Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (39 page)

Amerikaner Shadkhn
opened at the National Theater in May. It was an indication of the times that Boris Thomashefsky's old venue had become a movie house, with occasional live acts accompanying the feature. Eight acts of Yiddish vaudeville were on the bill, including acrobats, singers, and comedians. They represented the last of a dying breed.

VAUDEVILLIANS HAD BEEN
the bane of the Yiddish Theater for almost forty years. Jacob Gordin had called it the worst imitation of American taste, “the tail of the theatrical business, with disgusting shows, demoralizing recitations, vulgar witticisms, emetic beer, and debauchery.” The
Tageblatt
had claimed that the vaudeville houses were where “the city's most notorious women and dangerous men congregated,” and in the
Forward
Abraham Cahan headed one piece
YIDDISH MUSICAL HALLS ARE A SCANDAL WITHOUT A BUT
.

In his opinion, “One has to have talent to tell a good joke. But one doesn't need brains to make the audience laugh at dirty insinuations. It is the nature of indecent jokes that one laughs more about the filth than the joke. One just needs to wink and give a certain kind of smile at the same time. In all the songs that I heard in the Yiddish music halls, there was much more winking than humor, a lot more dirty smiles than sense or charm.”

As is usually the case when moralists ring alarm bells, such editorials served only to give Yiddish vaudeville free publicity and increase the size of its audience. The Hebrew Actors Union soon got into the act, refusing to allow vaudevillians to audition. In response the outsiders formed their own Variety Actors Union. The old organization agreed to recognize the junior one—but only if the performers stayed in their own venues. None of them would be allowed to go “legit.” That policy also worked for the best interests of the vaudeville personalities. They may have had little training in the classics, but they displayed more energy than the aging Second Avenue actors, and drew a younger crowd.

These days ebullient Aaron Lebedeff mixed the
mamaloshen
with the American idiom in numbers like “Oy, I'm Crazy for She, but She's Not Crazy for Me.” Willie Howard, who specialized in character parts and eccentric songs, amused his fans by recalling the day “When Nathan Was Married to Rose of Washington Square”:

Some of the vaudevillians performed on Broadway; others went to the medium that had not put up barriers—the Yiddish cinema. Besides Fuchs and Lebedeff there were Menashe Skulnik and Ludwig Satz, two natural clowns; and the
zaftig
Jennie Goldstein, one of the highest-paid stars in Yiddish vaudeville, a comic singer turned mock tragedienne whose specialty was portraying the heartbroken loser in melodramatic tableaux. The
Times
pointed to her as a performer who “counts a day lost when in which she does not spend a little time either in the gutter or in a psychopathic ward.”

Edgar Ulmer's greatest rival in Yiddish cinema was Joseph Seiden, who knew how to use these talents. It didn't matter that the performers had no classical training; they could cross a soundstage without bumping into the furniture, and that was all he needed. An experienced cameraman who had filmed many sports events including the Jack Dempsey–Gene Tunney fight in 1927, Seiden acquired a partner who owned four major film palaces. They incorporated under the name Judea Pictures, and went on to produce a slew of Yiddish two-reelers and full-length movies with nothing but a few thousand dollars and a line of persuasive patter. On one occasion in 1939, Seiden remembered, “I didn't have the faintest idea for a story. And the Passover, three weeks away—our best season. Then, that Saturday, in a bookstore on Allen Street, I found this dog-eared little booklet.” He bought the novelette
Love and Passion
for 20 cents, spent the afternoon rewriting it, and the following Monday started casting sessions. “I hang around the beaneries on Second Avenue,” he was happy to relate. “There's always an actor who wants to get in the movies. I don't pay him nothing. Over a cup of coffee, I give him a smile, a promise and he's willing.”

Seiden was not the only hustler in the field of Yiddish talkies. Sidney Goldin directed the riotous
Zayn Wiebs Lubovnik
(His Wife's Lover), starring Satz. Loosely adapted from Molnèr's
The Guardsman,
the scenario was augmented by the melodies of Abraham Ellstein and billed as “the first Jewish musical comedy talking picture.” It was indeed musical and comic, although a minor actress got most of the attention: this was also the first film to have a black maid speaking fluent Yiddish.

