acting I was taught by my parents. But film making was something else entirely. Over the course of a few weeks with Ulmer I learned more than college kids do in four years.” When the director wasn't moving his actors around, he was busy squeezing the budget to get the most out of every dollar. He himself took a salary of only $300, and to save money he used only one horse. The animal's front end was shown working at one place; when the scene changed to another farm, only his tail-twitching rear end was pictured.

To the surprise of some crew members, what could have been an unintentionally comic disaster turned out to be a minor classic. Though Ulmer was more at home in the film noir genre, he knew how to expand Hirschbein's script with a series of moody, evocative scenes. Manifestly, the earth, sun, and sky are intended to be members of the cast, and the phosphorescent trees and grass plains to take on a religious significance. Ulmer was no intellectual, but the Jesuits had educated him well; he was familiar with Spinoza's view of God as immanent in nature. What he showed on-screen illustrated that philosophy far more effectively than many a textbook—and, for that matter, many an ambitious and high-minded theater piece.

Beyond its obvious intent,
Grine Felder
had an unspoken purpose. In
the mid-1930s the phrase “the dignity of labor” was not a bromide. It signified the epic struggle between workingmen and their bosses, between the unions and the soulless corporations. That struggle could be seen and heard all over American popular culture, much of it influenced by Jewish writers and composers.

The song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” by Jay Gorney and E. Y. Harburg, had been written for a Broadway flop,
New Americana.
But two days after the show closed, Bing Crosby recorded the anthem of the workingman's predicament. Within weeks it was number one on the charts, its message strongly reminiscent of the editorials in the socialist
Forward,
its minor-key melody reminiscent of the Yiddish Theater's melancholy ballads:

On Broadway, Harold Rome's score brightened the 1937 production of
Pins and Needles,
a satirical revue backed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. One number, “Mene, Mene, Tekel,” told the story of Daniel with gospel music and Yiddish words. In another, a Jewish shop steward pled his case with a tongue-in-cheek ballad:

Hollywood followed their lead, featuring the downtrodden as the protagonists of their new melodramas.
Dead End
pointed to slums as a breeding ground for criminals; in
My Man Godfrey,
a servant had more dignity than his snooty employers; in
Marked Woman,
a courageous hostess went up against the gangsters (read strikers vs. scabs) at the risk of her personal safety. High on the bestseller list were Ernest Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not,
whose protagonist was a maimed boat captain fighting the spoiled and murderous rich, and John Steinbeck's
In
Dubious Battle,
which concerned itinerant workers and the bosses who took advantage of their desperate situation.

Grine Felder
floated on this current. The film opened at the Squire Theater in midtown Manhattan in October 1937, and immediately became a critical and popular hit. Said Ulmer, “The Jews came into the theater in the morning and wouldn't get out! We had to turn the lights on and plead with them to please leave the theater so other people could see the picture! Impossible. We had to stop the performance and empty the house with the police.”

This time around the critics were led by the community. A reviewer for one Yiddish paper compared
Grine Felder
with the best movies from France, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary and said it signaled “the beginning of a new epoch in American-made Yiddish movies.” Because the film had opened in a house known for its left-wing programs, the
Daily Worker
hailed
Grine Felder
as a film that “carries one back with it into the past of Russia, when Jews lived in the Pale and had to fight for knowledge, before the days of liberty and Soviets.”

For left-wing Jews as for traditional ones, the past had abruptly become fashionable. Even in Berlin, where the Nazis were closing in, the Jewish Museum turned its back on current events to stage a major exhibit about the fifteenth-century Grand Rabbi of Posen. And shortly afterward, a happy Jewish song made the rounds in Germany, sung by government officials and storekeepers, just as if everything was as normal as crullers and Wiener schnitzel.

THE TUNE
had been written by Sholem Secunda, an experienced composer and conductor of Second Avenue musicals and operettas. He was also known as a hard-luck figure because early on in his career he had met George Gershwin at the behest of Boris Thomashefsky. The star needed a personal composer for some operettas he planned to write; Boris judged the young Gershwin “too much American and too
little Jew,” but thought he might work in tandem with an experienced talent like Sholem. After all, the man had already written several Yiddish Theater scores. On an upright in Thomashefsky's dressing room the older composer listened to Gershwin play a few of his own songs. Secunda shook his head; a partnership would be out of the question: “The two of us are no pair,” he told his host. “We have totally different approaches to music.” Gershwin went on to worldwide eminence, and whenever he ran into Secunda delighted in offering his hand and booming, “Sholem's the one I owe my present position to in the musical world. If he had agreed to become my partner, I would now be a composer in the Yiddish Theater.”

Secunda was about to suffer his second hard-luck incident. By the late 1930s several of his melodies, with lyrics by the Yiddish actor/lyricist Jacob Jacobs, had become Second Avenue favorites. In the judgment of many fans, the minor-key “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” (To Me You Are Beautiful) was the best of them all. Eddie Cantor refused to go along. The stage, film, and radio personality listened to “Bei Mir,” declared that he loved Secunda's music, but added, “I can't use it. It's too Jewish.” Two black singers disagreed with his verdict. The duo billed as Johnny and George had heard the song during their tour of Catskill resorts. They learned the words phonetically, and included “Bei Mir” in their act at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street. Tin Pan Alley lyricist Sammy Cahn happened to be in the audience during their run and marked the reaction of the Harlem audience. “The theater began to undulate,” he remembered. “The beat absolutely caught hold of you.” Intrigued, Cahn purchased a copy of the sheet music, brought in a collaborator, Saul Chaplin, and together the two supplied the song with an English translation. Cahn then arranged for a young closeharmony trio, the Andrews Sisters, to make a recording—all without bothering to acquire the rights to Secunda's song. “Total, unquestioned
chutzpah
,” he later confessed.

Cahn was in luck. Discouraged by Cantor's turndown, the composer and his lyricist had already peddled “Bei Mir” to their publisher for $30. The royalties now belonged to the J. and J. Kammen Music Company. Cahn and Chaplin bought the rights. Promoted by Decca Records, the song rose to the top of the charts, followed by recordings by bandleader Guy Lombardo and Benny Goodman as well as by singers as dissimilar as Nelson Eddy and Judy Garland. In a biography of her father-in-law, Victoria Secunda reports that the Andrews Sisters
disk sold a quarter million records in two months—the first Yiddish song to have made the leap from Second Avenue to the Hit Parade. The rhymes resounded from radios, storefronts, and parlors:

Business was so good at the Gaiety Music Shop on Broadway that people crowded in front of the store's clerk, gave him 50 cents, and he handed them a rolled-up copy of the sheet music to “Bei Mir,” all without exchanging a word. People unfamiliar with Yiddish would ask for copies of “Buy a Beer, Mr. Shane,” or “My Mere Bits of Shame.” Translations came out in dozens of foreign languages, including a contraband version in Russian. In Adolf Hitler's
Deutschland
the song caught on immediately. It took some time to discover that the composer and lyricist were Jewish. After that it was banned.