Taking as his point of departure the celebration of the Yiddish Theater Diamond Jubilee a few months ago, George Ross tries to evoke the special qualities which have given the Yiddish theater vitality even when it has not reached a high artistic level, and which, finding their way by devious routes into the general American theater, have made a distinctive contribution to American drama.
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A gala night is not an occasion for presenting King Lear, nor is it a time to look for sustained performance. A celebration is at best a gathering of interested people who have come together to mark a significant date with nostalgia and affection. The Yiddish Theater Diamond Jubilee on June 10 was held for just this purpose, and an hour before the doors opened an audience largely of first-generation immigrant Jews collected under the marquee which still advertised Rum-shinsky’s Girl of My Dream. They came to buy Israel Bonds, to meet friends, and to recall the Yiddish Theater. Yiddish audiences are, by now, used less to going to the theater to see a play or a performance than to attending a benefit, hearing a little Yiddish spoken, and having a good laugh or a good cry.
What they saw inside was no great event in theater history. None of the “greats” of Yiddish dramatic literature—David Pinski, Perez Hirschbein, S. Anski, Sholem Asch—was represented, but Avrum Goldfaden who founded the Yiddish theater in Rumania in 1876 was, and so was Jacob Gordin who was responsible for its effective beginning in this country in the early 1890’s. The sketches, songs, and plays of Goldfaden and Gordin, crude and commercial as they were, nevertheless were the real beginning of the Yiddish theater as an institution and in a sense represented its present too; and this audience was the same “average” audience which has always supported it. Goldfaden and Gordin wrote nothing that can be called literature, but they left authentic Jewish characters whose names are part of the Yiddish language. When Jacob Kalich, as the master of ceremonies, announced Shloimke Sharlatan, by Jacob Gordin, or Shmendrik by Avrum Goldfaden, there was applause of recognition. Most of this audience had seen these pieces years ago, or in any case had absorbed these names and characters into their culture at least to, the extent that Americans have absorbed “Charlie Chaplin” or “Throttlebottom.” And if there were any present of my own generation (I didn’t see any) who were seeing these selections for the first time, they had certainly at some time in the family heard of “Shloimke” and “Shmendrik.”
We might have wished to see some of the brighter lights among Jewish actors, just as we might have wished for something from the more developed years of Jewish playwriting, but we had a delicious moment of Molly Picon, a tantalizing minute of Aaron Lebedeff, and a glimpse, albeit only a glimpse, in the acting of Nathan Goldberg, Hannah Hollander, Celia Adler, and Menachim Rubin, of what Yiddish performance has been and can be. Above all, this night stood as testimony that there has been a Yiddish theater for seventy-five years.
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Seventy-five years may seem like nothing for one of the oldest peoples in the world, but if we consider the severe religious restrictions against dramatic presentation together with the perpetual wandering of the Jewish people, it is remarkable that they have had a theater at all. (The Purim-shpiele which date back to the 5th century, and the published but unproduced plays of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries are interesting to the historian but are not in fact substantial evidence of a living theater.) 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. And if the Yiddish theater has given us no Synge or O’Casey, no Chekhov or Gorki, no Eugene O’Neill or what have you, at its best it has stood high indeed. Anski’s Dybbuk has become an international classic. Asch’s God of Vengeance, a play of original power, has 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 Theatre Guild in New York. I. J. Singer’s Yoshe Kalb was a fine and moving play, and his The Brothers Ashkenazi was a tremendous success by most standards, certainly by those of Broadway.
But this is not the place for comparative history, and nostalgia can lead us nowhere. What, we may ask, if anything, deserves our interest in the Yiddish theater today? “My own generation” is assimilated—or, if you prefer, “Americanized.” Its knowledge of Yiddish and of the Jewish style of life is already secondhand, little more than an echo, something only sensed beneath the surface. It manages unconsciously somehow to understand but not read Yiddish, or to read it only in Roman characters. If it has been trained to read Hebrew it rarely understands it. If it comes to a Yiddish theater at all, it is to a theater that is remote and exotic, heard of only through an occasional gasp on Second Avenue or through the nostalgic sighs of non-literary parents. What can this generation find of interest in the dead Yiddish theater? For, to be perfectly candid, there is probably no permanent major Yiddish playwright bequeathed to us. And everyone who speaks of the Yiddish theater delivers an elegy over its grave.
