Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (44 page)

The
Herald Tribune
was not impressed with this “undistinguished collection of borscht circuit performers.” But Jewish viewers were not impressed with the
Tribune
's critique. The movie, made on location at Young's Gap Hotel in Parksville, New York, ran for months and returned an immense profit. Seiden saw which way the wind was blowing and several months later released his own
Borscht Belt Follies,
a hastily assembled compilation movie also filled with tummlers, singers, dancers, and impressionists.

The jargon of the entertainment business was rapidly descending from spoken Yiddish to body Yiddish. Seiden saw it in the querulous, insistent comedy of Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, and Buddy Hackett, the bemused look of Ed Wynn and Menashe Skulnik, the quiet, almost scholarly style of ex-schoolteacher Sam Levenson and dialectician Myron Cohen. These men were Jewish in manner and substance; nevertheless, they did their routines in English. A story told by Cohen mordantly summed up the spirit of the age and the reason for the Yiddish Theater's troubled prospects.

Mrs. Moscowitz tells her Orthodox rabbi, “My grandchildren are driving me crazy. They want to have a Christmas tree. Could you maybe make some dispensation, a
broche
[Hebrew benediction] over such a tree?”

“Impossible,” says the rabbi. “But tell me, what exactly is Christmas?”

She consults a more lenient rabbi, a Conservative.

“No,” he says. “I'm sorry. But tell me, what exactly is a Christmas tree?”

She turns to the young new Reform rabbi.

“I'll be glad to,” he assures her. “Only tell me: what exactly is a
broche
?”

THE DEFENDING ANGEL

T
HE CAFÉ ROYAL
, that was the canary in the mineshaft,” lamented Seymour Rexite, president of the Hebrew Actors Union. A smile crossed his lean, intelligent face, but beneath the laugh lines was a sense of profound melancholy. The restaurant had just closed for lack of customers. In its place was a dry cleaning establishment.

It was the fall of 1953 and, truth be told, there had been precious little oxygen in the mineshaft for the last several years. The once robust Yiddish periodicals were dying, one by one. Only a couple of thousand
readers took the
Freiheit.
The
Morning Journal and Day,
now merged, limped from week to week. As before, the
Forward
employed far and away the best workforce—Isaac Bashevis Singer was a staff reporter. Yet no one rejoiced at the office; the average age of the newspaper's readership was estimated to be sixty. Still the
Forward
went on publishing, just as Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater offered regular performances despite an aging clientele and straitened budgets.

The finish of the Royal provoked comment far beyond Second Avenue and 12th Street. Harrison Salisbury, the
Times
editor who usually addressed political matters, offered a deadpan valedictory to the grapevine of the Yiddish Theater: “No more did rising young doctors and professional men make known their names and budding talent by the innocent device of being paged.

“And long since had vanished the youthful artist rebels, the brilliant socialists, the eccentrics and anarchists who poured their talents so lavishly into Great Causes like the Russian Revolution.”

Actors were wont to stop by and ask Mrs. Sorokin, the S of K&S Cleaners, about the previous occupant. “The Café isn't all gone,” she would inform them. “See the mirror there? That's your mirror from the café. You can still look in and see yourself—just like the old days.”

Salisbury peered in the looking glass as ordered. “The mirror from the café,” he remarked, “is almost the only memento of the great days along Second Avenue. You will look in vain for a restaurant that serves tea in a glass.”

The survivors ignored the evidence. They had fewer places to congregate outside, but in their homes the tea glass remained half full. A committee of actors decided to celebrate the history of their art with a gala, commemorating the Diamond Jubilee of the Yiddish Theater. Whether that theater was exactly seventy-five years old or not didn't seem important. The point was to salute the glorious past, to boost the sagging morale of the neighborhood, and let the world hear the heartbeat of downtown's glorious invalid.

The fete took place at the National, where Boris Thomashefsky had once strutted to the awe of ghettoites and the mixed pleasure and exasperation of journalists. Master of ceremonies for the gala was Jacob Kalisch. He hit all the high points in his narrative—among them the fact that unlike the Greeks or the English, the Yiddish Theater had a legitimate parent. So Abraham Goldfaden hadn't reached the high moral plane of Jacob Gordin. So he hadn't created a universal folk style,
in the manner of Sholem Aleichem. But he
had
invented an immortal character, Shmendrik, whose name had become a synonym for an allthumbs loser, and he
had
written lullabies that remained in the repertoire of Jewish mothers from New York to Jerusalem.

It was to be expected that Mrs. Kalisch, Molly Picon, would come onstage to wild ovations, and that Jacob and Sara Adler's daughter Celia would put in an appearance. The surprise was eighty-year-old Aaron Lebedeff, long a star in Yiddish vaudeville and author of the song “Romania, Romania.” He performed it as he always did, loudly and with great panache. Punctuating his song with the sound of corks popping, the octogenarian rejoiced in the memory of beautiful women, good comrades, and the other necessities of life,
mamaligele, pastramele, karnatzele, a glezele wayn
(a little taste of corn grits, pastrami, sausage, and a glass of wine).

