Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (41 page)

Amid all this fervor and pity there was one nation that claimed special credit for saving its Jews—Soviet Russia. Having turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad, the nation made a fresh appeal to the United States, asking for approval and aid. The communists' chief propagandist was Shlomo Mikhoels, actor and director of the Yiddish Theater in Moscow. Joseph Buloff remembered his fellow performer with considerable disdain. Throughout a monthlong visit to America, Mikhoels dressed as a Russian peasant, his wardrobe announcing soli-darity
with the proletariat. The two men hit it off at first, but things turned sour when Mikhoels announced that he was on his way to the capital for an official reception.

In his memoirs, Buloff writes, “I found myself expansively saying, ‘Tomorrow you are going to Washington to represent your great country. Would it be right and proper for you to appear there in sagging pants and a torn shirt, without even a tie? I'll tell you what: I have a closet full of suits, stacks of shirts—colored and white alike—and a wide selection of ties. Come home with me, and I will outfit you from head to toe, well enough to meet even President Roosevelt himself.’”

Mikhoels exploded. “You louse, you think I don't have enough money do you? My government has provided me with enough funds. But I refuse to spend the workers' money on your bourgeois trappings. I spit on your lackey cravats and white shirts. Let the president see me as I am, a Soviet proletarian dressed like the people!” He walked away.

Buloff never expected to see him again. But two weeks after the explosion he received an invitation to the widely advertised SovietAmerican Friendship rally, held in the Polo Grounds before a great crowd of fifty thousand. Mikhoels was accorded a hero's welcome. The Russian actor responded by performing a one-man sketch inspired by a Sholem Aleichem story. During the early days of railroading, a Jew and a Russian Orthodox priest find themselves trapped on an out-ofcontrol train. The Jew has reason to be wary of his seatmate: the priest is a transparent anti-Semite. Forced to work together in this emergency, the two men stop the locomotive just in time, saving hundreds of lives. In the process, each comes to recognize the other's essential dignity and humanity.

The audiences responded with a mix of laughter and tears. Mikhoels held up his hand and smiled. “At this very moment, even as I speak to you, a Soviet Tiger-Tank is rolling across the steppes. At the controls are a Jewish soldier and a Gentile soldier—descendants perhaps of Sholem Aleichem's very same Jew and priest. But unlike those two, our soldiers know their machine. And they drive, they maneuver, they fire their weapons, they fight on and on against the brutal Nazi invaders. They are battling and winning—Jew and Gentile together—for a free Soviet, for a free world!”

He received a standing ovation. When the roar died down he continued: “The other day an American dandy of an actor came to me and said, ‘Mikhoels, why are you in rags? Come, let me dress you like a fancy
American, in a white linen suit and a blue silk tie.’ And I, as a proud Soviet Citizen, said, ‘Never.’”

He indicated a large photomural of Stalin at the side of the stage. “I say to you, my friends, blessed be the hand that keeps us in rags, so that we may buy tanks and guns and bullets to fight for our homeland and kill the damned Fascist aggressors.”

The speech was met with an ecstasy of enthusiasm—deafening shouts and cheers that went on for several minutes. Buloff awaited the final blow: Mikhoels would finger him as the bourgeois lackey who had offended the people's artist. He was spared any embarrassment when the speaker exited to thunderous applause.

If Comrade Stalin was grateful for Mikhoels's tribute, he chose an odd way to acknowledge it. Five years later, the Generalissimo saw to it that the actor-director was assassinated. The Jew had outlived his value to the Revolution.

IN THE FALL
, two more Yiddish Theater performers, Jacob BenAmi and the Hollywood character actor Sam Jaffe, appeared in
Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Presented at the New Jewish Folk Theater on 12th Street and Second Avenue, that epic commemorated the last days of twenty-four-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz and his compatriots. Armed with a total of nine rifles, fifty-nine pistols, and a few hand grenades, they had fought against overwhelming German forces bent on wiping out every Jew in the ghetto. The one-sided battle raged from April 19 to May 8. As
Miracle
pointed out, a number of European countries, armed to the teeth, had not defied the Nazis for that long a time. But here, too, the message was carried to the already convinced. For too many in New York City—and that included its Jewish population—the war news was serious enough without editorials expounded from the stage. Instead of confronting the massacre in Europe, they sought to hide from it, seeking refuge in that reliable painkiller, nostalgia.

COMEDY, FANTASY, AND HISTORY
thrived in the early 1940s.
Fantasia,
Walt Disney's overdecorated salute to classical music, became one of the top movies of the decade, along with the sagas of distant times and places,
Rebecca
and
How Green Was My Valley.
In the legitimate theater farce rose to the top, from the sweetly lethal maiden aunts of
Arsenic and Old Lace
to the psychics and ghosts of Noel Coward's
Blithe Spirit
to the wry view of the Yiddish Theater gone by in Hy Kraft's
Café Crown.

