Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (6 page)

First he fancied himself a
maggid,
a teacher, but the salary was too small. Next, he went to Odessa, where he tried his hand at retailing. Not enough ladies came to his millinery store and he closed it. What about medical school, then? Czar Alexander II had liberalized some of Russia's conditions, but he was not ready to allow Jews to be doctors. Off went Abraham to Vienna, where he entered an academy. The study proved to be tedious, and his mind wandered. Journalism, he decided; this was a career for the Coming Man.

Returning to Russia, he founded several Yiddish periodicals, did
some serious reporting as well as humorous pieces, tirelessly edited and publicized his work. No one could accuse Goldfaden of an energy shortage—only of an inability to find his vocation. Each paper, in turn, failed to find an audience and stopped publishing. By 1876 he seemed to have no future at all. Was it time to emigrate? He thought so; but not to the United States, a strange and uncivilized country. Talk about the whims of the czars; what about America, where a Civil War hero, a General George Armstrong Custer, had just been slain by wild Indians? How safe could a Jew be in a nation like this?

And so, at the age of thirty-six, a married man still in search of recognition, Abraham went off to Jassy, Romania, hometown of many progressive Jews. The name of Goldfaden was not unknown here; people had heard of his newspapers and they were familiar with some of his songs. Perhaps this was the place where he could establish a new Yiddish journal. One evening, elegantly attired in frock coat complete with carnation in the buttonhole, white gloves, and pince-nez glasses, radiating a new hauteur, the visitor went for a promenade. He stopped in at the Green Tree café, where Israel Gradner, a popular Jewish singer, was appearing.

After the first show, Goldfaden introduced himself. The two men hit it off, and following the consumption of much wine, the singer made a proposal to the writer. Suppose Israel and Abraham were to team up? He would do the songs, Abraham would recite his lyrics and poems. The men shook hands and outlined a show. The next day, when both were sober, it still seemed like a good idea. They scheduled a dual performance and advertised it all over town. On the appointed day a large crowd gathered, anxious to witness the results of this ballyhooed collaboration.

In his memoirs, Goldfaden is unusually candid. “The place was packed, but whether with people or wild animals I can't say. Instead of the usual comedian with tattered shoes and stockings to his knees, the audience beheld an elegant gentleman, a man with a serious air that commanded respect. In a deep silence, I begin my well-known poem,
Dus Pintale Yid
[The Essential Jew]. I recite slowly, ecstatically. They hold their breath. I end. I bow. Silence. The silence would have been all right, but when I go off I hear whistles—hisses!” Gradner's performance was greeted with generous applause, making Goldfaden's humiliation all the more painful.

That night he lay in bed trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
And then it came to him. Hardworking Jews had come to the Green Tree to be amused, to forget their tribulations for a few hours. And what had he given them? Moral instructions, history lessons. No wonder they replied with catcalls. Diversion they wanted? Diversion they would get. Sitting down at a makeshift desk he spent a sleepless night and day knocking out two acts of a slam-bang farce in the style of
commedia dell'arte:
a love triangle complete with songs. All he needed now was a person to write down the music, plus a few actors. Some sixty years later, a playwright named Moss Hart was to write, “In the theater, the difference between failure and success can be a matter of three or four hours.” He thought himself original; Goldfaden had preceded him.

The exhausted playwright summoned Gradner, read him the dialogue, and croaked the numbers. The performer liked what he heard. Abraham was to recall that “Out of this came a piece—a nonsense, a hodge-podge! I don't even remember the name of it!” Nevertheless, on the evenings of October 5 and 8, 1876, that anonymous comedy was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. Not a soul whistled or hissed. No one was aware that the Yiddish Theater had just been born.

GOLDFADEN COMPARED
those first enthusiastic spectators to toddlers. He wrote down to them, he claimed later, because to do any more would be to court public embarrassment. That first night at the Green Tree had taught him well. “I could not have dressed the children up in a frock, in trousers with suspenders. I had to put them in a pair of breeches with the seam buttoned up at the back.”

