Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (36 page)

MAURICE SCHWARTZ
would not allow such bad news to impede his projects. Like Adler and Thomashefsky, he always managed to convince
investors that applause and profits were waiting on the other side of the lights. In a time of dwindling receipts, they backed his expensive production of Sholem Asch's
Salvation,
an epic of Polish Jews during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Mainstream critics came downtown because of the Schwartz name, but they were nowhere near as indulgent as in the past. The
Herald Tribune
reviewer, Richard Watts Jr., had a little fun with the makeup and costumes: “Beards do have a way of making actors look curiously alike. I think it would be of considerable help to us outsiders if Mr. Schwartz would place numbers on his actors' backs.” Watts enjoyed Sholem Secunda's emotional score, but described the acting as “florid” and its direction “curiously aimless and undramatic.” In the
Post,
John Mason Brown described the Asch play as incoherent, even in the English-language synopsis. He said that he and his fellow critics “might as well have been Martians for whom H. G. Wells had forgotten to write explanatory captions.”

Maurice shook off the bad notices. He decided to try the cinema again, striking back at Hollywood with his own film production. Between performances of
Salvation
he rehearsed a new movie,
Tevye der Milkhiker
(Tevye the Dairyman), based on the long-cherished stories of Sholem Aleichem. The central character, his life burdened with poverty and daughters, addresses a series of monologues to a deaf heaven. This time Schwartz vowed that there would be no cornercutting as in the Ulmer movie. Harry Ziskin, a wealthy restaurateur, had agreed to back the feature with a $70,000 budget—an immense sum for a Yiddish movie.

After three weeks of preparation, the cameras began grinding away at a Long Island potato farm. Every day the cast did what all casts usually do between takes, exchanging theatrical gossip and worrying aloud about the next role. But this August there was only one topic. Danzig had been seized by Hitler, and the invasion of Poland seemed imminent. In that case a war between Russia and Germany was certain, probably within weeks. Perhaps days. On Monday, August 21, 1939, newspapers disclosed that Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had flown to Moscow to arrange the details of a pact with Nazi Germany. That agreement sent shock waves through the entire Jewish community. Nine million European and Russian Jews were at risk. The New York communists, who had been loudly voicing their approval of American's freedom fighters, were suddenly exposed as hypocrites, string-puppets moving at the whim of marionetteers in
Moscow. Not content with mere betrayal, the Communist Party issued a statement denouncing Germany's declared enemies, France and England.

The resolution, noted historian Melech Epstein in
The Jew and Communism,
ended “under the banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Jefferson, Paine and Lincoln were dropped, casualties of the StalinHitler pact.” The reaction to all this was as dramatic as anything on the Yiddish stage. Jewish communists were greeted by jeering fellow workers with a Nazi salute and a withering “Heil Hitler!” The portmanteau word “communazis” was leveled at the Bolsheviks who were riding high only a month before. Fellow travelers and radicals fell away, repelled by the turn of events. Artef, the communist theater group with scrapbooks full of ecstatic reviews, was forcefully pushed to the margins of Yiddish Theater. Given the political mix of Artef and Yiddish Art Theater performers, the set of
Tevye
could easily have become a battleground. That the atmosphere remained calm was due to Schwartz's insistence on professionalism before politics—and to the fact that both sides suffered from a common adversary: noise. Stirrings of war were as close as Billy Mitchell Airfield, only a few miles away. Squadrons of army planes made it their headquarters, and filming had to be done between takeoffs and landings. Only tight cooperation between director, actors, and crew made
Tevye
possible.

It was never easy. The newspaper reportage from Europe grew so dismal that one member of the cast, Leon Liebgold, finally cracked. He played the suitor of one of Tevye's daughters, and demanded to be released from his contract so that he could go back to his family in Poland. Because
Tevye
was running behind schedule, Schwartz refused; the actor would not be released until his scenes were completed. At the latest, Liebgold was assured, he could go by the end of the month. Grudgingly, he returned to work—and got his life saved in the process. For on September 1, Germany finally did invade Poland, making the return impossible. Liebgold's relatives did not survive the Holocaust— had he been released from his contract and allowed to return home, he almost certainly would have perished with them.

