Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (4 page)

The Old Testament's pivotal scene is the essence of dramatic tension. Abraham, the man Kierkegaard dubbed the Father of Faith, makes ready to offer up his son Isaac—until Jehovah reprieves him. A covenant is struck between man and Jehovah: if this true believer remains obedient to the divine will, he and his descendants will be the Chosen People: “I will make of thee a great nation,” promises the Voice, “and I will bless thee and make thy name great.” From then on, human sacrifice is no longer necessary in this tribe; worship and a moral life are sufficient unto the day.

Unlike the multitude of pagan gods who surrender to temptations and war amongst themselves, Dimont observes, “the God of Abraham acts with a moral purpose and a preconceived plan. He is not a capricious god who acts on a day-to-day basis. The Jews know what God expects of them and can therefore make long range plans.”

By the time Abraham's descendants settle in Egypt, they are suffused with the idea of monotheism. It will not be relinquished in the presence of their enemies. There will be many such adversaries over the course of history. Often these enemies come from without, like the Philistines; but sometimes they come from within, irresistible temptations that change the individual and threaten his people.

Those enticements become an integral part of the melodrama. The gods of the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans are subject to follies, passions, and mistakes. Jehovah never exhibits such weaknesses. He leaves the scandals to his all-too-human followers, who never experience a shortage of family violence. Cain murders Abel. Jacob betrays his brother Esau. Absalom rebels against his father, dies in the field, and King David's cry resounds through the eons: “Would God I had died for thee, O, Absalom, my son, my son!” Joseph is cast out by his jealous brothers, who rend his coat of many colors and falsely report his death.

And should the reader's attention flag, sexual adventures are there to pique it. Sodom is destroyed because of the uncontrolled lives of its citizens. David is so besotted by Bathsheba that he sends her husband off
to war so that he can disport with her. The mighty Samson, seduced and weakened by Delilah, is destroyed for lust. The elders leering at Susannah, the ruinous fleshpots of Gomorrah, and, on a higher plane, the explicit love songs of Solomon (“My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and I was moved by him”) all speak of the pleasures and snares of carnal desire.

And this is only the beginning. After the Holy Writ comes the second part of the Jewish saga, when Jehovah can no longer be seen in a burning bush or heard on Mount Sinai. Twice the great Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed, first by the Babylonians in 587 b.c. After it has been rebuilt and the city regained by the Hebrews, Roman troops raze the Temple and slay thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. This catastrophe in a.d. 70 marks the end of the Jewish state and the beginning of the Diaspora.

“Without Zion,” remarks historian Nathan Ausubel, the Jews are “like children deprived of their mother.” Wherever they disperse, they remember Jerusalem, setting up scrolls of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible—in their makeshift temples, nourishing the hope of a Messiah who will deliver them from their exile, endlessly poring over the scriptures in search of meaning, speaking in prayer—and sometimes in one-sided conversation with a silent Jehovah. This monological style, popularized by the “Tevye” short stories of Sholem Aleichem, and musicalized in
Fiddler on the Roof,
can be heard to this day: “Dear God, why did you have to make my poor old horse lose his shoe just before the Sabbath? That wasn't nice. It's enough you pick on me, bless me with five daughters, a life of poverty. What have you got against my horse? Sometimes I think that when things are too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, ‘Let's see, what kind of mischief can I play.’”

The going out from the Middle East is only the first of many such sorrows. In the early Christian era, the Jews are singled out for refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Preachers find a ready target: Gregory of Nyssa sees Hebrews as “Murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels and detesters of God.” Saint John Chrysostom thunders, “Brothel and theater, the synagogue is also a cave of pirates and the lair of wild beasts.” The legend of the Wandering Jew, whom Jesus condemned to roam the earth endlessly, though mentioned nowhere in the New Testament, is related by Christian speakers and takes root from the thirteenth century on.