Yet however moribund the Yiddish theater is in fact, its ghost stalks about and may yet inhabit another body. Whenever we come upon any theater that is alive we know that somewhere, somehow, an old spirit has turned up to provide it with some stimulant that has been forgotten or neglected. The Yiddish theater is an old father and it sometimes pays to listen even to its ghost.
The French playwright Jean Giraudoux insisted that the one thing which distinguishes and survives a playwright (he might have said a theater or even a people) is his style. His ideas are always borrowed, and moreover not indefinitely valuable, his plots are never his own, his characters have occurred many times before. Only his style is his own forever. What Giraudoux meant by style was of course not just a characteristic mode or manner of writing, but also a personality, a temperament, a vision. There are things in an artist’s life which he may choose to deny or change, but his style belongs to those things which he must use and cannot deny: the things which have chosen him instead of being chosen by him —his childhood, his parentage, his landscape, the particular intonation and vocabulary with which he has learned his language.
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The style of the Yiddish theater, its tam, we would do well to attend to. It is an impressive value. I consistently say “theater” because I do not believe we can refer to this style in the plays alone without referring to the actors as well and in fact to the audience—and not only to acting and dramatic techniques, but also to the Jewish character and personality, to Jewish attitudes (not necessarily ethics) toward family, marriage, success, work, homeland, to a way of life, to the particular force or élan which belongs to the Yiddish theater alone.
I cannot hope to offer here any full definition of the Yiddish style, but I would like to suggest that the family is the fundamental unit of the Yiddish theater and is the feature more than any other which contributes to and illuminates its style. Family is in fact a most important feature of the drama in all of the greatest periods of the theater. The great plays of the Greeks, the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the French classicists as well as Moliere and Marivaux, the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, are family plays.
The family is certainly no guarantee of great drama. The soap opera exists on it. But from Shakespeare to the soap opera there is probably nothing which has wider and more persistent appeal. And it is easy to see why the family should be the most economical and resourceful dramatic unit: it is where all relations begin and end. From the purely practical point of view the playwright who starts his hero off with a father and a mother has told us all we need to know in the way of exposition; all the rest is drama. Hamlet reveals himself more in a word with his mother than in all his talk with Horatio, or Ophelia, or even with himself. Lear exists most articulately when he is in direct relation with his daughters. The whole point of Oedipus’ search is to discover his father and mother, and the economy and power of the tragedy lies in the fact that the mere discovery is itself the full summation of the tragic action. Drama doesn’t really begin until there are two people on the stage, two people in relation. And if relation is most deeply set in the family, it is no wonder that the greatest plays are involved with it.
The Yiddish stage is peopled with big men with big voices, family men, big with dignity and responsibility. They don’t take off their shirts, they don’t commit rape, they don’t fire pistols; they just shake a paternal finger and speak, and we feel their virility. When the father shakes his finger, it may be that he is defending an outmoded or unjust principle, or a misguided one, but we feel his essential wisdom and there’s no whining. The Jew rarely whines. He wails. When a father thunders to a son in a typical Jewish melodrama that he must never forget he is a Jew, it may be that the injunction is too simple and a little remote in its connotations, but the father speaks with the voice of Abraham and of Jacob.
In this as in other things, it would not hurt us to go back to the Yiddish theater for a lesson in dramaturgy. For the strong and wise father who carries drama in his mere presence has practically disappeared from the American stage. Jacob, the grandfather in Awake and Sing, and Esdras in Winterset, are in the line, but the father has lost stature in Willy Loman, of Death of a Salesman, a play notable for its careful suppression of the Jewish tone. In Life with Father he becomes a pompous fool and mother a silly spendthrift, and mother becomes another kind of scatterbrain in The Glass Menagerie. The father-fool and the silly-mother apparently seem truer images for a society in which it is common to think the young are wiser than the old and cannot realize themselves unless they run away from home.