Schwartz's version was at variance with the original Tevye stories. Aleichem gave the dairyman seven daughters; in the movie he has two, Hodl and Khave. Hodl is dealt with in a perfunctory manner: she breaks with her father and heads to Siberia, where her revolutionary lover awaits. The central conflict involves Khave, played by Schwartz's
niece, Miriam Riselle. Unlike so many Jews in the rural Ukraine, Tevye does not live in a
shtetl.
All his neighbors are gentiles, most of them hard-drinking, anti-Semitic oafs. He maintains an uneasy relationship with the town priest (Jacob Adler's son Julius). In a discussion with the cleric, the conversation gets around to intermarriage. Tevye declares that he would sooner see his daughters “perish than see them betray our faith.” Khave overhears this and collapses. She happens to be the lover of Fedya (Liebgold), a soft-centered Christian who reads Maxim Gorki and believes, like many progressives of the period, that by marching forward he will magically ascend to an atmosphere of peace and equality.

The two young people marry, much to the distress of Tevye and his wife, Goldie. The parents go through a mourning period, in effect sitting
shivoh
for their “dead” child. Sometime later Goldie, stricken with a fatal disease, passes away. Even then, Tevye's heart is too hard to allow the melancholy Khave back in the family circle; she can only look at the scene of bereavement through the windows of her childhood home.

Life goes on; Tevye endures penury and the pain of loss, Khave suffers through an unhappy marriage. The father and daughter stay irreconcilable—until, in the dairyman's old age, a pogrom takes place. The Ukrainian louts give Tevye twenty-four hours to pack and get out. This is the defining moment for Khave; she leaves her gentile husband because they're “worlds apart.” She begs the aging Tevye to accept her back into the family. After she makes the requisite apologies and he consults Jehovah, Khave is once again his child. They go off, pulling the little wagon that holds a few precious possessions. Their direction is east, toward Palestine.

Tevye
drew a mixed response. Almost every critic recognized that
Tevye
was technically superior to every other Yiddish movie. And to a man they praised Schwartz's virtuoso portrait of a faithful doubter, a loquacious monologist who could turn in a moment from misery to comedy, from hostility to fondness, from despair to dignity. But the communist
Freiheit
stated that while the central role was “played with deep understanding,” the result was “not
Tevye der Milkhiker
”; it was “something else and something worse.” The
Forward
called
Tevye
“One of the best Yiddish films made to date”—and then added that “merely a shadow of Sholem Aleichem has remained in Tevye's few external characteristics.” Schwartz could hardly be blamed for asking a friend, “What the hell do you have to do in this profession to get some decent
notices from the press? They're constantly demanding, ‘Where are the new Yiddish playwrights? Where are the opportunities for actors? How can creative designers and good musicians find work?' Those questions are reserved for feature stories. For the reviews the tune is changed and dissatisfaction becomes the order of the day.”

He was not alone in his unhappiness with the press. Another notable Yiddish movie was released in 1939, and it met with much the same reception.
Mirele Efros,
Jacob Gordin's Queen Lear, had once established Keni Liptzin as the greatest Yiddish diva in New York. The play had been filmed before in a popular silent version. The new movie starred a skilled if not subtle actress, Berta Gersten, in the title role. Though
Mirele Efros
turned out to be less cinematic than
Grine Felder,
it was more respectful to Gordin's play; almost all the original lines were retained. For his pains, director Josef Berne was criticized for being
too
deferential to the stage version. In faint damns, the
Daily Worker
allowed that “if you judge the film with the appropriate measure of tradition and historical perspective, you will enjoy it. But if you go to
Mirele Efros
as you go to a modern movie—this is not the right movie.” There was no pleasing anybody these days.

The only other serious rivals to
Tevye
were the films of Edgar Ulmer.
Di Klyatsche
(The Old Mare) had been marketed to English-speaking audiences under the less dispiriting title
The Light Ahead.
Shot in Ulmer's favorite Eastern locale, the farmlands of New Jersey, it was an adaptation of old tales of Jewish beggars in Lithuania. The author of the original stories was a schoolteacher who used the pen name Mendele Mocher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller). Unlike many later writers who romanticized the
shtetl,
Sholem Abramowitz saw it as a locale that robbed the Jews of their vitality and self-esteem. As the title indicates, he likened his people to a once proud, now spavined and worn-out nag. The film version retained only a few pieces of Sforim's plot, but much of his bitterness and dark comedy.

