Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (8 page)

Two plays seemed to fill the bill. Jacob knew very well that
The Beggar of Odessa
was a shameless rewrite of a French play,
The Ragpicker of Paris.
The piece, he was to acknowledge, had “no great literary value. But the role gave so much room for ability, for variation, for the art of mime— in short, I decided that this was an excellent, a truly theatrical play.”

Adler's granddaughter described his London accomplishment: “As the Beggar, Jacob sat on the ground drawing from his basket his crazy odds and ends, and his perplexity as he examined these objects was unforgettable.” He had a drunken scene that became a tour de force. Pursued, he crawled into his own basket, a contortion that was met with deafening approval. This was followed by a courtroom confrontation, in which the Beggar told his tragic story and pleaded for the troubled daughter he adored. At the final curtain, “when he proclaimed that he stood forever with his own, with the poor, the audience stamped, thundered, shook the walls with their tribute. On a stage so small he could hardly turn about, Jacob Adler had become a great actor.”

Two months later he exceeded that performance in the title role in
Uriel Acosta,
based on an authentic historical figure. Acosta was a Portuguese intellectual whose Orthodox family had fled to Holland during the Inquisition. In the play, Uriel concludes that Galileo was
right—the earth does move around the sun. This is as sacrilegious to the Jews as it was to the Roman Catholics. Like the Italian astronomer, the Jewish philosopher is forced by the elders in his congregation to recant. But the disavowal is insincere, and only serves to increase his dilemma. The Judaism in which Acosta was raised will not allow him to speak in behalf of science. Science will not allow him to return to an outworn creed. Racked with conflict, he takes his own life.

The operatic plot was made for an actor who enjoyed big moments, and
Uriel Acosta
brimmed with them. For the run of the play, Adler had taken a larger theater and the opening night audience included London's most prominent Jews, including his censorious cousin, in the company of a Rothschild. The crowd's response was terrific; many would not leave the theater until they had a chance to speak to the leading man, press his hands, express their gratitude. Gazing at Jacob's imposing posture and avian profile, one of them bestowed a new title on the star. It was repeated all around, and the sobriquet stuck. Thereafter the actor would be referred to as
Nesher Hagadel—
the Great Eagle.

To top
Uriel Acosta
would have been impossible for most leading men, and even the Great Eagle found it difficult. He finally came up with Friedrich Schiller's
The Robbers,
a good-brother, bad-brother melodrama set in the Middle Ages. Adler was first cast as Franz Moor, the cynical and repellent villain. Then he played Karl Moor, the noble knight who casts his lot with the poor, èla Robin Hood. Finally, he played both roles in the same evening. “Since the brothers never meet in the play,” Adler recalled, “I had time between scenes to change my makeup and costume and come on as the other character.” He concludes with typical brio, “In one night to play two such parts! Just to throw myself from one into the other cost me whole rivers of sweat. But the satisfaction of it! The achievement!”

Alas, the glorious moment was not to endure. In the winter of 1886 Rivka, the Adlers' three-year-old daughter, died of the croup. Only a few months later his twenty-seven-year-old wife contracted an infection at the birth of their infant son, Abraham. She passed away on the Jewish holiday of Tisha Bov. Jacob saw it as an indecipherable judgment from above. He walked around in a daze for months, barely able to function. Only onstage could he escape his sorrows and recover his spirit. He disappeared into the roles of spectacular heroes and overstated wrongdoers, often assuming their personalities when he went offstage. But the life force was too strong for an extended period of
mourning. He had carried on with an emotional young actress, Jennya Kaiser: “Sitting at the play,” he remembered, “she found pleasure in weeping whole cups of tears, with never a care that she might injure those beautiful eyes!” A child was born of this union, and Jacob was intent on making it legitimate. Or so he claimed.

Then, in a pattern that was to repeat itself throughout his life, he abruptly announced his engagement to another actress in the company, Dinah Shtettin. Jacob and Jennya ran into each other after the wedding; he said he was still in love with her, she spurned his advances, walked away, and took up with a young Yiddish playwright. Somehow, Adler thought this unfair. To forget his tribulations, he threw himself into project after project, confident that he would build a power base in London, working and living there for years to come. That dream ended on the night of January 18, 1887.