Another frequent theme in Jewish plays is that of the elder sister who gives up her “place” and the man she loves to her sister. It is a melodramatic situation built on an archaic custom, but it conveys to us some of the pathos and drama of the sister-relation. Where else do we recognize that relation today, and how are we to play the Electra-Orestes situation if we don’t understand it? And there is the mother, too, who participates in the action with the ominous knowledge that her elder daughter may never be married—where does this vigorous and passionate mother exist in American drama? Or again: a son or a daughter makes a bad marriage, marries out of Judaism, and it becomes a tragedy for the young and the old and for the Jewish people as well. It is not fashionable on our stage for a mother or a father to be so deeply concerned in the marriage choices of their children, but is this a completely dead issue and can we utterly deny the psychological basis, for good or for bad, of such concern?
In Asch’s God of Vengeance, a father becomes a procurer so that he may provide his daughter with a rich dowry and a good and respectable life. Even in this shocker the theme so dear to the Jew’s heart—sacrifice of parents for children—is basic. Again we may ask whether this theme has no meaning in American life on some level. Is not the question of how much a parent may give to a child before he destroys the child or himself a current one?
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On the comic side of the Yiddish style Menasha Skulnik is the best and most accessible example and I think he is offering an interesting lesson on Broadway in The Fifth Season. Skulnik is the Jew in trouble, but his trouble has become an abstraction and the definition of his style: when he appears on the stage, even before the situation seizes him, his tsores are there beside him like a partner in the act, his straight man. He doesn’t hope to defeat them. He needs them. Without them, he would have nothing to say. Even success means only more trouble. And a good thing, too: if there could be a world in which trouble did not weigh on Skulnik’s shoulders, we would be deprived of the most eloquent shrug ever conceived.
He’s not a fool either. He’s a nebachel, a shlemiel. He walks into trouble with the ease of a fool, but he understands his fate and embraces it. It is particularly interesting to see him in this bad play where his style is set off sharply against an example (not the best) of the standard Broadway comic style: Richard Whorf in a typically efficient, rapid-fire, wallop-the-punch-line technique is never funny, never a person. For Skulnik the gag is only secondary. With careful tone and gesture, precise timing and emphasis, he feels the meaning of his situation. His funniest line, “I used to think you were my friend, but now I see you’re only my friend,” is not spectacular as a gag, but through a process of raising and lowering his arms, his shoulders, his eyebrows, his voice, he rewrites the line and fills the moment with disappointment, resignation, self-effacement. These are his trademarks and the trademarks of the Yiddish comic style. But what is even more interesting is the way he unconsciously rearranges the relationships in the play. Richard Whorf, the governing partner in the garment business and a father in the play, for all his loud voice and at least forty inches of waist is never truly a father. (His wife, incidentally, is again the silly, spendthrift mother.) But Skulnik, by the sheer authority of his style, becomes the real father figure of the piece, while Whorf remains only a petulant boy.
The World of Sholom Aleichem, a small piece of it now playing at the BarbizonPlaza Theatre, gives us another good opportunity to see some excellent comic Yiddish acting. The stories, translated and adapted for the stage, are hardly more than skits, dramatized jokes, but even in English a good deal of the tone and manner of the folk is preserved, and much of the charm of the Jewish family humor remains. It is again from the family situation that the most affecting moments are extracted. Morris Carnovsky plays a comically inadequate father trying to get his son admitted to a Gentile high school, and achieves a feeling of racial pride and dignity before overwhelming odds that carries him beyond his already established comic resignation. On the other hand as the Presiding Angel in Heaven, in Peretz’s Bontche Schweig, he plays heavenly authority with a gentle and easy realism that belie his false beard and white robe.
But perhaps the most poignant moment in the program is Howard Da Silva’s reminiscence, as Mendel the Bookseller in a sort of Our Town narration, of his youthful aspiration to play the fiddle. In deference to his father’s wishes he never succumbs to the seductive vice of the fiddle but neither does he succeed in the practical world. He becomes a humorous failure who sells books, and recalls what a wonderful fiddler he might have been. It is another favorite Jewish problem; shall the son go into the father’s business or play the fiddle? And it is no less an American one, but I dare say it is far more frequently stated in the radio serials and Class B movies than ever on the American stage.