By the Middle Ages this antipathy hardens into doctrine. Pockets of
tolerance exist throughout Europe—the Jews enjoy an unprecedented economic and religious freedom in the Arab-Christian culture of Spain. Yet a sword dangles over them at all times. Some nations force them into ghettos; others make them wear special clothing and caps to identify them as outsiders. In Germany they are forced to swear an oath of fealty on the carcass of a pig. The Passion Play at Oberammergau features Jews in horned hats to suggest their connection to Satan, and Jewish religious figures are portrayed as evil and sadistic. The sights and sounds affront rabbis; they condemn theater as “the seat of frivolity.”

Jews are considered the devil's allies whenever a plague surfaces. Martin Luther excoriates them when they fail to embrace his doctrines. “Therefore be on your guard against the Jews,” he warns, “knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils.” Spain turns from oasis to killing ground during the Inquisition. Jews are burned, murdered, tortured, and finally expelled from the country in 1492, just as Columbus sets sail for America.

For centuries they're forbidden to live in England. The absence of Hebrews makes no difference; anti-Semitism without Jews is all the rage during the Elizabethan era. In
The Jew of Malta,
Christopher Marlowe makes his villain a scheming, outspoken Jewish merchant named Barabas: “Now I will show myself to have more of the serpent than the dove.” Shakespeare, in his turn, seizes on the incident of Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, a visiting Spanish convert who has been supplying information about his native country to the queen. Lopez runs afoul of the Earl of Essex. The aristocrat dislikes foreigners who have greater royal access than he has, and attempts to frame the doctor for espionage. At first Elizabeth will have none of it; but Essex persists and eventually gets his way.

En route to the block, the crowd shouting with excitement, the executioner's sword glinting in the sun, Lopez protests that he loves Elizabeth even more than he adores Jesus Christ. It does no good; the converted Jew is publicly hanged, castrated, his carcass pulled into pieces by four horses, to the amusement of the crowd. Shakespeare follows the incident with his own contribution. The Bard, states Anthony Burgess in his biography, “was not above exploiting the general bitterness towards Jews by writing a play in which a Jew is the villain—not a treacherous one, however, but a usurious one. Barabas is a Machiavellian monster; Shylock merely, and literally, wants his pound of flesh.”

Shakespeare, of course, is incapable of creating a two-dimensional character, and the man is immortalized by his famous plea: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” All very well for the modern playgoer, but in the Bard's time and long after, audiences would see only a beaky moneylender rubbing his hands, alternately purring at his Christian enemies and planning their destruction.

On rare occasions the Jews find a welcome. The city of Vilna is created by Gedymin, ruler of the grand duchy, when he ventures out on a hunt for game. He sleeps where one of his arrows falls, and dreams of a big wolf wearing an iron shield and howling as loudly as a pack of a hundred wolves. Awakening in fright, he asks his priest for an interpretation. The wolf, says the holy man, represents an important place that will rise where he stands, and the roar indicates its future reputation. Accordingly, Gedymin builds a city on the site and names it for the river Vilia flowing through it. Anxious for a population to fill his new streets, he invites
all
newcomers regardless of their religion, and Jews crowd into this newly safe place. But as always in Europe, East and West, they remain subject to someone else's dream.

They prosper for long periods in the Netherlands, where the heretical Baruch Spinoza finds a home for his ethical philosophy. And in postrevolutionary France there are Jewish statesmen, bankers, musicians, and philosophers. In Berlin a free education becomes available to indigent Jews willing to study German, French, and European history. Still, menace is never far away. The nearest approximation to Hitler's genocidal procedures comes in the seventeenth-century Ukraine, where Cossacks, urged on by a maniacal leader who blames the Jews for all evils, go on a lethal rampage. Historian and Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel describes the results: The Ukrainian Jews “were destined to utter annihilation, and the slightest pity shown to them was looked upon as treason. Scrolls of the law were taken out of the synagogues by the Cossacks, who danced on them while drinking whisky. After this the Jews were laid down upon them and butchered without mercy. Thousands of Jewish infants were thrown into wells or burned alive.”

