William and Sarah Schack, who last month recounted in our pages the early history of the Yiddish theater (“1,001 Nights in the Yiddish Theater”), here examine one of that theater’s somewhat dubious descendants, offspring of the torrid summertime romance between Broadway and Second Avenue which is resumed annually in the Catskill Mountains. The hybrid—there are two specimens currently on view on Broadway: Bagels and Yox and Borscht Capades—has never been officially named; Mr. and Mrs. Schack suggest it might be called “Yinglish.”
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For years they’ve been comin’ ’round The Mountains (Catskill)—those Jewish storytellers, mimics, singers—to entertain the overfed guests with numbers not always sp Jewish as the dishes; and now, deviously assembled from Grossinger and Monticello, from Kiamesha Lake and Livingston Manor, from Hunter and Hurleyville, Ellenville and Tannersville, from Fleischmanns, South Fallsburg, and Ferndale, they have converged on Broadway to give us Bagels and Yox, and, within the same week, a second show of similar pattern called Borscht Capades. In the preceding months, while these shows were playing other cities before their New York opening, radio station WMGM had been featuring “The American Jewish Caravan of Stars,” an hour’s program offering much the same sort of material and even some of the same performers. Together, these three shows seem to be setting a trend toward a Jewish American theater in which the cast of characters is largely American-born, the material is of mixed nature, and the language neither the King’s English nor the rebbetzin’s Yiddish but a crossbreed that we might call “Yinglish.”
None of these shows measures up to any critical standard, even as “lowbrow” entertainment; and though we must admit laughing at many things in spite of ourselves, we were surprised, if anything, that the non-Jewish reviewers had not been even more acid in their comments than they were. For the shows do not have a universal appeal in content, and in style they are not full-scale theater, failing to utilize the stage’s resources in costume, in lighting, and above all in movement. With a master of ceremonies, and a band permanently seated at the back of the stage, they are essentially floor shows; Bagels and Yox even makes use of a microphone—an insult to the theater. Borscht Capades is less noisy; rank enough, it doesn’t spew quite as many smutty and tasteless jokes (the “Caravan” is, of course, almost as pure as the air waves); and it is superior musically. But it is still decidedly low-grade. (The Yiddish critics strongly condemned the revues, largely for their pervasive vulgarity. “Moral degradation!” cried one of them, lamenting the laughter of the audience as much as the coarseness which provoked it.)
Storytellers are the mainstays of these programs. After the master of ceremonies has his inning, a straight-faced monologuist like Phil Foster, a mimic like Dave Barry, or an antic crew like the Barton Brothers holds the stage a good deal of the time. If little of their stuff is really original, the best of it is worth seeing and hearing. What is new is the departure from the long line of storytellers on the American stage who lent authenticity to their work by Jewish accent and intonation but deliberately avoided outright Yiddish; just as deliberately, the two revues and the “Caravan” try to make capital of Yiddish.
By way of music they offer operatic-cumliturgic tenors of some quality, singers of folk or popular songs with or without a voice, and instrumental virtuosos (piano, harmonica, surprisingly little fiddle for the people of Mischa, Jascha, Sascha, Toscha). Sometimes American popular songs are given entirely in English; sometimes a Yiddish version follows. The Barry Sisters, monotonous in their uniformly easy-breezy attack and their almost constant harmonizing in thirds, work it both ways, translating idioms sometimes freely, sometimes literally: “Ich bin meshigeh far-r-r dir-r-r—I’m crazy about you. . . . Tell me what I am to do. . . .” Then there is a dash of Hebrew, and an aria in Italian which may or may not be paraphrased, in whole or in part, in English or Yiddish.
Finally, the stage shows have some modern dancing and some “exhibition” dancing; and Bagels and Yox has a talented ventriloquist in Rickie Layne and his “Velvel.” In general, the programs fall somewhere between the American revue and the Broadway movie-palace stage show. And they contain much non-Jewish material, perhaps as a sop to the Gentiles who may wander in, but more likely as a leaven for even a Jewish American audience, which may prefer some relief from a completely Jewish menu, chopped herring and all.
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That there is a large audience for such entertainment seems proved by their reception. Bagels and Yox ran for seven weeks in Miami Beach, ten weeks in Atlantic City. Borscht Capades started its career in Los Angeles, where it is said to have played thirty-five “capacity” weeks, continued for twelve weeks in Chicago, and finished its pre-Broadway run with ten weeks in Miami Beach. The two shows opened in New York in September; at this writing, Borscht Capades is scheduled to close December 1, but Bagels and Yox will apparently run well into next year, and its producers announce plans for a “second edition” to open in Miami Beach December 22.
