Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (38 page)

Naturally,
Clinton Street
emphasized the Cohen part of the saga, but other ethnic groups were not neglected. The show traced the fall and rise of two disparate characters who seek to escape the slums: a young woman who marries a rich industrialist, even though she loves a poor youth her own age; and a man who becomes a criminal in thrall to crooked Tammany operatives.

The left-wing press generally gave the drama a pass. The
New Masses
found many of the scenes “so rich they achieve genuine folk quality,” and the
Freiheit
found much to like in “a clash of ideas, a contrast of cultures, a mixture of languages, an amalgamation of customs and ways of living.” The mainstream papers gave a harsher assessment. The
Daily News
critic wrote that “what starts out to be a tense, sympathetic crosssection of the people of this slum district, finally degenerates into a conventional Yiddish melodrama,” and the
Times
labeled the characterizations “brittle” and added that “few individuals come up to the Artef mark” of the past.

In
World of Our Fathers,
Irving Howe judiciously compares shows like
Clinton Street
to an Italian art form: “Hit the high C no matter what happens to the plot of the opera, do the bang-up scene where the father banishes his errant son no matter what the story of the play. What counted, as perhaps it always must in popular art, was the exuberance of the occasion, available every evening as cast and audience joined in a magical interchange of pleasure.” No one took the plots of
Aèda
or the Ring Cycle seriously anymore; similarly no one could believe in narratives like the ones of
Clinton Street.
“But if one saw these plots as residues of traditional romance or grandiose reflections of a culture's view of itself, they might make sense, if not in their details then in their larger rhythms.”

And that was exactly the way the Artef's audiences did see them. By the time the play closed on Christmas Eve 1939, more than forty thousand people had come to the theater, gazing, as their parents did, at highly tinted pictures of themselves and their surroundings. No doubt there was more than a touch of nostalgia in the enthusiastic reception—along with a retreat from the headlines. But Artef members had reason to believe that the unpleasantness surrounding the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had been forgiven if not forgotten, and that a Jewish solidarity had returned. Avoiding any references to the present day, the organization next presented
Uriel Acosta,
the uncontroversial, century-old tale of a renowned Portuguese-Jewish martyr. Helen Beverly, the star of the film
Grine Felder,
headed an outstanding cast. Much was expected, particularly after a set of generous reviews, capped by the
Mirror
's ecstatic endorsement of Beverly: “One of the most promising actresses on the New York stage today.”

By now, however, art had been overtaken by events. The communists learned the hard way that they had not been forgiven after all.
Clinton Street
had made money because of a big advance sale. Most of those purchases had taken place before the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed. Now the anti-communist Jews knew better. They refused to waste any further money. It was a matter of principle.

Uriel Acosta,
as Artef historian Edna Nahshon indicates, “was doomed even before it opened.” Performances shrank to a weekend schedule and then ceased altogether. Members of the company dispersed. Some, like the budding director Jules Dassin, went on to Hollywood. Others, like David Opatoshu, joined the Hebrew Actors Union and looked for work. The war was soon to begin. The Artef was about to go under.

DURING THE SUMMER
of 1939 Germany erected financial barriers, making it impossible for its Jewish citizens to transfer their savings out of the country. Those who sought to emigrate found few places to go. The United States had set up iron quotas: no more than 3 percent of immigrants from any specific country, based on the 1920 census.

Pushed by his wife, Eleanor, and by several Jewish associates, President Roosevelt set up an international conference. It was meant to address the problem of refugees from Germany's harsh and widening persecutions. At the same time that the Grine Felders were meeting for lectures and the Artef was planning its final productions, representatives from thirty-two countries convened at the French resort of Evian on Lake Geneva. After nine days, all but one of the countries offered excuses rather than opportunities. Commenting on the Evian conference, the German government said it was “astounding” that foreign countries had dared to criticize the Reich for its treatment of Jews when only the Dominican Republic had agreed to accept additional refugees.

Two American officials responded. Immediately after the conference, Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts introduced bills ordering the admission of ten thousand refugee children to the United States. Another ten thousand, according to their plan, would be allowed to enter the following year. Reaction was immediate and impassioned. The American Friends Service Committee volunteered to coordinate private efforts on behalf of the young refugees. Within twenty-four hours of the offer, four thousand U.S. families said they would make room for a foreign child. Radio stations and newspapers were swamped with additional tenders of aid and comfort.

The isolationists and anti-Semites felt threatened. A consortium
of thirty “patriotic organizations” organized under the leadership of Francis H. Kinnicutt. Among them were the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Speaking on behalf of those parties, Kinnicutt denounced the Wagner-Rogers bill as “part of a drive to go back to the condition when we were flooded with foreigners who tried to run the country on different lines from those laid down by the old stock. Strictly speaking it is not a refugee bill at all, for by the nature of the case most of those admitted would be of the Jewish race.”