But for sheer energy and invention, Seiden had no rivals. Because he used combustible nitrate stock, the New York City Fire Department
would not certify him during regular business hours, lest he endanger other occupants of the building on East 38th Street. So he shot most of his movies at night or during holidays, when no one was watching. In his history of Yiddish cinema,
Visions, Images, and Dreams,
film scholar Eric A. Goldman cites Harold Seiden on his father's schedule. Joseph “would be shooting about four to eight weeks before the holidays and just get the picture finished for the opening. He used to run down to the Clinton movie theater on a Friday to collect money from them as an ‘advance' against the picture to pay the crew. He worked with no money. He would make enough to start another picture…. It was a hand-to-mouth existence.”

The summer of 1940 was a difficult one. Hitler's troops had already invaded and taken over Denmark and Norway, as well as Belgium and the Netherlands. France had fallen in June. Rumors of Jews rounded up in concentration camps had been confirmed. Mindful that
Amerikaner Shadkhn
was not thriving at the box office, perhaps because of the national malaise, Seiden sought to have it two ways.

Still a vaudevillian at heart, he produced several melodramas.
Motel der Operator
(Motel the Big Shot) told the story of a young labor leader crippled by strikebreakers, leaving his wife and baby penniless. To give the child a future, his mother gives him up for adoption to a wealthy couple and then takes her own life. In the tearjerker
Eli, Eli
(My God, My God), children mistreat their aged parents before reconciling at the last minute.
Ir Tsveyte Mama
(Her Second Mother), an adoption drama laden with coincidence, concerns a difficult child and the biological father she confronts in court (where she is the malefactor and he is the judge). These, Seiden felt, might appeal to the apprehensive Jewish filmgoer.

To cover all bases, he also produced the comedy
Der Groyser EytseGever
(The Great Advice Giver). “The world sorely needs more laughter,” he explained to a reporter, “and we therefore modeled this feature on the type of film produced by the Marx Bros.” The film followed the farcical misadventures of a radio host, a scheming
shadkn
(as if there were any other kind), and three friends looking for love and luck. This was followed by
Der Yidisher Nign
(The Jewish Melody), in which a cantor's son journeys to Italy to further his musical education. There he meets a beautiful and mysterious girl who, in one of Seiden's typical crowd-pleasing finales, is revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of the synagogue president.

While all these films explored the Jewish experience, not one mentioned what was going on in contemporary Europe. The confrontation of Nazi butchery was left to Hollywood. Granted, there were many Jewish producers and executives in that town, but their personal concerns rarely reached the screen. Harry Cohn, the Neanderthal head of Columbia Pictures, let it be known that “in this studio, the only Jews in the movie play Indians.” A glossy photograph of Benito Mussolini hung on the office wall of producer Walter Wanger, and Il Duce's son had recently studied the movie business under the tutelage of Hal Roach.

As all-out war approached, however, a number of studios were suddenly forced to confront the truth. Charlie Chaplin came up with
The Great Dictator,
playing the double role of a mustachioed Jewish barber and the megalomaniacal dictator Adenoid Hynkel, a jeering parody of Adolf Hitler. Warner Brothers'
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
was released under protest from the German consul general in Los Angeles.

Newspaper stories assiduously followed the controversy. A fellow mogul prudently advised Jack Warner that anti-fascist movies might reduce the overseas market for American movies. Snapped Warner, “The Silver Shirts and the Bundists and all the rest of these hoods are marching in Los Angeles right now. There are high school kids with swastikas on their sleeves a few crummy blocks from our studio. Is that what you want in exchange for some crummy film royalties out of Germany?” Frank Borzage's
The Mortal Storm
dealt with a professor who refuses to recognize a “superior Aryan race.” As punishment for this exhibition of courage, the teacher is sent to a concentration camp. His family is divided between those who argue in favor of a Master Race, and those who despise the Nazis. Shortly after the film's release, MGM films were banned by the Third Reich.

