The Yiddish theater—fountainhead of truth and poetry, swamp of cultural decay, or den of iniquity, depending on your point of view—emerged from the bubbling caldron of the Enlightenment in the last quarter of the 19th century, and, for better or worse, has been with us ever since. William and Sarah Schack here tell the story of the early days of this Jewish child which seems, unhappily, to be passing into senescence without having enjoyed any substantial period of maturity.
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In the summer of 1882, the first performance of a Yiddish play in this country—Abraham Goldfaden’s Koldunya, sometimes titled Die Bube Yachne (“The Witch”)—was given at the Turn Hall on East 4th Street in New York City. If this première was a nightmare to the actors and audience, it was nevertheless a historic event—second in importance only to that earlier première, in the fall of 1876 in Jassy, Rumania, when the same author started the first Yiddish theater in the world.
It should be remembered that Jewish tradition frowned on drama as a frivolity. So far as we know, there had never been a Hebrew theater in Palestine in all its long history, nor a Jewish theater in any language of the Diaspora. Even some forty years after the production in Turn Hall, when the Yiddish theater was already—though prematurely—spoken of as “dead,” there were diehards who still opposed its having been at all. A friend of ours recalls her appearance in a Hebrew school production of a Purim play during the 1920’s. In the audience was the girl’s mother, a keen, hard-bitten Puritan who when her daughter came on the stage rose up and cried out: “Lollke, mack zich nit narish—geh arup fun der biene!”—“Don’t make a fool of yourself—get off the stage!”
Why did she do this? The play celebrated one of the few events in Jewish history that can be an occasion for rejoicing, the rescue of the Persian Jewish community in the 5th century BCE; and traditionally the Purim play was the only semi-formal secular entertainment Jews permitted themselves. The Talmud expressly states that on Purim you are even allowed to get so drunk as to bless Haman, the would-be destroyer of the Jews, and curse Mordecai, their savior. Our friend’s mother knew all that. Yet for her daughter to take part in the celebration as a performer on a public stage—that was a disgrace. The stage was for low-life komediantchikes—all actors were comedians to her—and in the old country women did not participate even in Purim plays: jesters, choir boys, musicians, and lads eager to get away from the grind of the Yeshiva made up the cast of characters, playing the women’s roles also (in masks, as men did in the Greek and still do in the Chinese theater).
It took us ten years to persuade this one Jewish mother to look in on the professional Yiddish theater, and even then she went with the utmost reluctance. We knew better than to expose her to the popular musicals, but we felt she would enjoy a good lebensbild—a “picture of life,” which in the Yiddish theater was never a piece of raw naturalism but always a sentimental tragi-comedy. Years after she saw the play Die Ebige Mame (“The Eternal Mother”), in which her own real and imaginary sorrows were reflected, she still spoke of it with profound respect Yet she never recanted her opinion that the theater was a place of unseemly frivolity and that attending it was on a par with habitual card-playing.
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That is very much what her remote ancestors seem to have felt. During Roman rule over Palestine, Hellenist Jews wished to imitate the circus entertainments of their conquerors (who had already created a “stage Jew”), but public opinion was against them. One of their number wrote a play in Greek about the Exodus, but there is no record of its having been produced. A Jewish actor named Aliturius was a favorite of Emperor Nero and his wife, but one Jew talking Latin does not make a Jewish theater.
From the beginning of the Exile, the annual Purim play was all the theater the Jews knew. At various times and places, it was given in the synagogue or its courtyard (where Haman could be safely burned in effigy), in the streets, or in the homes of the well-to-do, which were often visited by troupe after troupe of strolling players performing for whatever payment was voluntarily offered. At one time, in Frankfort, there was a Purim company that had a four-week season—two weeks before and two after the holiday.