Based on the operators and celebrities who once populated the Café Royal, Kraft's comedy was directed by a former actor, Elia Kazan. Its twenty-member cast featured Jay Adler, son of the famous Jacob, and two prominent Yiddish-speaking film veterans, Morris Carnovsky and Sam Jaffe. Stage directions described the Crown as “the last cultural rendezvous of the Jewish-American, the country store of New York's ghetto.” His story revolved around David Cole (Carnovsky), a legendary superstar of the Yiddish Theater who has scattered wives and illegitimate children around the world. Cole nourishes the idea of starring in one last, grand role. He tries to enlist a café employee, Hymie (Jaffe), as his principal backer, warmly describing the play that will provide his comeback. Hymie is wary—he has been burned before, investing in classics that folded in a week. A relentless pitchman, Cole presses on with his synopsis. On the West Side of Manhattan a wealthy Jewish businessman gathers his three daughters and two sons-in-law around him:

After being courted, flattered, and reassured, Hymie learns that Cole's “new” drama is in fact a rewrite of
King Lear.
Memories flood back.

Café Crown
turned out to be the surprise hit of the 1942 season, launching the directorial career of Kazan and informing a new generation
of playgoers who had never strolled on Second Avenue. From the machinations at the Cort Theater, and from the attendant publicity, they learned that there really
had
been a flourishing and vital enterprise in downtown New York, and that the Yiddish Theater still had a pulse, thanks in large part to Maurice Schwartz's still vigorous, still ambitious Yiddish Art Theater.

All during the war, the last remaining actor/impresario had remained hard at work. His artistic temperament had not mellowed over the years. Two people who giggled during a dramatic moment were lectured from the stage. Breaking out of his part as a false Messiah, Schwartz boomed, “Get the hell out of my theater! Go watch
shund
someplace else!” He ordered a stagehand to lower the curtain, after which he gave a short lecture on the importance of treating the theater as a temple.

When the couple left he ordered the curtain to rise, and went back into his role as if nothing untoward had occurred. Moments like this convinced Schwartz that people only needed a little moral instruction to make the Yiddish Theater vibrant again. He saw no reason why there would not be a Second Avenue renaissance once the Allies declared victory.

Maurice took a brief time out in Hollywood, where in 1943 he played a minor role in a major film.
Mission to Moscow
starred Walter Huston and the great character actors Oskar Homolka and Vladimir Sokoloff, but even this trio could not keep it from becoming one of the most embarrassing features ever turned out by a large studio. Produced at the behest of the U.S. government,
Mission
told the story of Joseph Davies, ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938. Stalin was portrayed as a warm and benevolent leader, the Soviet invasion of Finland was seen as “self-defense,” and the notorious show trials were made out to be nothing more than a fair-minded conviction of “traitors.” Schwartz made a convincing Soviet doctor in the few minutes he was on-screen. He took the money and ran back to New York.

The following year he resurrected his adaptation of I. J. Singer's novel
The Family Carnovsky.
The critics were kind, the attendance sparse. For the first time, the eternal optimist began to despair not only for his projects but for his community. He had the literary properties, actors, sets, venue. But where was the audience? Tyranny was destroying the Jews of Europe. In the benign United States, assimilation continued its own erosions.

IN THE WINTER
of 1944 Red Army soldiers discovered the abandoned Majdanek extermination camp near Lublin, Poland. The worst tales of German atrocities, long thought to be as exaggerated as they had been during World War I, were confirmed. The wire services ran pictures of a warehouse bursting with 800,000 pairs of shoes that had once belonged to Nazi victims. A
New York Times
correspondent contributed to the general information when he entered the site of the Natzweiler concentration camp and reported that Zyklon B gas had been used to kill prisoners. Other killing places were liberated, among them Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Treblinka.

“We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, leader of the European Theater of Operations. “From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors.”

In the spring of 1945, CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow reported from Buchenwald: “They showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said: ‘The children—enemies of the state!'

“The manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 200,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 600,000. Where are they now?

“I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.

“If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.”

The twentieth century's ultimate barbarism is common knowledge today. It was deeply traumatic then, as the irrefutable evidence piled up: the testimonies of witnesses and victims; the photographs of bodies stacked like cordwood; corpses bulldozed into mass graves; ovens in which people were sometimes burned alive; the rooms full of gold rings, false teeth, and hair taken from the prisoners before they were murdered in gas chambers; skin turned into lamp shades; soap made from human corpses—it came in a rush, and the horror was too much to comprehend. It took the cessation of hostilities, an unconditional surrender, and the trials of war criminals at Nuremberg before the public could take in the lineaments of the Holocaust. Then it reacted with powerful revulsion. Echoes of the Third Reich still could be found in Poland, where in the summer of 1946 a pogrom took place in Kielce. Some one hundred Jews were attacked and forty-nine murdered as the mob shouted slogans of rage and hatred. Save for this incident, however, anti-Semitism became quite literally unspeakable in most of the civilized world.