This success is surely due to a good many factors besides their intrinsic “merit.” One large element is the present decade’s heightened interest in things Jewish. When the first collection of Yiddish folk songs for English-speaking people was published in this country many years ago, Jewish intellectuals used to say, “My grandmother would love them!” Now everyone remarks on the beauty of the songs when they are rendered with the sensitivity of a Raasche (in Borscht Capades), and Hebrew songs in English such as “Tsena” and “Hora” have become hits.
A second factor is the apparent existence in large numbers of a culturally hybrid variety of American Jew, who responds to the hybridization of language that developed in the Yiddish popular theater.
East Siders will recall how, a half century ago, Yiddish-language purists were horrified when some of the newspapers allowed fenster to give way to vindeh, bilyeten to tickets, tsukerlach to kendy. (Abraham Cahan of the Forward encouraged the use of such words as a means of acclimatizing—and catering to—his immigrant readers; Cahan referred to the resulting mixture as “plain mame loshen.”) Outside the columns of the press, people were bolder: they moofed their foinitcheh into a flat, the walls of which were beautified by a paintner; the gobbage was removed in a dumbvaiter; it has got so—Phil Foster retells this one at length in Borscht Capades—that if a fellow can’t think of the Yiddish word for “disappointed” and calls up his bubbeh for help, he finds out that it’s disappointed. Just as most Jews tried to become as American as possible as fast as possible, so their language showed a healthy appetite for the words of the new environment, and the popular Yiddish theater has had to absorb more and more: in the current Second Avenue musical Don’t Worry, there is almost as much English as in Borscht Capades and Bagels and Yox. For many children of the immigrants, this linguistic mixing of the two cultrues is apparently an unending source of humor; that it can also amuse a wider audience—and on a higher level at that—has been demonstrated by the success of Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, “The Goldbergs,” and Sam Levenson. (It is interesting to note, on the other hand, how the German theater in New York, as long as it lasted, retained as unadulterated a German in a flighty musical comedy as it did in a Schiller play; and the popular Italian American theater still remains jealous of the purity of its language. The sociological reasons for this contrast are too complex to be discussed here.)
These new revues draw their sustenance, unhappily, from the shallowest Jewish topsoil; their roots are not so densely branched as they ought to be. The best proof of this is the absence of any one-acters or sketches, which used to be important even in vaudeville programs and which featured Alla Nazimova, Bertha Kalich, and other stars. Gags, however, are a weedy growth, needing only the right sort of club car, cocktail lounge, or night-club microphone. Only the “Caravan” has had anything comparable to the playlet, in the dramatic monologues ably rendered by Jennie Goldstein and Gilbert Mack, some of which squarely confront the life around us without playing for a laugh.
But always the hybrid life. Bagels and Yox and Borscht Capades are most themselves when they deal with the mixed world of halvah and Hershey almond bar, sunny schoolroom and dingy cheder, Sabbath candles and Fourth of July Roman candles, Simchat Torah and the World Series, chestnuts from the itinerant Greek and heisse arbes (hot chickpeas) from the wandering Jew, punchball and football, Johnny-on-apony and Jewish nut games, Al Jolson and Menashe Skulnik and Clayton, Jackson, and Durante—Williamsburg and Brownsville, East Side and East Bronx, with a week’s or a month’s vacation, if you were lucky, in the Catskills, Lakewood, or Miami Beach.
In this mixed world, Yiddish was for many youngsters no more integral than the raisins in a bun: according to their taste, they might pick off the raisins and eat them, or spit them out. Understanding it imperfectly, they might be amused or resentful when Uncle Abe and Tante Rivkeh and the rest of the relations got together for a pinochle or powwow. What in the world could gehockte tsuriss mean? What was mycholim? Unwittingly, the expressive Yiddish fluidity made light of the youngsters’ hard-won command of language—which meant English. Yet they could not help but take some pleasure in the smack of certain words and in the exotic names of the foods they loved—how could there be another word for tsimes but tsimes?—as they might be unduly fearful of the strange and plentiful imprecations even when not flung at them.
The boys and girls grow up. They move away from their parents; the parents die away from them. The manifest content of their lives becomes less and less Jewish. They half forget the Yiddish that they used to know, going to a Broadway show once a week or once a month, to a Second Avenue show once in a blue moon, or never. Now along comes Bagels and Yox and Borscht Capades and they knock you for a goal. Even if you’ve been going ’round The Mountains, to hear this stuff right on Broadway gives you one belly laugh after another.