Beginning with pantomime, high spirits, and ad-libbing, the plays gradually acquired formalized dialogue. A complete dramatic text on the story of Ahasuerus is known to have existed by the 10th century. Other Biblical subjects, especially the Joseph story, were also used as themes for Purim plays. In time, irrelevant comic relief was written into otherwise sober history. One Pickleherring (the equivalent of the German “Hanswurst”) made his appearance in some early 17th-century works written in what we now call deitshmerish—a kind of would-be-German Yiddish. Finally, there were plays that corrupted the Biblical stories for the sake of laughs. By the end of the 17th century, when the celebration of Purim had taken on the coloration of the Italian and German carnivals, at least one Purim play was so bawdy that the leaders of Frankfort Jewry burned it in a public bonfire. Yet there were many among the lower classes who enjoyed the lighter touch, even if it was often heavyhanded. Daily life was a long drudgery and the Law allowed little time for kicking over the traces except on Simchas Torah and a few other holidays. So on this one day of the year when a real live play was part of the entertainment, they might well have thought: Esther-shmester, let’s have a good rowdy farce and let history go hang! The audience for the first Yiddish theater was in the making.
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The movement toward the establishment of the theater itself had its source on a higher plane. It was a phase of the Haskalah, the movement of enlightenment (to the Orthodox, of heresy) which brought Western culture to the Jews of Europe toward the end of the 18th century. In the Latin countries there had already been a trend in that direction: in the previous century Lope de Vega and Racine had been translated into Hebrew, and in the early 18th century Moses Hayim Luzzatto had written plays in Italy and Jose da Silva in Portugal (Silva was burned at the stake while one of his operettas was being given in Lisbon). But in the late 18th century the tendency was toward the Yiddish. The men of the Haskalah, especially in Central Europe, despised Yiddish as a jargon and sought expression in the European languages and Hebrew; but in Eastern Europe, although several authors wrote plays in German, Russian, and Hebrew, many felt that it was also important to reach the masses in their own tongue. Solomon Ettinger’s Serkele (1825-26), A. B. Gottlober’s Der Tektuch (“The Marriage Veil,” 1838), and the dramatic dialogues written by Israel Axenfeld “to be read on a winter’s night,” circulated from hand to hand for a generation before they were published, generally in garbled form and sometimes without the author’s name, (Serkele was first printed in 1861, in Johannesburg, South Africa!) Even as closet works they played a large part in creating an interest in the theater, and as mediums of propaganda for the Enlightenment they had a serious content such as was generally lacking in the first plays produced for the box office. Serkele, for instance, though enveloped in a structure of melodrama, aimed to give an essentially truthful and serious picture of a kind of Jewish family that was commonly treated as a subject for sentimental humor. Its theme was the henpecked husband and the wife who made the family’s living, but the husband was not the stereotyped image of abjectness, and Serkele was not just a shrew with a heart of gold: she was a more real and more menacing figure, sharp to her husband, brutal to her brother’s child, and eventually capable of forging a will to get hold of her brother’s fortune.
A parallel influence, this one of folk origin, came from brodersinger, wine-cellar entertainers, who effected the actual transition to the stage proper. The hrodersinger themselves, who appeared on the scene around 1850, grew out of the badchonim, minstrels who were employed to enliven weddings and other festive gatherings, chanting rhymed couplets wishing the bride and groom good health and plenty of children, offering sound, trite advice, and otherwise entertaining the company with their clowning and naive moralizing. Eliakum Zunser, the most famous of all badchonim, was a folk poet, a composer, and an ardent exponent of both Zionism and the Enlightenment. Zunser also wrote material for the minstrels of Brody, a town in Galicia which was a convenient stopover for business men traveling between Germany and Russia. To meet the travelers’ demand for entertainment, a more sophisticated type of entertainer arose, taking his cue from the performers in the non-Jewish cafés. From the name of the town, these new minstrels came to be called brodersinger. Beginning with simple amusing ditties, the brodersinger later created songs in the true folk spirit—songs of rich and poor, of work and love. With a couple of boards placed on beer kegs, they would set up a stage on which to present character types—the peasant, the thief, the tailor, the soldier, the water-carrier, the Hasid—with costumes, crude makeup, and half-improvised monologues. Spicing their skits with the progressive, secularist ideas of the Enlightenment, the brodersinger contributed much to winning over the masses to that movement—perhaps as much as all the self-conscious preaching of its leaders.
So popular were Berel Brody and others of the school that in a generation they were emulated throughout Galicia, Rumania, and Russia. A Velvel Zbarzher became famous writing for them and Abraham Goldfaden, too, was among those who supplied them with material. Indeed, the brodersinger constituted a Yiddish theater in miniature, and they—along with the choir boys who used to sing and do impersonations at parties—were the first source of acting talent Goldfaden had to draw on. The circumstances were ripe for the birth of the professional theater, and Goldfaden was the right man to officiate at the delivery.