In the little town of Glubsk, Jewish tradition is fading fast. Impudent youths regularly scandalize the remaining handful of pious Hasids. “Better a Jew without a beard,” jeers a youth, “than a beard without a Jew.” Only two young people have retained their purity in this dishonored place, Hodel, who is blind, and Fishke, the lowly bathhouse attendant. The two are deeply in love, but so destitute that marriage is out of the question—until an epidemic sweeps through the town.

The elders have a plan: they will pay for the wedding if it takes place under a canopy in the local graveyard. The
Jewish Encyclopedia
explains that during cholera attacks, “marriages often took place within the cemetery, as that in Kovno of a lame young man to a deaf-mute or hunchback woman. At Pinsk, and in other communities, two orphans were married…the idea being that the cholera was thus conducted to the graves.”

The two principals carried the film. Helen Beverly, the heroine of
Grine Felder,
proved once again that she could be a confident as well as attractive performer; and David Opatoshu, who at twenty-one had already been with the Artef troupe for four years, made the most of his poignant role. But what gave
The Light Ahead
its real power was the timing of the film's release—across the Atlantic were millions of Jews not unlike these half-medieval ones, unworldly, fearful, vulnerable. W. H. Auden caught the spirit of the age in his poem “September 1, 1939”:

That year there were no darker lands than those of Eastern Europe, all about to be overrun and corrupted by the Third Reich. Viewers recognized the film's subtext of dread—Glubsk stood for Warsaw, for Lodz, for all the threatened Jewish quarters—and perhaps for a lot more. In the
Hollywood Reporter,
one dispatch called
The Light Ahead
“the surprise sensation of the picture business.” As far away as Kansas City, it noted, the local press “urged Gentiles to enjoy it with their Jewish neighbors, resulting in picture fans of all creeds and nationalities buying tickets.”

Ulmer took further advantage of the times by working with the euphoniously named Moishe Oysher. Like his father and grandfather before him, Moishe had been trained as a cantor in Bessarabia. In America, the young immigrant sought to extend his résumé. He would not only chant in synagogues, he would be a leading man on Second Avenue. He persuaded Thomashefsky to hire him for small choral parts, and proved that his voice was glorious enough to play leading
roles. He debuted in
Der Mazldiker Boykher
(The Lucky Boy), and pleased the downtown fans of
shund.
At the same time he kept up his religious affiliations, singing at the behest of a Brooklyn rabbi.

The double duty antagonized many in the Flatbush congregation.
Variety
reported that a “serious rumpus” occurred during Oysher's appearance, “with a lot of squawking and many cancellations from the synagogue membership, etc. plus a few open catcalls during the services.” The subject of this controversy, the story went on, “is pretty well convinced that he is probably through as a cantor unless he forgets all about acting, but he likes acting. At the same time he hasn't been offered a star or featured part in any Yiddish legit troupes in New York, because managers feel that perhaps his presence in the cast may bother some prospective customers.”

With the theater barred to him, Oysher turned to the cinema. He starred in
Dem Khazns Zindl
(The Cantor's Son), a kind of reverse image of Warner Brothers' breakthrough talkie,
The Jazz Singer.
In the Hollywood movie a young man leaves the synagogue to become a vaudeville star, reconciling with his family at the last moment, but never abandoning his show business career. In
Dem Khazns Zindl,
Oysher goes from a little Jewish village (constructed in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania) to the streets of Manhattan. Success piles on success, with many musical solos accompanying the climb. But with all the compensations of money and celebrity, the hero finds his life empty. Not until he returns to Beltz, where his aged parents still live, does he feel at home. Looking back, he sighs, “I tried to find my real self but I couldn't.” Setting down roots, the hero forsakes the Yiddish stage and takes a local, makeup-free bride, untainted by New York.