The youngsters took their first significant steps in the Romanian city of Bathsan, another favorite of forward-thinking Jewry. Goldfaden, Gradner, and a small company of actors had journeyed there, seeking a larger venue. The timing could not have been less propitious. Hostilities between Turkey and Russia suddenly erupted into a shooting
war, and the czar's army charged through towns looking for cannon fodder. In the late 1880s conscription meant state-sanctioned arrests of young men, on the street and in their houses. No appeal was possible. Once captured, the youths were presented with a choice: don a military uniform and follow orders, or face death by firing squad. It was persecution as before: long forced marches, the possibility of death en route, and the guns of the enemy if you made it through. Draft dodgers literally headed for the hills—in this case the Carpathian Mountains—or hid in secret rooms and attics until the troops had passed through.

Goldfaden's little assemblage had several men of draft age, and he persuaded a Jewish innkeeper to let them remain in his garret until it was safe to emerge. The days stretched into weeks. Still the soldiers stayed in town. The smuggled food began to taste of despair. But what began as a curse turned out to be a benison: the performers used the downtime to learn their art. As they practiced, Goldfaden, too old for the military, took pen and notebook and went downstairs to the inn.

There he hacked out one of the earliest service comedies,
Recruits,
the tale of a bumbling teenager in uniform. Aware that officials might interpret the play as anti-government, he found places for a patriotic song and an irresistible fife-and-drum-corps march. He brought the manuscript upstairs, and read the cast his new project. It was the next best thing to freedom; they started rehearsing that night. When the coast was clear he booked a large theater, blocked the scenes, and made ready for opening night a week later.

The debut was a smash; just about every adult Jew in Batshan attended
Recruits.
Some of the enthusiasts saw it two and three times, and Goldfaden and his actors were mobbed on the streets. Even so, the supply of willing ticket buyers dwindled fast. After a month it was time for the provincial celebrities to push on.

In England, Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India; in America, Alexander Graham Bell sold his newfangled telephone service and Thomas Alva Edison patented his phonograph. But it was still crazy over there, Abraham noticed; the presidential election was in dispute. Did Tilden win, or Hayes? Nobody knew. In Germany, Richard Wagner completed
Parsifal
and began to stake a big claim in classical music. A promising culture, the German one. But there was talk of Wagner's letters condemning Jewish composers. Better to stay in Romania. For the Goldfaden troupe, that country was the focus of the
developed world, and Galantz its epicenter. They journeyed to that city and settled in.

A signal event occurred in Galantz during the winter of 1877: for the first time a female performer was hired for a Yiddish production. From the beginning, Goldfaden had written very minor parts for girls because, as in Shakespeare's time, juvenile males had to play the roles. The difference was that in Elizabethan England the Lord Chamberlain's Players were forbidden to hire women. The nascent Yiddish Theater was not held back by law, but by tradition. No respectable Jewish parent would allow a daughter to appear with
any
group of unmarried men—especially one comprised of clowns and musicians.

And yet, in this provincial place a virginal seamstress came to Goldfaden and pleaded for an audition. Astonished, he granted her wish. Sarah Siegel proved to be an unalloyed delight; she was not only attractive, she had a pure, resonant soprano. He offered her the female lead in his new operetta. She went home ecstatic—and returned disconsolate: Sarah's mother and father forbade her to join the troupe until she had a husband. Goldfaden was used to emergencies by now and came up with an on-the-spot solution. He was already married, and so was Gradner. But what about the actor he had hired back in Jassy, Sacher Goldstein? The young man was eighteen, perfect for Sarah. What did it matter that the two had never met before? Goldfaden argued. This would hardly be the first arranged marriage in the ghetto. And so it was done. Sarah Siegel had a husband, the Yiddish Theater had a leading lady, and now everything was set for the big time: Bucharest.