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Abraham Goldfaden was born in Staro-Konstantin, Southern Russia, in 1840, the son of a watchmaker. Though he was without musical training, he began to compose verse as a boy, and first became acquainted with the brodersinger through Nachman Broder, a fellow apprentice of his father. After receiving a good traditional Jewish education, young Goldfaden wanted to supplement it with the new Western learning. Abandoning his father’s trade, he went off to the rabbinershule in Zhitomirone—of the numerous schools the government had set up as part of its Russification program; these schools attracted many bright and ambitious boys eager to acquire European culture and at the same time escape onerous military service. In Zhitomir, the young man at once showed his adaptability by Germanizing his family name, Goldenfodim, to Goldenfaden, and, in a second refinement, to Goldfaden. He had his first taste of the stage when he played the title role in a student production of Ettinger’s Serkele, which was very well received. His verse in both Hebrew and Yiddish was being printed in the magazines, and was popular enough to warrant publication in two separate books, one in each language.
Graduating at the age of twenty-six, Goldfaden taught school for a year, then went in for gay living at the expense of a rich uncle in Odessa who expected him to marry his daughter. The curtain soon fell on that scene; Goldfaden married the daughter of the Hebrew poet Eliyahu M. Werbel, and reluctantly began to teach again. But he continued steadily to write verse and dramatic sketches which he read to responsive audiences of Odessa intellectuals. Again escaping from the confinement of the classroom, he became cashier in a millinery store, and later set up in that business for himself. His establishment grew bigger and bigger and proved to be excellent training for the future theatrical producer: he went bankrupt for some eighty thousand rubles!
Goldfaden next decided to study medicine in Munich, but before getting as far as an anatomy book he changed his mind and became publisher of a Yiddish weekly in Lemberg. There he was able to attend plays, operas, and operettas given in several languages. His magazine failed. He set up another in Czernowitz, and that went under too. Meanwhile he kept moving nearer to the stage; he had been in close touch with several of the brodersinger, who performed some of his works, and a miscellany of his verse and prose published in 1869 under the title Die Yiddene included a comedy, Die Mume Sosia (“Aunt Sosia”).
When the suggestion was made of starting a European-style theater in Yiddish, Goldfaden took it up enthusiastically: “Well shovel in the napoleons,” he declared. The theater would give him the excitement he craved and the fame his talent deserved. Also, it would allow him to preach against the old fanaticism and superstitions and spread the ideas of the Enlightenment—though this, one feels sure, was quite a secondary consideration.
Now he was ready to start a theater. But where was the play? If he had entertained any idea of putting on a straight comedy like Die Mume Sosia or writing a new serious drama modeled perhaps on Serkele, he changed his mind when, shortly before he was to begin work on his first production, he appeared on the stage of Shimon Mark’s Garden in Jassy, where his friend Israel Gradner, a brodersinger, performed. Goldfaden had gone to Jassy to try to publish still another periodical, and Gradner had invited him to declaim some of the works which had given him a reputation as a folk poet. Goldfaden recited, as he thought, “loudly, pleasantly, with ecstasy,” but the audience was cold: they had expected the elegant gentleman to crack jokes or perform magic tricks, like pulling red ribbons out of his nose. The evening would have been a complete failure if Gradner had not taken the stage in costume to do a Hasidic song and dance. The hearty applause this received convinced Goldfaden that if he was to make a success of the theater he would have to cater to the mob.
In Mark’s Garden, Goldfaden put on his first production, with Gradner playing the role of a Hasid, Sachar Goldstein (another l·rodersinger) doubling as the Hasid’s wife and a young boy, and probably a third actor, who remains anonymous. Goldfaden expanded a few of his songs, strung them together, added a few dances, and concocted an inept triangle as a plot to unite them in two acts, for better or for worse. He didn’t trouble to write out any dialogue (proseh, as they grandly called it), but let the actors improvise. “All they had to know,” Goldfaden wrote later, “was when to kiss, when to quarrel, and when to make up and go into a dance.” In polite academic language, the result was a kind of commedia dell’ arte; in Goldfaden’s own words, “it was a mishmash, a noisy hash, a senseless thing, the name of which I don’t even remember.”
