Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (40 page)

In its early melodramatic form, Yiddish Theater could have been defined as life on fire. Gradually, the dramatic writing matured and the actors' art grew subtle and naturalistic. Yiddish radio was a sudden throwback to the Goldfaden era, when emotions were expressed in primary colors and scripts were sprayed with exclamation points.

Stutchkoff's son Misha, who occasionally acted in his dramas, defined the difference between WEVD melodramas and the soap operas on the major networks. “Mainstream radio was about allowing listeners to escape
out
of their problems. On Jewish radio we would escape
into
our problems.” Generational conflict was the staple of
Bei Tatemames Tish.
In a typical episode, a haughty Jewish matron guards the family's nouveau-riche status on Riverside Drive by passing for a gentile. The pretense works until the day her Orthodox father-in-law invites a few friends to drop by. One of them is a gnarled old man with beard and yarmulke, Reb Hirsch. The lady throws a fit, embarrassing her husband and son.

Out of sight, the grandfather overhears her words. He appears with his bags packed, to the dismay of his son and grandson.

These stories, almost all of them interior, family dramas, went on throughout the 1940s. There were no radio plays that mentioned the Holocaust; not a single playwright—or for that matter, novelist— dealt with the immense suffering overseas. In America there were little interruptions like the Madison Square Garden rally, or the occasional editorial in the
Christian Science Monitor
:
JEWS HAVE NO CHANCE IN NAZIS' NEW ‘ORDER
.’ Otherwise it was show business as usual.

PESACH'KE BURSTEIN
considered himself—correctly, as it turned out—more of a matinee idol than an actor in the style of Adler or Kessler. Watching him perform at a
Forward
benefit, Maurice Schwartz commented, “You're a fine actor, Burstein. You could have a position in my art theater, but no doubt you want billing; in my theater we don't list names, just ‘Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater.’” Burstein, with a lively concern for Burstein, did not hesitate. “That's too bad, Mr. Schwartz, you'll just have to do without me.” A broad, infectious smile and purring voice were all he needed to build a loyal following among radio listeners in the United States. He gained more fans when he toured South America and Europe just before the war. Pesach'ke arrived back in Manhattan aboard the overcrowded Polish ship
Pilsudski,
one of the last passenger vessels to make it across the Atlantic without taking fire. (On the return trip, the boat was torpedoed and sunk.)

Although Burstein had by then built something of a name in New York, he was nowhere near as famous as another entertainer also heading for the States during the same period. The Bursteins had not yet learned to wring comedy from their sorry condition. Bob Hope, aboard the overcrowded
Queen Mary,
demonstrated the way to turn a situation into a routine, recalling his berth in a parody of “Thanks for the Memories”—while some passengers slept on the floor, he said, “I had ‘Men' written on my door.”

Burstein's wife and fellow actor, Lillian Lux, found a job on WEVD. A producer ripped the news off an AP ticker and made instant translations into Yiddish; she spoke them into a microphone, reading from his handwritten script before the ink was dry. Following that program, Burstein went on the air with his own show, singing popular Yiddish numbers. As soon as the last commercial went on, he joined with Lux for yet another interlude of songs and amiable gossip. On weekends, he operated a Yiddish theater in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The overwork took its toll; the exhausted couple began to bicker and the subject of divorce was broached.

Their marriage was rescued by a lucrative offer to appear in the Jewish enclaves of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. The Bursteins treated it as an extended second honeymoon. They sang, appeared on radio, and starred in operettas and plays—including a grim new one,
Der Vershaver Kanarik
(The Canary of Warsaw), about the Polish underground. It was one of the first Yiddish attempts to confront the situation of Europe's Jewry.

A year later the Bursteins returned to a New York they scarcely recognized. The elevated train on Second Avenue, whose periodic rumbles had been the bane of downtown restaurants and theaters, was being torn down. The sky, blocked out for all these years, could be seen from the sidewalk. It was a dark time for the city nonetheless. “The young, American-born comics and singers had been drafted into the army,” Burstein observed in his autobiography. And the Yiddish Theater was scraping bottom. In order to work, he and Lillian headed for the Catskill Mountain resorts along with many other theater veterans. The experience of facing a Borscht Belt audience changed them all. Jennie Goldstein, who had made a good living out of Yiddish stage melancholia, cheered up and became a stylish comedienne. The entertainer Danny Lewis disliked show business, and encouraged his adolescent son to study law or medicine. One evening Danny and his wife
had to appear at another hotel, leaving Burstein to conduct the weekly amateur night. “Let me go on,” begged the youth. “My father won't know.” Against his better judgment, Pesach'ke assented. As soon as the sixteen-year-old made his loose-jointed way across the stage the audience began to snicker; by the time he left they were weak with laughter. Jerry Lewis was on his way.

Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalisch, could have made a small fortune in the Catskills, but they aimed higher. Kalisch convinced himself that in these strange days a Yiddish play might just make it on Broadway. No evidence to the contrary would dissuade him. Thomashefsky, Adler, Schwartz—they were all good men, but bless them, they didn't know how to do it. Kalisch had a plan. Working with Joseph Rumshinsky, he prepared a new musical,
Oy, Is Dus a Leben
(Oh, What a Life). Written in Yiddish, English, and Yinglish, a blend of both languages, it covered the story of Molly from childhood through her many shows and to her marriage, carrying her on to the present day.

They opened the show at the Jolson Theater, which was renamed the Molly Picon for the occasion. The grab bag of good-hearted vaudeville, melodrama, and operetta debuted on October 13, 1942, played to the expected loyalists, then gathered a new group of gentile fans and kept on going until the New Year. By that time the war news had improved; the Allies were making inroads in Europe. At home, though, Molly heard more than a few anti-Semitic slurs about Jewish wartime profiteers. And, she noticed, Negroes were still barred from many places where she was free to go. Visiting a friend on Central Park West, as she and Jacob entered one elevator, an authoritative voice sounded behind them: “You'll have to take the freight elevator,” said the uniformed black operator. She turned around just as he shut the door on Mr. and Mrs. Paul Robeson. Picon's memoir of that occasion reads, “Racism, Jew bastard, war. When would we learn to follow the Bible and love thy neighbor?”

NO MORE RAISINS,
NO MORE ALMONDS

L
ATE IN JANUARY
1942, fifteen high-ranking officials of the Third Reich met at Wannsee, a lakeside villa near Berlin. The topic of the conference was the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” Put less euphemistically, this meant the step-bystep elimination of all European Jews, the old, the middle-aged, the young, men, children, infants. Though the Wannsee Conference formalized the plans, killings had been under way for months. Mobile
detachments had already rounded up and machine-gunned thousands of Jews in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union.

After the conference, the murders increased exponentially. The thousands of victims became hundreds of thousands, and then more. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had gotten close enough to Franklin Roosevelt to address him informally, received specific information about the Final Solution. He sent a vexed but carefully worded letter to the president:

“Dear Boss,

“I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing with magic, and as I believe, heaven-inspired strength at this time. But you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.”

A twenty-page report followed. Prepared by Wise and his colleagues,
Blue Print for Extermination
was the most accurate nongovernmental account of the Final Solution, analyzing the deaths country by country. Roosevelt responded, promising to rescue “those who may yet be saved. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. We are doing everything possible to ascertain who are personally guilty.”

The rabbi's group waited expectantly for specific action against the genocide. It never came. Roosevelt maintained a policy of Rescue Through Victory, rarely mentioning the catastrophe of European Jewry in his political speeches. Yet he remained a pantheon figure to most American Jews, who voted en bloc to elect him to office again and again and again. Only a handful found this dissonance impossible to accept.

Ben Hecht was one of them. The playwright and scenarist (
The Front Page, Twentieth Century,
etc.) refused to get along and go along. He decided to arouse America to the Jewish plight by staging a pageant,
We Will Never Die
, at Madison Square Garden. Seeking support, he addressed a private group of important Jewish writers and artists gathered at the town house of fellow playwright George S. Kaufman. In his memoir Hecht refers to that evening: “I said that an outcry against the massacre would have an important effect on the British…. If they heard that millions of Jews had been murdered, and that the Germans planned to kill the four million still breathing in Europe, and that most of these still-breathing Jews could be saved if the ports of Palestine were opened, the British, fine, decent people that they were, would certainly not continue to collaborate with the Germans on the extermination.”

His appeal was met with silence—or worse. To suggest that America's ally, Great Britain, was somehow at fault was too much for the majority of his listeners. “Who is paying you to do this wretched propaganda,” demanded novelist Edna Ferber, referring to the Nazi chancellor and his minister of information, “Mister Hitler? Or is it Mr. Goebbels?”

Of that group, only two volunteered their services, the writer Moss Hart and the composer Kurt Weill. Hecht had better luck with a handful of Yiddish Theater stars. Some forty thousand people attended
We Will Never Die
, a spectacle clearly influenced by the Second Avenue style. Before a backdrop of forty-foot-high tablets of the Ten Commandments, Hecht's words boomed out: “Almighty God, Father of the poor and weak … we are here to say our prayers for the two million who have been killed in Europe, because they bear the name of your first children—the Jews…. They shall never die though they were slaughtered with no weapon in their hand.

“Though they fill the dark land of Europe with the smoke of their massacre, they shall never die.

“For they are part of something greater, higher and stronger than the dreams of their executioners.”

Stella and Luther Adler spoke out; so did Jacob Ben-Ami and Paul Muni.
We Will Never Die
rolled on to Hollywood, where Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield contributed their talents, and to Washington, D.C., where it was seen by the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and several hundred members of Congress. Everyone who attended was moved, and there was talk of the War Department reversing the policy of Rescue Through Victory, of taking immediate action to save the victims. Somehow, feet were dragged and phone calls were not returned. A month later Kurt Weill bitterly assessed the situation. “What have we really achieved? All we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment.”