With more at stake, the Yiddish filmmakers continued to blink in the face of
realpolitik.
During the winter of 1941 the first units of the German Afrika Korps arrived in North Africa, advancing under the direction of General Erwin Rommel. England was alone in its fight against the Nazis. After furious negotiations with Congress, President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, allowing the besieged and exhausted Britain to receive armaments. In April the Nazis invaded Greece and Yugoslavia; both surrendered within two weeks. The Jews of these countries were rounded up and either murdered on the spot or sent to concentration camps in the East.

In Vichy France, chief of state Marshal Pétain announced the internment of “foreign Jews” and revoked the citizenship of Algerian Jews. These decrees were covered by the American press;
Time
magazine called them “so un-French, so very German in accent that the outside world found it hard to believe they came from the mouth of an old fighter for France.” In New York, the liberal daily
PM
lamented that the “best policy for a Jew in Poland today is neither to be seen nor heard”—a policy that took place immediately after the Nazi racial policies herded Polish Jews into ghettos.
Beyond Belief,
Deborah Lipstadt's account of the coming Holocaust, offers evidence that “As the commencement of the mass murder of European Jews neared, the press had enough information to indicate that many of them were doomed to die of disease, starvation, exposure, torture and slave labor. But their own nagging doubts and those of their editors back home permeated the writing and publication of the news so that the American public would still have cause to disbelieve.”

Not all writers or readers turned away. By the summer, a large protest rally took place in Madison Square Garden. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had been slow to acknowledge what was happening to his co-religionists under German rule, was joined by New York State governor Herbert Lehman, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and AFL president William Green. Some twenty thousand people heard them speak about the Nazi killing fields. The
New York Times
headlined its coverage save doomed jews, huge rally pleads.

Though that call was to go unanswered, the Jews of New York could no longer claim ignorance of world events. A feeling of dread and guilt ran through the community with palpable force. For once, Seiden's timing went awry. His feature
Mazel Tov Yidden
(Congratulations, Jews) was a collection of souvenirs posing as a new piece of entertainment. The compilation film, offering snippets of the director's previous short and full-length movies, died at the box office. The sources of financial backing were gone at the end of the year, and by then the audience had lost its taste for trivia. There would be no more Yiddish movies made in America until six million Jews had been murdered, Hitler was dead in his bunker, and the Third Reich lay in ruins.

WITH THE YIDDISH THEATER
treading water and the Yiddish film industry bankrupt, there remained one place where Yiddishspeaking performers could still find steady work: radio. Some independently owned stations in New York City were of meager wattage, barely able to reach a mile. But others were powerhouses. WEVD led the way. The station had been founded in 1927, its call letters chosen in honor of the Socialist party leader Eugene Victor Debs. Cahan sat on the station's board of directors; in dark times the
Forward
contributed $250,000 to fund the station's Englishand foreign-language broadcasting schedule—everything from Japanese to Macedonian, with a heavy tilt toward Yiddish.

On Jewish radio, Zvi Scooler, a Yiddish Theater veteran, recited news items in rhyme. Molly Picon offered monologues, chatter, and songs. Moishe Oysher presented cantatorial recitals and scat-sang Yiddish popular melodies. Rabbi Samuel A. Rubin mediated disputes among Jews who were too poor to settle their arguments in court. The layman C. Israel Lutsky dispensed advice with such authority that many listeners thought he was a rabbi. A comedy series called
Happy Tho' Married
became a forerunner of the TV situation comedy.
The Forward Hour
was a blend of music, recitals, and dramatic radio plays.

But it was
Bei Tatemames Tish
('Round the Family Table) that gave Yiddish actors the broadest scope. The plays were written by Grine Felder veteran Nahum Stutchkoff, a throwback to the tireless “bakers,” Moishe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner, who had dominated the Yiddish Theater in its early days. For decades, Stutchkoff ground out as many as eight half-hour radio dramas a week. In “The Yiddish Radio Project,” Henry Sapoznik's remarkable excavation and reconstruction of a bygone era, the radio writer is recalled as a man with an unruly thatch of hair, whose “clothing was covered in cigarette ash, and who would
leave the house wearing unmatched shoes.” To Stutchkoff the external world hardly mattered; emotion was everything. His children often saw him weeping over some dialogue he had just written. “If it doesn't make me cry,” he explained, “then my audience won't cry either.”