This historic event took place early in October of 1876; and the play, the production, the senseless thing—whatever it may be called—lasted exactly two performances.
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Goldfaden was not discouraged; he went off to try his luck in Batushan. Recruiting for the Rumanian army was going on there and they weren’t particular about whom they pressed into service. Goldfaden hid in an attic and wrote a farce called Rekruten. When the coast was clear, he produced it, filling out the cast with real soldiers on leave. Bad weather kept the customers away and Goldfaden, unable to pay his bills, had to leave his “company” at an inn as hostages while he sought fortune in Galatz. In the inn there he set up a stage, prepared the scenery, and around Purim time successfully presented Rekruten for eight or ten performances.
Goldfaden now felt impelled to do a serious drama and wrote Dvoshe die Plyotkemacherin (“Dvoshe the Scandalmonger”), but not without interpolating two comic songs and a translation of some popular couplets from an operetta by Lecocq. When he came to cast it, tentatively, he had Gradner for one part and Goldstein for another. A third role was assigned to “we shall see” and two more to “someone from the street.” Gossip had it that he dragged young fellows out of “forbidden streets” to round out his cast. . . .
But it was not long before there were willing actors all over the Jewish towns—these, aside from the brodersinger. They came from among the choir boys who used to sing and do impersonations at parties, from Purim players and stage-struck youngsters who had never seen a stage and didn’t mind missing a few meals. The first actress—not a masked man, but a real woman—stirred up as much passion as a lone female at an army post. Sarah Siegel, a seamstress, was Goldfaden’s discovery. She had romantic notions about the stage, but her mother wouldn’t let her realize them until she was safely married; Goldstein was available. . . . Soon there were plenty of willing and less cautious actresses: wives, cousins, sisters of the male actors, and other young girls looking for the exciting life of strolling players, and possibly even for husbands.
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Within a few months of its birth, the Yiddish theater was in ferment. Actors became rebellious; new companies were formed; old companies disbanded. It all began when Goldfaden moved to Bucharest. There, in the home of the famous cantor Israel Cooper, he discovered Sigmund Mogulesko, a young choir boy who had been offered a scholarship by the local conservatory of music to study in Italy but had turned it down because it was conditional on his being converted. Mogulesko was spirited enough to join the precarious new venture. He was not only a good musician—people called him der notenfresser, “the note-eater”—but also proved to be a fine actor. He is still generally considered to have been the greatest the Yiddish theater produced. Mogulesko made such a hit in his very first role in Goldfaden’s new play, Shmendrik (or “The Ridiculous Wedding”) that Gradner became sick with jealousy and left the company. He went to Jassy and there set up a second company. But he needed another good actor, and so he lured his rival, Mogulesko, away from Goldfaden. Meanwhile the self-styled “Professor” Ish Hurwitch began to compete with the father of the Yiddish theater in Bucharest. Goldfaden drove Hurwitch into bankruptcy by stealing his best actor, Abba Shoengold; Hurwitch then took to the road and met up with Gradner; they decided to join forces against Goldfaden, and returned to Bucharest. As partners they fought more bitterly than if they had been competitors: there was a saying that if you saw two top hats rolling in the gutter you could be sure they belonged to Gradner and Hurwitch.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 brought heavy war contracts to Rumania, and there was so much easy money around that it even flowed into the Yiddish theater. This prosperity stimulated the formation and re-formation of more stage companies all through the Jewish sections of Russia and Rumania. There were companies; there were actresses; there were even playwrights. In most cases, this meant simply that a fledgling manager, having hired a hall, sat down to write a free version of some play by Goldfaden or a foreign author that he had seen, or even that he had merely heard of. Joseph Lateiner wrote the first new vehicle for the Gradner-Mogulesko combine, Yente die Pipernoterin (“Yente the Viper”), following it up with an endless series of works in which, to paraphrase the first historian of the Yiddish theater, B. Gorin, there is no relation between one act and the next, or between one character and another, and no consistency in any character from one moment to the following. In effect, Lateiner wrote three plays for each of the three audiences he assumed to be present in every audience—how the three plays became one was no concern of his. “Professor” Hurwitch was equally facile in grinding out trashy melodramas. And in Odessa, Nahum Meir Shaikewitz-Shomer, famous first as a writer of realistic tales and then of extravagant romances, soon made the lebensbild his specialty for his own theater.