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Irritated by so much easy laughter in which he was unable to share, Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times critic, wrote, “It may be that all the Yiddish jibes are devastatingly funny, but this department cannot vouch for that, and even suspects that in Bagels and Yox all Yiddish words are regarded as funny, whatever they mean.” As a mere goy whose Yiddish vocabulary is very limited, Mr. Atkinson shows a keen intuition. For aside from the Yiddish words used to point up an anecdote, there are others which evoke the same boisterous response without having any such reference. The laughter they evoke, strangely enough, derives from nostalgia, which, we know, can express itself thus as well as in tears, sighs, soft words, or silence. That is to say, along with relief of tension and hostility, there is identification and a new ease: now that we are grown up, near masters of English and having heard many other languages, we can afford to be more indulgent to the challenging tongue of our parents. When you hear the actor roar a chólerye! (a plague) it takes you all the way back to Papa, Uncle Solly, or the butcher of your childhood; to think that it ever scared you—what a joke! And knishes, kishkeh, and kigel remind you of Mama, Aunt Sally, or your dear old next-door neighbor who made these delicacies for you. What a word—kishkeh! The very sound of it fills your belly with lead. But you still love it, or think you do, or would like to, but anyway, with the gusto that actor puts into the word, you can’t help laughing. Another large part of the audience, those who have been talking Yinglish a long time without knowing it, gets a kick out of hearing it on Broadway of all places, and especially from hearing those robust or cheaply vulgar expressions which the stage and certainly the radio would hardly permit in English. (And if there is to be detected no little of self-hatred and self-abasement in this display in front of the goyim, there is also the expression of self-assertion and even superiority right in their faces—or at least only half behind their backs.)
Significantly, the Yinglish shows do not have any long passages in Yiddish in the dialogue. Only “Velvel,” that fresh mug of a ventriloquist’s dummy, gets off quite a spiel in which he chides his listeners for not understanding Yiddish; it seemed to disturb the customers. The live actors confine themselves usually to a single word or an idiomatic phrase, and not infrequently they translate it. Sometimes the translation seems impromptu, as if the actor, sensing uncertainty in the audience’s response, is hurriedly trying to salvage his laugh; more often the translation is in the script, either dictionary-like for the sake of understanding, or else, in the mode of “Fractured French” or Sam Levenson’s Basic Yiddish, as another form of gag: e.g., shaygetz (Gentile): a man who buys things retail.
The range of the Yiddish words scrambled into English is as yet limited. There are a certain number of juicy or onomatopoetic phrases. Then there are the two well-defined categories: culinary terms, and expletives, curse words, and vulgarisms. The invocation of the Jewish cuisine is the whole point of the parody on “Come on-a My House” which, instead of plums and pears, lists chicken fligel (wings) and lukshen kigel (noodle pudding), matzoh balls and halvah. The very mention of herring and potatoes is a prime Jewish American joke, the equivalent of the all-American humor in hot dogs; one gag refers to a man with a herringbone suit graced by a boiled potato in the breast pocket.
A lesser factor in the making of Yinglish is the bilingual pun. As we know from Finnegans Wake, the potentialities are enormous, but the examples offered by these shows are enormities, a playing with sound effects regardless of meaning: e.g., “She’s a doll.” “Yeah, yisgadal” (the first word in the prayer for the dead); and there was a strained attempt to make something of Chanel 5 and Shlemiehl 5. We have heard better examples offstage—there are creative possibilities.
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Indeed, the same can be said of every phase of Yinglish entertainment. At present, Yiddish folk songs, quasi-folk songs, and even liturgical music are often mangled by the bad taste and direction of the hybrid theater, which can allow Aneynu, a solemn fast-day prayer, to be followed without pause by boogie-woogie. Such a theme as the lighting of the Sabbath candles, which has in recent months become a kind of light unto the nations—even Sophie Tucker offers one treatment of it rendered in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew—can be handled with discretion, as the tenor Jan Bart did on the “Caravan” and Raasche does in Borscht Capades, chanting in accompaniment to a group dance. But in Bagels and Yox, Mary Forrest presents her Sabbath chant immediately after a medley of old American popular songs ending with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and she is atrocious in two extremes—an excessively sentimental beginning switching into a rant which tears the song wick from tallow. Conglomerates of English, Yiddish, and Hebrew are often presented on the “Caravan,” and there are likely to be more of them in the future. When Jan Bart strings together, on a narrative English thread and with a brief coda in English, three Hebrew chants—Kol Nidre, Al Tashlichenu l’st Zikna, and Yismechu b’Malchutcha—there is small loss of dignity; the very range of the Hebrew songs assures their dominance, and the minor English parts seem an obvious and tolerable concession to a Jewish American audience. On the other hand, Moyshe Oysher, highly popular for his liturgical singing both in the synagogue and out, sometimes offers ludicrous linguistic mélanges, a sign of the poor taste which mars even his genuine gift for cantillation.
So far, the straight numbers in both speech and song—straight English, straight Yiddish—are the best things in the revues. If Yinglish is ever to be endowed with an integral quality, an art will have to be found that digs deeper into Jewish American life and makes sense of its incongruities: certainly there is no lack of material for light as well as serious treatment. But the present revues never get beyond merely naming the various elements, offering the primitive pleasures of recognition. A Yinglish theater which gave a richer reflection of the life it pretends to mirror would not have to serve a bagel and cheese sandwich at intermission, as Bagels and Yox does, to remind you why you are there.
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