The capital of Romania provided Goldfaden with more than a fresh audience. It also supplied him with new talent. In 1877 Bucharest was a bustling city of manufacturing and middlemen. Scores of Russian Jews had contracts with the czar's army for uniforms and ordnance, and they relocated to be near the factories. Several of them attended Goldfaden's show, went backstage, and asked to try out for parts. One of them, a local choir leader named Sigmund Mogulesko, could not only sing but do imitations of all the well-known Romanian comedians. Goldfaden saw a star in the making and signed him up over Gradner's protest that one leading light was more than enough. At the clown's debut, the audience went crazy. Gradner exploded. Here was this newcomer, this
youth,
who mugged, upstaged actors, stole scenes. In a burst of offended ego, he quit the company, returned to Jassy, and founded his own troupe of amateurs. Gradner had no original material, but that
hardly mattered. He simply wrote down what he remembered of Goldfaden's dialogue and songs and gave it to the actors. In a place where copyright was almost unknown, every pirate had a license to steal.

Truth to tell, Goldfaden was something of a buccaneer himself. In her account of the early Yiddish Theater, Lulla Adler Rosenfeld observes that in order to beguile his audience, Abraham had to “continually turn out plays, curtain-raisers, and couplets for the divertissements between the acts. He also had to take care of business problems, bribe officials, rehearse the actors and, often as not, jump in and play a part himself.” Since Goldfaden was creating a genre with little more than his own energy and conviction, “he may perhaps be forgiven if, along with so much that was original, he borrowed too. It must be admitted that one early operetta opens with a chorus from Wagner's
The Flying Dutchman.
”

Other melodies recalled Beethoven and Offenbach. No one seemed to care. The unsophisticated spectators were pleased with any plot they could follow and any tune they could hum. In fact one of their favorites, a lullaby entitled “Raisins and Almonds,” has been crooned by mothers ever since. It has never gone out of print:

All the while Goldfaden tried to bring his theatergoers along, folding instructions into the comedy. His farces,
The Fanatic
and
Shmendrik,
for example, were elemental. But their subtext concerned the very serious struggle between hyper-Orthodox and enlightened Jewry. In the first play a stuttering pedant, Kuni-Leml, convinces a girl's family that
he would make an ideal groom, even though the girl loves another. At the wedding the bride's boyfriend, Max, suddenly appears in the costume of Kuni-Leml, imitating his rival's every gesture. The prospective bridegroom stares open-mouthed.

Pandemonium reigns, and amid the confusion true love wins out. But something else prevails as well—the children of the
Haskalah.
They have triumphed over the old-style Judaism of blind obedience and rote scholarship.

In
Shmendrik
the title character is a ponderous
yeshiva
student. With the help of his overprotective mother, he also tries to wed a sweetfaced young woman. She barely manages to evade his clutches by running off with
her
lover. In the end the blockhead is left with a homely girl whose IQ is lower than his. Simple as these narratives were, they spoke directly to the Jewish playgoers of Romania. Before the year was out, “Kuni-Leml” and “Shmendrik” had entered the Yiddish language as synonyms for the kind of dolts who get tangled in their own idiotic schemes.

And then came March 4, 1878—a momentous day for Russia, a catastrophic one for the Yiddish Theater. Outgunned and outmanned, the Ottoman Turks sued for peace. Russian businessmen, enriched by the war and elated by the victory, returned to their homes. Goldfaden's troupe played to smaller and smaller houses, shrank to a few loyalists, and then split up. Their leader refused to give in to circumstance. He spent hours pondering an atlas and asking himself the same question
over and over. Where to go? America? Still out of the question. The papers spoke of a Lincoln County War in the territory of New Mexico. Somebody shot an Englishman, a friend of a crook called Billy the Kid. And then Billy put together a posse to kill the killers. It was crazy over there. Uncivilized. Wild. Since Russians would not come to him anymore, maybe he should go to the Russians. He would think on it.