There were other playwrights too, but Goldfaden remained the dominant figure. Not content to be only manager, director, composer, scene designer, entr’acte entertainer, occasional actor, and prompter, he also wrote steadily. In the sum of all his capacities, he was apparently so difficult to work with that, as his wife once remarked, if he had not supplied the plays they would have thrown him out of the theater altogether. But he did turn out plays, encouraged by intermittent financial success. In Odessa, to which he brought a company of forty-two persons (including dependents and creditors), he made such a hit that he was able to rent magnificent quarters and, like the pope, post a Swiss guard at his door to keep out unwanted callers (including actors). And his actors, too, took over half a suburban resort, with boats of their own and their own carriages to bring them to town.
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To keep his company (and others) going, Goldfaden wrote some forty plays and sketches: farce, melodrama, semi-serious realistic drama, historical and pseudo-historical works—all embellished with music. He stole from the German, French, Russian, Rumanian, and heaven knows what other languages. His songs were based on or directly borrowed from synagogue chants, from compositions of Mogulesko, from the operettas of Offenbach and Lecocq, from the operas of Meyerbeer, Verdi, and even Wagner, from Gypsy, Turkish, Rumanian, and Ukrainian folk songs. Yet he often managed to give foreign musical idioms a Jewish and sometimes even a personal accent, just as he created some authentic Jewish character types by drawing on the details of the unique social life of the Jews. This fund of realistic observation is the leaven of his deliberately dilute works as well as of his more ambitious ones. It ran through everything: Ix Mix Drix; Todros Bloz; Nie Beh Nie Meh Nie Kukerikoo (or “The Struggle between Education and Fanaticism”); Kabtzensohn et (sic) Hungerman (or “The Capricious Bride”); Die Tsvai Kune Lemels (or “The Fanatic”); Das Tsente Gebot (“The Tenth Commandment”); Doktor Almasado; Bar Kochba (or “The Last Days of Jerusalem”); Shulamit (or “The Daughter of Jerusalem”), etc.
Several of Goldfaden’s works—and not only the “serious” ones—were considered good enough in their time to be translated into many languages for production. As late as the 1930’s they were still being adapted by various top-flight troupes the world over. They are only given occasionally on New York’s Second Avenue now, mainly for special memorials, but their influence in the popular theater is still very strong.
After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, successive restrictions were placed on the Yiddish theater, and its performances were completely banned two years later. While this may have been simply a part of the general anti-Semitic repression, it has also been given more specific interpretation: according to one view, the government imposed the ban because an informer said that Bar Kochba contained veiled subversive references, suggesting the uprising of the ancient Hebrews against their Roman conquerors as an example for their descendants. Others believe that Orthodox Jews, together with partly assimilated rich or intellectual Jews, felt that Goldfaden’s works were giving their people a bad name and therefore persuaded the government to take the action it did.
While public theaters were closed by law, it was discovered after a while that “literary clubs” might produce plays for their members if they were in German; so Yiddish dramas were given in “German”—that is, all the “aw’s” became “ah’s”: a nawz became a naz. But meanwhile most of the Yiddish actors and manager-playwrights had begun to migrate westward, stopping in Austrian Galicia, Rumania, France, and England, and then going finally to the United States.
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There are contradictory accounts of the events leading up to the first Yiddish production in New York, and of the performance itself. We follow the account of Boris Thomashefsky, who was a prime mover in the affair, because it is the most complete, even if probably embroidered by memory and temperament.
Thomashefsky was only sixteen years old at the time, having arrived in the wave of immigration immediately following the pogroms of 1881. In the old country he had been in the choir of a famous cantor, learned a good many of Goldfaden’s songs outside the walls of the synagogue, and had seen his first Yiddish play with Mogulesko in the lead. In New York the handsome youngster was earning his living in a cigarette factory on Chatham Square, where his fellow workers used to lighten their labors by singing the old folk songs and the newer Goldfaden ditties such as Bobkelach (“Little Beans”), Bristelach (“Little Breasts”), and Oi Veh, Dalles (freely—“Alas, No Dollars”). Someone in the group would enliven his interpretation with gestures; a man who had once been a “super” in Russia offered his criticism—and there was the nucleus of a company.