Looking back at that evening,
Commentary
magazine went into defensive mode. “Seventy-five years may seem like nothing for one of the oldest peoples in the world, but the Irish had no theater before 1899, and there was no significant Russian theater before the Moscow Art opened in 1897. Our own American stage had no identity of its own before 1900.” If the Yiddish Theater had produced no Synge or O'Casey, no Chekhov or Gorki, “at its best it had stood high indeed.” Ansky's
Dybbuk,
the publication reminded its readers, had become “an international classic. Asch's
God of Vengeance,
a play of original power, had played all over Europe. Pinski's
The Treasure
brought him the enthusiastic interest of the general audience in Max Reinhardt's
Deutsches Theater
and in the Theater Guild in New York.”

The hour was late, but the obituary a bit premature. As in Bucharest and Warsaw, the Yiddish Theater had made its way out of the ghetto. Currently it was thriving in the uptown precincts denied to Thomashefsky and Schwartz. At the Barbizon-Plaza Theater,
The World of Sholem Aleichem
played to standees. The sketches were rendered in English but the style was very much in tune with the old Second Avenue fare, putting heavy emphasis on the vigor, pathos, and anxiety of the
shtetl.

The show starred Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand. The Carnovsky name had become a familiar one at the House Un-American Activities Committee's Hollywood investigation several years before. Subpoenaed to appear before the committee, actor Larry Parks, star of
The Jolson Story,
admitted that he had been a communist in
the past. That confession did not satisfy the congressmen. “I ask you again, counsel, to reconsider forcing me to name names,” he pleaded. “I don't think this is fair play. These are not people who are a danger to this country.”

The counsel insisted: “If you will just answer the question please. Who were the members of the communist party cell to which you belonged?”

Parks hesitated, and then broke. “Well, Morris Carnovsky, Joe [J. Edward] Bromberg, Sam Rossen, Anne Revere, Lee Cobb, Gale Sondergaard …”

Committee chairman John S. Wood of Georgia turned conciliatory. “You could get some comfort,” he told Parks, “out of the fact that the people whose names have been mentioned have been subpoenaed, so that if they ever do appear here it won't be as a result of anything you have testified to.” True enough; Carnovsky's name, for example, had already been mentioned by his onetime comrade, director Elia Kazan, in a private session with the congressmen.

Up to that point Morris had been considered one of Hollywood's prime character actors, with screen credits that ranged from the role of Anatole France in
The Life of Emile Zola
to George Gershwin's father in
Rhapsody in Blue.
After the hearings, he and his wife were barred from film work. They came to New York in search of employment, and found roles in
The World of Sholem Aleichem.
Adapted by Arnold Perl and directed by Howard Da Silva,
World
featured Jack Gilford, Will Lee, and Sarah Cunningham. That quintet had also been blacklisted for past political activities.

When no theater managers were willing to house the show, the group secured a room with a stage in the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel and opened on May Day to virtual silence. “The press,” recalled publicist Merle Debusky, “were scared to death of it. Even those who wanted to do something were afraid. But the people of the left, the progressives, were willing to support it. That's where some of the money came from. And also from the people who knew and loved Sholem Aleichem. They were the audience.”

Oddly enough, the
Daily News,
then a conservative tabloid, mentioned the show favorably, if briefly; so did the choleric, Hearst-owned
Journal-American.
But it was the
Times
that made the modest little show into an off-Broadway hit when, in a Sunday piece, Brooks Atkinson
said
The World of Sholem Aleichem
gave the city “a time for rejoicing.” He added that “a lot of skill in theater and native understanding has transmuted simple things into humor, pathos, wisdom and beauty … something wholly delightful.”

World
consisted of three one-acters: “A Tale of Chelm,” “Bontche Schweig” (Bontche the Silent), and “The High School.” The title was something of a misnomer; “Bontche” was actually the work of I. L. Peretz, and the disparate playlets were tied together by a narrator, Mendele the Bookseller. This was the nom de plume of the nineteenthcentury novelist Sholem Yankev Abramovitch. Both men were familiar to Aleichem, however; with a little stretching, they could be considered parts of his literary cosmos.

As Da Silva played Mendele, he was a disarming font of Yiddish aphorisms: “While wisdom is no substitute for a piece of herring—a house with only fish is not a home.” Shuffling along, the town elder introduced the characters of Chelm, a legendary village of comic fools.

The plot of “Chelm” involved a billy goat who was sold as a nanny goat, and the rabbi who convinced the village that a sex change was all the rage for ruminants. The curtain raiser was deliberately trivial. Act
two was anything but. “Bontche Schweig” had begun life as a Yiddish moral fable. Much anthologized, it had found readers in nearly every part of the world.

The scene is the gate of heaven. A great noise has sounded, indicating that something special is about to occur—perhaps Judgment Day. But it's Judgment Day only for Bontsche, in life a poor man who had never received a single break. As God and a group of angels stand by, he faces a seraph who will defend him, and a Prosecuting Angel who will question his credentials for entry into paradise.

The hapless figure scratches his head and wonders who they could possibly be talking about. The Defending Angel catalogs Bontche's misfortunes. His mother died when he was thirteen. His father was an alcoholic, his stepmother a termagant who tyrannized the boy, made him chop wood barefoot in the winter, and finally rejected him. Whichever way the wind blew the young man followed. For his menial work he was underpaid and shortchanged. Fortune smiled only once, when he stopped two runaway horses. The driver died in the accident, but Bontche saved the life of the passenger and he was hired in the coachman's place. Unfortunately, he had to support the coachman's widow and child.