Russia handles its Jews with slow-motion malice. Beginning in the eighteenth century its hundreds of thousands of Hebrews are forbidden to travel beyond the rural towns
—shtetls—
in which they already live. An invisible moat rings the Jewish communities of Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. The Romanov czars, fearful of revolution in the
wake of foreign wars and increased taxes, use them as convenient scapegoats. Pogroms are encouraged during the frequent periods of social unrest.

The mortality rate among Jews is twice as high as for Christians in the territories. That rate is accelerated by the military draft, which sweeps up Jewish boys and puts them into training schools far away from their homes. The Russian author Alexander Herzen witnesses one forced march in 1835. The officer in charge confides that less than half of the children will reach their destination. “They just die off like flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly creature, like a skinned cat; he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating biscuit—then again, being among strangers, no father, no mother, nor petting; well, they cough and cough until they cough themselves into their graves. And I ask you, what use is it to the government? What can they do with little boys?”

This method is judged insufficient to deal with the Jewish Problem. Some fifty years later Czar Alexander III resolves to find a way to deal with the obdurate, stiff-necked people once and for all. Konstantin Pobiedonostev, procurator of the Holy Synod, offers a three-pronged scheme: “one-third conversion, one-third emigration, and one-third starvation.”

And yet, wherever Jews congregate, a saving remnant always manages to survive. What is the formula for their endurance against millennia of savagery, persecutions, murders, evictions? There are four ingredients.

THE FIRST IS LITERACY
. These, after all, are people of the Book. Sometime around a.d. 200, an epochal resolution is made. Some of the greatest wise men and teachers have perished at the hands of the Romans and they have left nothing behind. From here on, Judaism's traditions must be set down on paper, lest they be forgotten and lost forever.

The product of this decision is the Mishna. It deals with Jewish laws of diet, behavior, worship, justice, marriage. During the centuries following the writing of the Mishna, rabbis write down their discussions and commentaries in a series of books known as the Talmud. Together, the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud provide Jewish children with their
moral education even in the worst of circumstances. Such study stays with them for a lifetime.

Well over a millennium later, the power of this textual base was still evident. An old book, preserved from the millions burned by the Third Reich and now housed in a New York City library, bears the stamp of the Society of Woodchoppers for the Study of Mishna in Berditchev. These axmen required no literacy to do their jobs, but that was beside the point. They were Jews, and therefore they met regularly to discuss Talmudic matters. The outside world, with its threats and exclusions, is forgotten during those hours. If they argue about religious matters, they agree about the special nature of their lives: gentiles drink away their leisure time; Jews analyze the Law.

The Yiddish novelist Mendele Sforim describes the education of a typical
shtetl
boy during this long period. From the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century there is hardly any variance: “Little Shlomo had accumulated before his bar mitzvah as much experience as if he were a Methuselah. Where hadn't he been and what hadn't he seen! Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Persia, Egypt and the Nile, the deserts and the mountains. It was an experience which the children of no other people knew. He could not tell you a thing about Russia, about Poland, about Lithuania, and their peoples, laws, kings, politicians. But you just ask him about Og, King of Bashan. He knew the people who lived in tents and spoke Hebrew or Aramaic; the people who rode on mules or camels and drank water out of pitchers…. He knew nothing concerning the fields about him, about rye, wheat, potatoes, and where his bread came from; didn't know of the existence of such things as oak, pine and fir trees; but he knew about vineyards, date palms, pomegranates, locust trees. He knew about the dragon and the leopard, about the turtledove and the hart that panteth after the living waters; he lived in another world.”

Shlomo is allowed to live in that place until the Enlightenment (
Haskalah
in Hebrew) transfigures Europe in the 1800s. The prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, a Christianized Jew, proudly identifies himself as the missing page between the Old Testament and the New, and pushes for greater tolerance. The Rothschild family of bankers rises from “Jew Street” in Frankfurt to enjoy an unmatched global reach. Within the city ghettos as well as the contained world of the
shtetl,
ambition is no longer something to be held in check. The
sounds of laughter and desire serve as a powerful counterpoint to the sighs of resignation.