But for all their enthusiasm, they had little knowledge of the theater, whether as a business or an art, and they weren’t quite bold enough to start a company on their own. One of the cigarette-rollers, Abraham Golobuck, knew where there was a company ready-made: two of his brothers, Leon and Myron, were starring in a London company and enjoying a great success in Goldfaden’s Koldunya (Golobuck didn’t say, if he knew, that it was only a succès d’estime—if it was even that). Thomashefsky agreed that they were just the people to start the theater in New York. The only question was where to get the money to pay for their transportation. This problem was soon solved. In the Henry Street synagogue, where he sang in the Sabbath service, Thomashefsky met Frank Wolf, owner of a popular saloon on the Bowery known as The Workingman’s Friend, and laid the situation before him. Business was good with Frank Wolf, and he liked the idea of a Yiddish theater; one day he bought eight steamship tickets, London to New York. When the troupers, plus several children, arrived at Castle Garden a few weeks later, they were taken straight to Wolf’s saloon.
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The Golobucks’ first thought was to outfit themselves with top hats and high-heeled shoes: their prospective customers had to be shown what elegant gentry Yiddish actors were. A rehearsal hall was rented on Hester Street. The choristers of several synagogues were recruited to form one grand augmented chorus. Preparations went forward well enough to justify the hiring of Turn Hall for the performance. With the eldest Golobuck as chief promoter and Thomashefsky as his assistant, tickets began to move. And then they received a summons.
It was not from the police, but from a committee—a committee of Americanized Jews who, regarding themselves as the spiritual wardens of the new immigrants, had looked into their proposed theatrical venture and found it evil. It was bad enough that the play was written in outlandish jargon—that is, in Yiddish. What was more serious was its immorality. The leading character of Koldunya, Bube Yachne, is a fortune teller secretly engaged in more nefarious activities. Having arranged the marriage of a confederate to a rich man, she proceeds to frame him with the police in order to get hold of his business and his money. This involves abducting his daughter, selling her into slavery in Constantinople, and then, when the girl is bought back by her fiancé, attempting to kill them both by burning down the inn in which they are staying. As comic relief, there is an odious peddler, Hotzmach, who short-changes his customers, and there are such awful songs as Bristelach, sung with evident double meaning by a butcher in the market place. Never mind that Bube Yachne herself is killed in the fire—instead of her intended victims: this slapped-on moral ending could not excuse the fact that the monstrous story was presented as a lehensbild, a picture of Jewish life. Was this the kind of people to set before American eyes as representative Jews? The play ought not to be given, and it wouldn’t be if the committee could help it
The representatives of the poor, uncouth, and emotional East European Jews were intimidated by the spectacle of well-dressed authority speaking English without an accent, and departed meek and unhappy. But they were young and men of the theater; they recovered quickly from the scolding, and the show went ahead as scheduled.
The tickets, priced high, were eagerly bought up. On the evening of the performance such a crowd seethed around Turn Hall that the proprietor thought a riot was in the making and called out the police. Speakers popped up to assail the play, to urge people to boycott its production or break it up. But by 7:00 P.M. the hall was full.
Until the announced curtain time, eightthirty, the audience was patient. For another quarter of an hour, it kept the peace, amusing itself as it could. Nine o’clock, and the curtain billowed here and there but still trailed the floor. The audience began to stamp and shout. A representative of the management came on the stage to plead for more patience. Madam Kranzfeld, the prima donna, had been unavoidably detained, but she was expected any minute now. The orchestra would entertain them meanwhile. The orchestra played an overture, the cymbals clashed their final tsing!—and still no Madam Kranzfeld.