Mrs. Agnes Waters, representing a group called the Widows of World War I Veterans, independently sent out word that the Children's Rescue Bill would serve to make the United States a “dumping ground for the persecuted minorities of Europe. The refugees can never become loyal Americans.” Stirrings began in Washington. At a Beltway cocktail party, the wife of the commissioner of immigration told friends: “The trouble with the Wagner-Rogers bill is that 20,000 children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.” America Firsters lobbied for the status quo. Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina introduced a bill to abolish
all
immigration to the United States for a decade. Fearful of an uprising within the reactionary and Southern wings of his own party, Roosevelt refused to renew the debate about immigration. A letter to FDR from a New York congresswoman urged him to change his mind; the president's assistant sent it to a drawer marked “File—No Action.” The Golden Door had slammed shut.

ESCAPING
INTO
OUR PROBLEMS

A
T THE END OF
1939 Maurice Schwartz paid a high price for his exertions onstage and in the cinema. Stricken by a heart attack, he went south to recuperate. In Florida he was not pleased to read publicity about Edgar Ulmer's latest Yiddish movie,
Amerikaner Shadkhn
(American Matchmaker). The musical, written by Ulmer and his wife, Shirley, starred a rising young comedian. Notorious for hambone tactics, Leo Fuchs could occasionally astonish his fans
by underplaying. This time out he proved the validity of his street reputation as “The Yiddish Fred Astaire” and kept a light touch throughout.

He played the title role of Nat Silver, a well-heeled clothier who lacks but one thing in life: a wife. Nat has already been engaged eight times, and is chronically unable to commit to any woman. He continues to evade and deflect, and yet something in him remains fascinated by the subject of marriage. So fascinated that Nat elevates his surname from Silver to Gold and chooses a new vocation, operating a “Human Relations Bureau” in the Bronx. The bureau is the headquarters of the new, self-appointed
shadkhn.

For the older crowd of American Jewry, that Yiddish noun summoned up bitter memories and cynical jokes. Many a match had been arranged by brokers in the Old World. The raw materials of their work were usually impoverished parents of a bachelor seeking a suitable dowry, or luckless parents of an attractive young woman looking for a moneyed son-in-law. Love had nothing to do with it. Often one candidate couldn't stand the other, and the
shadkhn
had a lot of selling to do. In
The Joys of Yiddish,
Leo Rosten quotes the defining Old World anecdote:

In the United States, the elements of intelligence, sentiment, and sexual attraction entered into courtship. These drastically changed the rules of engagement. Even so, the matchmaker's profession endured for a surprisingly long time. While Ulmer was planning his film,
The New Yorker
profiled one Louis Rubin. As the proprietor of Rubin's Prominent Matrimonial Bureau, he claimed to have arranged some seven thousand marriages over a twenty-five-year span, and considered himself a bridge between the Old World and the New. He wore a silk yarmulke, but covered it with a wide-brimmed fedora. He sported a long black beard and black suits that suggested a rabbinical background, but peppered his palaver with slang.

“Timid clients,” the magazine reported, “especially the younger ones with fussy American ideas, sulk and get stubborn when they first put themselves into Rubin's hands. They insist on working a certain amount of romance into the thing.” For that, Rubin blamed “poets, songwriters and the movies. Pin him down and he'll concede a pinch of romance is OK.”

Men like Rubin continued to be tolerated, if not honored, because they helped to fend off the dangerous temptation of intermarriage. The wedding of Jew and gentile had always been anathema for traditionalists. In the rapidly changing social and political environment of 1930s America they felt endangered. The
Forward
's famous “Bintel Brief”—letters to the editor and advice from him—continued to reflect this apprehension. “We live in a small town in the country where we are the only Jewish family,” says one characteristic plea. “We earn a good living here. But we have four daughters, all of them ready for marriage, and there is no one here with whom to make a match. Here it's impossible to marry off a girl, because there are no Jews, only Gentiles. Our daughters are fine girls. They are always in the store and behave decently. The question is, however, how will it end?” The
Forward
's reply: “We can only tell them that many Jewish families that are in the same position leave the small towns for the sake of their children. Others, on the other hand, remain where they are.”

In his introduction to Isaac Metzker's
Bintel Brief
collection, columnist Harry Golden is not so equivocal: “A Jew who has three or four daughters is in bad shape. In the small towns of the South the Jew has discovered a system. He sends his daughters up to Philadelphia or Boston or to Atlanta where she can meet Jewish boys.” The boys are
not so fortunate: they tend to stay home and enter the father's store or become professionals. A certain number will find Jewish mates; for others the worst will be unavoidable: “Some of them wind up marrying
shikses.
” The best antidote for this disastrous outcome was the
shadkn,
a man like Nat Gold.

As the last reel of Ulmer's film winds down, the matchmaker is ensnared by a trap of his own making. Having fallen for the attractive, impecunious Judith, Nat becomes leery of his own feelings. He finds an eligible man for her by offering to provide a dowry. But the jittery bridegroom backs off at the last minute. “Neurotic as Nat is,” comments Hoberman, “he can only get married behind his own back.” Rather than suffer the embarrassment of a canceled wedding, Nat steps to the altar. Whether the couple live happily ever after is irrelevant; what
is
important is that despite the pressures to abandon tradition, to speak English exclusively, to wed out of the faith, a modern Jewish couple in America has taken their vows under the
chuppah.