Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (37 page)

Dem Khazns Zindl
made back more than double its investment, and Oysher's next film,
Der Zingendiker Shmid
(The Singing Blacksmith), augured well. Based on the David Pinski drama,
Shmid
told the story of a voluptuary who drinks too much, pursues wenches, blasphemes, but eventually gets tamed by the purity and love of a good woman. Ulmer confidently directed this feature with minimal assistance. Scouting locations in New Jersey he remembered that “my big staff consisted of two boys and four old Jews in a station wagon we had bought for $110.” After driving for about thirty minutes they came across a monastery that seemed ageless, and therefore ideal for a background. “This was Friday, I was up to the main door in the building—the Jews kept sitting in the station wagon frightened.”

They had reason to be discomfited. Like almost all Jews in New York, they were aware that a Michigan-based, rabble-rousing Catholic priest named Father Charles E. Coughlin was making anti-Semitic statements on his weekly radio program, and had just harangued his listeners with the question, “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?” In the tradition of Henry Ford, the prelate had backed up his broadcasts by running
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in his privately printed newspaper,
Social Justice.
But the monks, to everyone's astonishment, proved to be the very antithesis of Coughlin, accommodating and ecumenical. The abbot went so far as to encourage some of his bearded brethren to appear as extras. Even so, the locale was not without its worrisome aspects. When Ulmer and his crew returned, they were amused to find that on one side of them was a nudist camp—and distressed to discover that their other neighbor was Camp Ziegfried, summer quarters of the state's Nazi Bund. In order to keep the sets safe from vandals and antiSemites, armed guards walked around the set from dusk to dawn.

The film's midtown New York opening was right out of
Abie's Irish Rose.
One half of the house was packed with Catholic clergy from New Jersey; the other half was composed of what the manager called “Oysher's Hebrew claque.” Every scene was greeted with thunderous applause, and in the following weeks the Yiddish press threw bouquets. The English-language papers spoke of its charm, its elevated standards, and its improvement even over such well-made films as
Grine Felder.

And with all this, Maurice Schwartz was still to have the last hurrah.
Tevye
outscored every other Yiddish film at the box office. Thus, observes film historian J. Hoberman, “Schwartz's epic may be considered the Yiddish analogue to those fondly remembered archetypes
— Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Gone With the Wind—
that led to the canonization of 1939 as the greatest year in Hollywood history.” Appraising the products of Jewish cinema that year, no less a
goyische
paper than the
Herald Tribune
proclaimed, “One need no longer speculate about the proper place of these films in the many-corridored auditorium of the American theater. Yiddish films have arrived.” Had they? And if so, was celluloid to be the next costume of the Yiddish Theater—or its shroud?

FORGETTING THE
HUMAN DISASTER

A
S THE YIDDISH THEATER STRUGGLED
for survival, Zygmund Salkin thought he might have an answer—perhaps
the
answer. Late in the 1930s he steered a rickety sedan toward the Catskill Mountains. En route, he commiserated with his passenger, a fellow immigrant named Isaac Bashevis Singer. Salkin intended to be a great director; Singer aspired to be a full-time author. The careers of both men had stalled. The theater man had recruited a troupe of young
actors, but could find no audience for their efforts. The writer had recently published a novel,
Satan in Goray,
but it did not sell well. He continued to publish pieces in the
Forward,
the newspaper's paychecks rarely rising above subsistence level. That summer, the idea of a working vacation exerted an irresistible pull for both men.

Half inspirational figure, half confidence man, indefatigable in his search for recognition, Salkin had wangled an invitation to bring his new-formed troupe to a bungalow colony in Woodridge, New York. Named in honor of the Hirschbein play and film, Grine Felder was peopled with artists and intellectuals, and Salkin intended to offer them his version of I. L. Peretz's
At Night in the Old Marketplace.
Following this out-of-town tryout, he planned to take the show to New York City, where, the producer boldly predicted, it would wow the critics. Cast, costumer, and set designer were in place; the one missing piece was the dramaturge. Singer agreed to fill that role.

In
A Place in the Country,
memoirist Martin Boris observes that Grine Felder “was no ordinary Catskill resort for the families of middle-class Jewish shopkeepers and businessmen who would come for a respite from Manhattan's swelter.” By the time Salkin and Singer entered, the place had been in operation for several years and now boasted “the most concentrated assemblage of Yiddish elite anywhere on Earth.” Located on thirty-five luxuriantly wooded acres, Grine Felder had forty little houses, three grand pianos, and a large auditorium dubbed the Amphion. Here, declared Salkin, would be the hatchery for a new kind of Yiddish-American Theater. It would change the world—and this was a world that needed changing.

Malvina Fainberg, a longtime summer resident, remembered that “there was a long waiting list, composed of only those recommended by
Grine Felders
already there. I was considered because my brother-in-law was one of the original founders. One had to be first interviewed, parents and children alike, by the membership committee. Next, we were evaluated by the cultural committee as to his or her possible contribution to the various cultural activities going on.”

The majority of those Grine Felders were left-leaning Jewish thinkers and artists. Among the musicians were conductor Lazar Weiner, who directed the highly regarded Mendelssohn Symphony Orchestra, and Moishe Rudinow, chief cantor at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, the largest synagogue in America. The literary and theatrical genres were represented by playwright David Pinski; Nahum Stutchkoff, an
author and playwright whose radio series was running on the Jewish radio station WEVD; and Abraham Shiffrin, poet, short-story writer, and president of New York University's School of Journalism.