And where was she, this woman who after a career of two or three years had been billed in London as “the world-famous Yiddish Sarah Bernhardt”? A deputation from the theater went to investigate and found her in bed. Sick, said her husband. But a crowded house was waiting for her. Where was her sense of honor? Sick, Mr. Kranzfeld persisted, hinting also that the antitheatrical committee was taking care of her, of them. The deputation pleaded. Sorry, impossible for his wife to sing that night, said Mr. Kranzfeld—unless. Unless what? Unless they hand over three hundred dollars. The deputation cursed—and paid. Madam Kranzfeld found the strength to get up and dress, and she arrived at the hall at tenfifteen.
The musicians had exhausted their repertory and gone home. Half the audience had left also. The prima donna at first balked at singing to an empty house, and unaccompanied, but at ten-thirty she gave in: the curtain went up.
Madam Kranzfeld sang; Thomashefsky sang; the brothers Golobuck carried on like the brodiers Karamazov. But it was no use. Nothing was good enough for people who had lost three hours of their lives in uncomfortable seats. The evening ended—at an unrecorded hour—in catcalls and a rumpus. The managers sneaked out by a back door. Those of the company who had jobs in the cigarette factory went back to their benches.
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But, like Goldfaden’s first venture, this was only a temporary setback. After three months the Golobucks got up enough courage to put on a repeat performance of Koldunya, and after that the climate became increasingly favorable to a theater. The continued stream of immigration augmented the audience, and the stage folk, after the closing of the Yiddish theaters in Russia, largely followed their audience to America.
The Atlantic crossing was hardly beneficial. Instead of improving on Goldfaden, the theaters that were established in New York sank to a lower level. Lateiner and Hurwitch, who arrived in 1884 and 1886, respectively, soon gained complete control of Yiddish show business, and remained the dominant managers for some fifteen years. Whatever companies came here from abroad, however they split and recombined, were mosdy presenting plays by Hurwitch or Lateiner, for Hurwitch and Lateiner. (Mogulesko, however, used a good many of Shaikewitz-Shomer’s works.)
When Goldfaden himself arrived in 1887, he couldn’t find a place in the New York Yiddish theater. When, just off the boat, he insisted on taking over himself a performance of his play Bar Kochha, instead of accepting the role of honored guest, the actors walked out on him. A second cast was assembled, but the play failed and Goldfaden fled to the wilderness of the road. Faring badly there, he returned to New York, where he started an illustrated drama magazine, and organized an amateur theater to win new actor-disciples. There was not much of a living in this, so Goldfaden took ship for home. For fifteen years, home was Bucharest, Lemberg, Galatz, London, Paris . . . Home was wherever he found support. He found so little that a friend finally had to write urgently to the New York theater managers for help, and they staged a benefit performance which brought in some seven hundred dollars. Again, on his return to New York in 1903, they gave him a fitting ehrenabend (testimonial), but after that they left him to his own devices. He wrote verse, drew remotely on Daniel Deronda for his last Yiddish play, Ben Ami, dealing with an artist, and, despairing of its production, turned to the Hebrew of his youth. His oneact play about David—the first Hebrew play written in this country—was put on by an amateur troupe which enjoyed high prestige. But Goldfaden was destitute.
Pressure was brought to bear on the managers, who agreed to pay him five dollars a week each—“royalties,” they called it, even though they were not often producing his work, at least not in acknowledged and recognizable form. When Thomashefsky at last decided to present Ben Ami toward the end of 1907, he insisted on embellishing it with songs, which the author claimed ruined it. After the first few performances, the play was clearly headed for failure. Then, on January 9, 1908, Goldfaden died. Tens of thousands attended the funeral; Ben Ami played for fourteen weeks—a phenomenal run for the time; and a great tombstone was set up in Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn, bearing the names of his best plays.
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Hurwitch and Lateiner continued to borrow plots and music from all sources; to contrive melodramas as involved as possible; to put German into the mouths of their educated characters and liehhaber (lovers, as distinguished from ordinary couples who simply got married)—a device in which Goldfaden himself followed Ettinger; to exploit lameness, stammering, and other physical defects for purposes of comedy; to write parts to the specifications of the stars who were expected to put over a show; and, above all, to bear in mind that the audience was ignorant, illiterate, and simple-minded. Even today the catchword of the knowing ones is “der oilem iz a goilem” (without benefit of rhyme: “the public is a nitwit”).