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So there are things the American theater can learn from the Yiddish style, and indeed does now and again, because setting aside the old East European scene and the melodramatic story, the Yiddish theater rests on a still present reality. The story of the Yiddish stage continues unfortunately to be one of disintegration and dispersal, but we can at least observe to some degree its absorption into and its effect upon the American scene. It must mean something that, except for Eugene O’Neill, the outstanding plays of strong families, strong by comparison with Life with Father, I Rememher Mama, and The Glass Menagerie, have been written by American Jews—Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman. Jacob in Awake and Sing goes on shaking his warning finger at his grandson as does Bonaparte at his son in Golden Boy. In Arthur Miller’s plays, sons leave home or fall sobbing into their father’s arms, fathers sacrifice their lives and their dignity to provide for their families. In Lillian Hellman, the family goes on wrangling and eating at each other’s hearts, but ultimately presents a formidable and united front to the outside world.
And the Jewish actors, too, have kept something of the Yiddish theater in their bones. Watered down, a good deal obscured, the Yiddish style can still be seen in Paul Muni’s Jewish shrug and raised eyebrows; in Edward G. Robinson playing the dominant father of House of Strangers, or the criminally sacrificing father of All My Sons; in Lee J. Cobb playing the sacrificing provider Willy Loman, or the disappointed Bonaparte of Golden Boy; in John Garfield playing the prodigal violinist son in the same play. It is still seldom, however, that we see actors on the American stage who can give us the powerful patriarchal presence of a Maurice Schwartz or the high style of a Joseph Buloff. No doubt by our present standards of realism there is a bit too much grandiloquence and floridity in their style, but our excitement over the raucous, coarse “grand manner” of Judith Anderson, for instance, is a sign that we miss the real thing—and there is more than a little of the real thing in the Yiddish theater.
Even the Jewish comedians have relied heavily on what might almost be called the “family style.” Eddie Cantor’s Ida and his five daughters served his comedy continuously. George Jessel’s most famous and persistent routine is his telephone conversations with his mother. Sam Levenson’s entire repertoire is made up of Momma and Poppa and the kids. Milton Berle’s favorite offstage character is his mother. And I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to suggest that the running food jokes, so characteristic of Jewish humor, which are eaten up on the “borscht circuit,” have been fed to Broadway in Borscht Capades and Bagels and Yox, and have become more and more frequent on radio and in musical comedy, are essentially family jokes: food and religious rites remain in the family as identifiably Jewish in a way that other things do not.
The current musical Wish You Were Here, based on Arthur Kober’s Having Wonderful Time, is also worth mentioning for the effect that the Yiddish “family style” produces in a stock American Hollywood Broadway situation. The original play’s undercurrent of social comment on die Catskill Mountains resort as a place for finding husbands, for “mixing and mingling,” has been diffused and weakened. The production has become a little shy of its Jewishness. Teddy Stern and Chick Miller, the boy and girl of the piece, stand out unintentionally as Gentiles in the Jewish Camp Karefree (Nitgedaigit). But the basic Jewish orientation remains. In a more purely “American” musical like Oklahoma, for instance, the girl is in love with a boy who must first overcome the second man; the second man is ugly, stupid, obviously not worthy of the girl, and never represents a serious threat; he stands in simply to give the girl and boy an opportunity to come together, conflict and part, and then come together again in the end. In Wish You Were Here we find the same plot element, but in this case the second man, one Herman Fabricant, is past middle age. Jewish, and in the garment industry, he owns a “Hydromatic-shmatic” Cadillac, and has been provided by the girl’s mother as the soundest possible marriage arrangement for her daughter. Not to drop Momma and the second man too hard, we are assured that Herman is a good-natured guy, and anyway Chick is sure to turn out a successful lawyer in spite of his taste for concerts and museums. It may be that the mother’s concern over her daughter’s marriage is more bourgeois than Jewish, but the point is that the tradition of Yiddish theatrical style makes it easier for Jews to express such a concern convincingly on the stage.
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In its purest form, it’s a style of inflated realism, the Yiddish, of melodrama and sentimentalism, of laughter and tears. It’s not likely to attain to high tragedy or high comedy, for it deals too much with types rather than with characters—types at which the audience may point and experience sentiment rather than real emotion. But neither does the American theater show signs of arriving at high tragedy and comedy, and the Yiddish style represents a value it cannot afford to overlook: the sources of renewed life for the drama are not always —indeed not often—to be found within the accepted boundaries of cultivated taste, but somewhere outside.
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