Shiffrin made detailed accounts of the resort activities. His reports tell of Yiddish productions, as well as performances in English of Robert Sherwood's
Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
In the evenings, attendees heard lectures by Pinski, concerts of Mozart, Brahms, and Yiddish folk music, and solo recitals by Jewish stars of the City Center Opera Company. There were also vigorous discussions of contemporary politics, and these were not so agreeable to the skeptical Singer. In
Lost in America,
he recalls that bungalows were named not only for Yiddish writers like Aleichem and Peretz, but also for such radicals as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, and Emma Goldman. The Grine Felders “seethed with those offering ready-made remedies for all the world's ills. Some still preached anarchism—others, socialism. Some placed all their hopes on Freud, while others hinted that Stalin was hardly as bad as the capitalist lackeys painted him.”

For a few delirious weeks Salkin and his followers believed that
At Night in the Old Marketplace
was their gateway to security and celebrity. Patrons pledged generous cash contributions. That led to talk of leasing an off-Broadway theater, setting up an artistic company to rival Maurice Schwartz's, and staging dramas in English as well as Yiddish. Singer was not so sanguine. He saw that most members of the acting company were young, naive, and penniless, and suspected that the wallets of the so-called backers would turn out to be as empty as their promises. No theater could be rented without a sizable deposit. Also, the play needed professionally built scenery. Actors and actresses had to have salaries. Verbal assurances would cut no ice with managers and landlords. Although the novelist outwardly pretended that all was well, he couldn't lie to himself. In his view, Salkin “lacked the skills of a director and most of the boys and girls had little talent. Peretz's words emerged false, awkward, and often ridiculous from their mouths.”

Labor Day approached. Most of the colonists, having spent two months noisily denouncing the status quo and endorsing radical politics and free love, quietly migrated back to the city with their wives. One by one the bungalows shuttered. Salkin assured everyone that although the money had not yet come in, fame was only months away. Singer knew better: “He had a briefcase full of papers and a head full of ideas and hopes, but deep inside we knew that it was all over.”

Singer's melancholia covered more than the local events of that summer. Exactly one year before, a Yiddish columnist had written, “It seems that everyone is waiting to see which way the cat will jump.” The world watched it jump that fall, when a young Polish Jew murdered a German diplomat in France. As the official lay dying in a Paris hospital, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seized on the incident, encouraging Nazi party leaders to incite “spontaneous” anti-Semitic riots throughout Germany and Austria. The result was
Kristallnacht
(The Night of Broken Glass). Synagogues were burned to the ground and some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses looted or destroyed. Two weeks later Jewish children were expelled from German schools.

On May 13, 1939, a cruise ship carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees left Hamburg, Germany, for foreign shores. When the boat reached Havana, it was not permitted to lower an anchor. It set sail for Miami—only to be intercepted by the coast guard and warned to keep moving. On June 6, the
St. Louis
returned to Europe. There, Great Britain agreed to take 287 of the passengers, Belgium 214, the Netherlands 181, and France 224. All but the ones who went to Britain were keenly aware of what awaited them.

Singer sensed what was coming and expressed it in his art. His retrospective novel
The Family Moskat
encapsulates the two attitudes of Poland's doomed Jewry. “The Messiah will come soon,” says an optimist. No, says a realist. “Death is the Messiah. That's the real truth.” As for the author's fellow Grine Felders, they knew what they wanted to know, and they were joined in their willful ignorance by much of the Lower East Side's population. Not that any of them could have done much for their anguished relatives in Europe. The U.S. State Department had no intention of intervening on the Jews' behalf—it had never been comfortable with the big waves of Hebrew immigration.

American Jewish organizations stood by, uncertain of what to do. While the death camps were being set up, while Joseph Stalin occupied himself with the annihilation of such writers as Isaac Babel for the crime of being Jewish, the majority of intellectuals and artists—including the populace of the Yiddish Theater—continued to avert their eyes from the actual, lived on illusions, and, in Singer's memorable phrase, gathered around the Old Idolatry. “The stone and clay idols had been exchanged for a Gertrude Stein, a Picasso, a Bernard Shaw, an Ezra Pound. Everybody worshiped culture and progress.” Sadly, “at its best, art could be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while.”

The communist Artef, troubled and battered since the Soviet-Nazi pact, suffered from a collective amnesia. Culture and radicalism became their gods. A story circulated in 1939, prompted by Artef's new choice of venue: multimillionaire Otto Kahn tours the Lower East Side in his limousine. He spots the sign for a dry cleaning establishment: “Operated by Isadore Kahn, nephew of Otto Kahn.” Outraged, the plutocrat orders his chauffeur to put on the brakes, storms into the shop, bawls out Isadore Kahn, who is no relative at all, and threatens a lawsuit if the sign is not changed immediately. The next day he arranges to have the car pass by. The sign has been altered. It now reads “Operated by Isadore Kahn,
formerly
nephew of Otto Kahn.”

The joke gained circulation because the Artef had rented the 679seat Mercury Theater, recently occupied by a famous company headed by the enfant terrible Orson Welles. A quarrel resulted when the Artef announced their takeover. Welles won when the ads were revised to read: “The Artef
formerly
the Mercury Theater.” At that location the new occupants of the 41st Street house performed nine times a week, including two weekend matinees. The company's initial offering was
Clinton Street,
the kind of inclusive panorama of urban life soon to be popularized by a number sung in the Marx Brothers film
The Big Store:
“The Cohens and the Kellys, the Campbells and Martinellis—they're all a part of my Tenement Symphony …”