Everybody was a borrower, but Lateiner, he of the three-in-one plays, was particularly free in his adaptations. He thought nothing of converting an Irishman into a shochet, an Italian bandit into a Jewish poet. Hurwitch, for his part, had only his comic characters speak plain Yiddish—kugelsprach, he called it; the rest had to declaim in lofty German. And why not, when “Professor” Hurwitch, too busy with the box office to have the time or inclination to write proseh, turned to the masters on his library shelves for appropriate passages?
Thomashefsky, who became a manager-star many years after his debut, shuffled words and music together for many of his vehicles. His recipe was: a bit of comedy “to forget one’s troubles”; a bit of tragedy about kings, lords, or other high personages, “to have a good cry”; a scattering of songs for every taste; something special for the women, say about husbands and wives; and, since all the world loves a lover, a young couple, wooing in the manner of “du bist meiner, ich bin deiner, mir vellen zein a pohrele, aza yohrele.” When the taste for romantic historical plays passed, along with the youthful figures of the stars (Thomashefsky was famous for his thighs), Thomashefsky made them into contemporary homespun lebensbilder by transforming the dowager queen into a housekeeper, the prince into a pantsoperator, the king into a presser.
On occasion, he and the other stars of the period—Jacob P. Adler and David Kessler—would produce the great theater classics or give a hearing to one of the serious Yiddish playwrights who finally came along—Jacob Gordin, Leon Kobrin, Abraham Shomer, David Pinski, Sholem Asch. . . . Toward the end of his career Thomashefsky had the spirit to sponsor the first tour in this country of the Vilna Troupe, which produced the kind of plays he would have liked to appear in, if only they had had as much box-office appeal as the concoctions that made his fortune. But the ehrenpiesen—the “art” plays—seldom made money, and when Shakespeare failed the manager went flying back to shund (“trash”). The character of the Yiddish theater had been set on a low level, and throughout its history it rarely managed to rise above its beginnings.
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To be sure, the crudities of the early Yiddish stage were not unique. Their counterparts existed at the beginning of every sort of theater in other countries. What makes the primitiveness of Goldfaden and his immediate successors more striking is simply the fact that their theater came into being so late, and in the midst of an already highly developed theatrical tradition all around it.
There is no denying, also, that the larger audience which the Yiddish playwrights first tried to reach would not have been receptive to subtle art. Generally speaking, the audience was as ignorant and naive as Goldfaden thought it. Its members may have had plenty of common sense outside the theater, but they had no standards by which to judge what happened behind footlights. They confused reality and makebelieve; the folklore of the Yiddish theater is full of anecdotes revolving around this confusion. For instance, there was the old woman who cried out to a bearded, white-haired character (played by a young man): “Hey, you old Methuselah, aren’t you ashamed to make a fool of yourself at your age? Pfui on you!”
Just as they confused make-believe with reality, so they also confused one makebelieve with another: it was all the same. There is the story of a woman who pushed her way through the crowded lobby of a Second Avenue theater with several children stringing behind her, only to be told by the doorman that she was in the wrong place.
“This is Second Avenue, lady; your tickets are for a theater on the Bowery.”
“So what should I do—go drag the children to the Bowery? What’s the difference this theater, that theater! Do I come for pleasure? It’s for my landsman a benefit!”
When does one go to the Yiddish theater? When there’s a benefit. Hardly the attitude of people with a serious interest in the theater. And the early playgoers, lacking aesthetic experience, wanted only simple, relaxed entertainment—a good laugh, a good cry. Therefore, although the theater was a product of the Enlightenment and one of its vehicles, the more serious values expressed in the work of the non-theatrical writers of the Enlightenment found little expression on the Yiddish stage for nearly a quarter of a century. But the day was to come when a Leon Kobrin would try to picture life as it was, and a Jacob Gordin would adapt the new intellectual plays from the European stage. The critical audience was still small when Perez Hirshbein, in 1908, organized a company in Odessa to present plays to meet its more exacting demands. But this audience grew in numbers—in Russia, in Poland, and in our own country—and for it were created the plays of Sholem Asch, Perez Hirshbein, David Pinski, Ossip Dymow, Harry Sackler, H. Leivick, and other serious writers. For a short time the Yiddish theater did achieve a flowering; but that is another chapter in its history.
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