At Smith's theater, located in the East End, Adler scheduled a light entertainment for his followers.
Gypsy Girl,
a full-length operetta in the Viennese style, went very well that evening. Laughter and ovations got more boisterous with each number. The fifth and final act was to close with the spectacular burning of a house, an illusion aided by flames issuing from “Bengal Fire,” a mix of potassium nitrate, sulfur, charcoal, and sodium chloride. The harmless effect, well known to magicians, had been in common use for decades. On this night, however, some unwanted sparks floated into the air, and someone in the audience yelled “Fire!” Others took up the shout.

From the stage, cast members looked down at a gathering stampede. The next few moments, Adler recalled in theatrical terms, “was the scene played out whenever men and women cease to be rational beings and give way to blind animal panic.
They
were the actors now, we their helpless, terrified audience.” He stepped to the apron of the stage and shouted authoritatively, “There is no fire. There is no danger. Go back to your seats. Nothing has happened. You are all safe!” For a moment all was silent; then came shouts from the rear: “He is lying. Fire! Fire! Fire!” The panic resumed as hundreds pushed and struggled with one another in a frantic effort to get out.

An escapee notified the police, and fifteen minutes later fire wagons pulled up to Smith's theater. They were useless. Adler was right—there had been no conflagration, only mindless hysteria boiling through the narrow corridors. In all, seventeen people were trampled to death that night, among them two children. The city of London officially listed
the tragedy as an Act of God. After a decent interval Adler announced that another play was in the planning stages. No one stopped by the box office to ask about the name of the play, or the price of the tickets, or the names of the stars. It was now midwinter, and, the actor wrote, “We moved heaven and earth to get the theater going again. It was useless. Our appeals to the public, our attempts to make them see reason—all to no avail. Talk to the trees and the stones!” Even in flush times the nightly gross had been no more than a few pounds. “How much could we take in now? The theater stayed so cold, dark, and empty you could hunt wolves in the gallery.”

Adler considered the alternatives. Russia was out. Eastern Europe seemed to be following the czar's example; there were almost daily reports of pogroms in Poland and Galicia. According to the census, Paris had enough Jews to support a small theater, but every single Yiddish company had failed there. Asked about the City of Light, Jacob condemned it as “a grave.” He could see only one open gate. “From America,” his memoir states, “we had already received joyful tidings. Maybe too joyful. Experts ourselves in the art of bragging, we had long discounted half the great good fortune reported by our colleagues in that land. But even with half discounted, the other half remained! And one sign we had that erased every doubt: Of all the actors that had gone to America, none had returned.”

It was said that a Yiddish troupe was doing business in New York. With what results, no one seemed to know. Letters were sparse, rumors constant. And, Jacob asked his actors, if they did agree to go to the States, how would they find the money? A Yiddish proverb came to mind:
Got vet helfn. Vi helf nor God biz Got vet helfn—God will provide. If only He would provide until He provides.
First Jacob scrounged around London, pleading for a handout; when nothing came of that he announced a farewell performance with high-priced tickets. There was no advance sale. Only one court of appeal was left: Rabbi Adler.

“On that occasion,” Jacob noted, “the old man was surprisingly cordial.” The reason for the warm response was not hard to discern. “From my first words the Rabbi grasped the all-important fact: I was taking myself and my theater out of London.” To get rid of this interloping Yiddishist, the rabbi was willing to dole out £Â30. The gift amounted to about $150 in American money—not a very generous donation, but enough to take Jacob Adler across the Atlantic, in the company of his son, Abraham (the new Mrs. Adler would stay in London until Jacob
established a theater and a home), four performers, and a musical director.

Jacob had heard “confused, uncertain rumors” about Chicago, but they were enough to give him heart. He went down to the waterfront and bought space in steerage at $35 per person. Following the purchase, he wrote letters to a handful of Yiddish actors whose addresses he had in New York City. Early in 1888, along with hundreds of others—Jews, Italians, Slovaks—the little company walked up the gangplank and made ready for a three-week voyage.

The conditions don't have to be imagined; there are plenty of accounts by passengers who made the trip during that period. “Crowds everywhere,” wrote one, “ill-smelling bunks, uninviting washrooms— this is steerage. The odors of scattered orange peelings, tobacco, garlic and disinfectants meeting but not blending. On many ships even drinking water is grudgingly given. We literally had to steal water for the steerage from the second cabin and that of course at night. The bread was absolutely unbearable, and was thrown into the water by the irate emigrants.”

Another remembered moving from his tiny shelf-bed “with the greatest of caution because I didn't want to be hit with the contents of the stomach being steadily disgorged by my upper neighbor. When I got up and walked by the women's quarters I heard more screaming. Other men were up to help the sick. In a little while our whole stateroom was filled with sick and ‘nurses.’ There was a running to the sailors for water and to the doctor for help and medicine. Instead of water and medicine we received a bawling out for having disturbed their sleep.”

Jacob and his colleagues came through the trip thinner and grimmer. Their spirits did not rise until they entered New York Harbor. Ellis Island was only an architect's plan at that time; Adler and company cleared customs in Castle Garden, a drab, hexagonal building in Battery Park, the southernmost part of Manhattan. They sat on the grass outside, waiting for someone, anyone to come down and greet them with a simple
sholem aleichem.
Not one person appeared. “The loneliness! God, what loneliness!” Adler lamented. “They probably feared that with our coming their poor little fishpond on the Bowery would grow even more crowded and muddy.” That settled it. He and his colleagues would not spend a single night here. The hell with New York. There was just enough money to take them to Chicago. They caught the train that night.

IN THE GREAT EAGLE'S
Ptolemaic worldview, everything centered on Jacob Adler. If people from New York's Yiddish Theater failed to meet the boat, it could only be because they feared competition from a
real
personality. Actually, many factors kept the Yiddish performers away and rivalry was the least of them. The struggle for existence in New York City gave little time for such indulgences as a meeting at Castle Garden, and no spare cash to buy the immigrants so much as a glass of tea.

For a decade after the Civil War, New York City remained a Protestant city. The movers and shakers, whether upright (Episcopal bishop Henry Codman Porter), piratical (J. P. Morgan), or corrupt (Boss William Marcy Tweed), were all WASPs who represented Manhattan's mainstream. But from the 1870s onward, New York's booming economy and large swaths of undeveloped real estate enticed blacks from Dixie and the West Indies, Irish from Hibernia, and Jews from Eastern Europe. The African-Americans gathered in the Tenderloin—an area between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, from 23rd to 57th Streets. The Irish filled up Hell's Kitchen on the far West Side, between Ninth and Twelfth Avenues, from 34th to 57th Streets. That left the Jews with the Lower East Side, from the Bowery to First Avenue, and from 14th Street to well below Canal Street.

The latter area had changed so much since the Reconstruction period that longtime residents felt out of place. The streets above the 60s were still unnamed horse paths, and north Manhattan was covered with scattered woods and several large farms. But each year the city pushed further uptown to accommodate the increasing population. Real estate was booming. More industry was to be expected now that the elevated trains roared over Sixth and Third Avenues. The Brooklyn Bridge was nearing completion. When it was done, laborers as well as executives could commute from their green districts to Manhattan bakeries, railroad yards, and clothing factories.

The wealthy scrambled for new digs, away from the hoi polloi. In Edith Wharton's
The Age of Innocence,
a wellborn old lady complains, “When I was a girl we knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had carriages. It was perfectly easy to place anyone then; now one can't tell, and I prefer not to try.” Bold, upwardly mobile parvenus displaced the gentry without a backward glance. Save for a dwindling group of self-styled aristocrats who attended the opera and gave lavish dinners for one another, background and genealogy ceased to have any significance. John Jacob Astor, a fur trapper, became more important than the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant. Peter Schermerhorn, another sudden millionaire, had been a ship chandler. Frederick and William Rhinelander had been bakers, and Peter Lorillard a tobacco merchant.