Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (3 page)

Two other pastiches followed. The Broadway musical
Rags
(book by Joseph Stein, who had written the book for
Fiddler on the Roof
) told the story of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century. In a key scene, three of the principals, Rebecca, David, and Saul, pay a visit to a Yiddish theater where the impresario/actor Boris Kaminsky is giving his version of Hamlet.

BORIS
: To be or not to be. A terrible question. In other words to live or to die. Both bad! Living we know about—suffering without end.

AUDIENCE
(
Mixed reaction
): That's true. Listen to him. Ssh, let him talk.

BORIS
: But dying is better? That's also no life. Because after you're dead, what have you got?

AUDIENCE
: Nothing.

BORIS
: Nothing! I'm going crazy thinking about it. I once said to my friend Laertes, the more we think, the more mixed up we get. I'm the saddest person in the world.

AUDIENCE
(
Mixed cries
)

MAN IN AUDIENCE
: You think you got it bad? You should know my boss.

(
Enter
OPHELIA
)

OPHELIA
: Hamlet, you shouldn't say such mean things about your mother. Your mother is your best friend. I don't know what's happening to you lately, always talking to yourself.

AUDIENCE
: Maybe he's sick. He should see a doctor. Go out in the sun more.

DAVID
: Why is he so angry, Saul?

SAUL
: Well, his father died and his mother married his uncle.

REBECCA
: Terrible…a second marriage. It's always the children who suffer.

 

Rags
lasted for four performances.

Jewish pride in Broadway's preeminent composers continued through the 1970s. The musicals of Richard Rodgers, Jerry Herman, and the emerging Stephen Sondheim drew loyal followings of Hadassah ladies at Saturday matinees; Leonard Bernstein's ballet
The Dybbuk,
based on a Yiddish play, was well attended; the comedies of Neil Simon, obviously written about Jewish characters but deliberately cast with gentiles, drew similar crowds. But as for the roots of all this— the Yiddish Theater—hardly anyone cared to attend its modest, live presentations.

One last attempt was made to send up the past imperfect.
The Great Ostrovsky
had songs by Cy Coleman (
Sweet Charity
;
Little Me
) and book and lyrics by Avery Corman (
Kramer vs. Kramer
). Like
The Prince of Grand Street,
it told the story of a Second Avenue actor in the old days. The score mixed sentimental ballads with light-handed klezmer orchestrations, and the jokes were genial and essentially nonsectarian. And, like
The Prince,
the show never made it to Broadway. Philadelphia was its final stop.

CERTAIN THAT THEIR CULTURE
was in decline, Yiddishspeaking New Yorkers grew despondent. Then came the morning of October 5, 1978, when a dramatic reprieve sounded from Stockholm. The Swedish Academy of Letters sent word that Isaac Bashevis Singer had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The press release cited his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings the universal human condition to life.” Lars Gyllensten, permanent secretary of the academy, added praise for Yiddish, the language in which the laureate wrote. It was, he said, the tongue “of the simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers who preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.”

In the wake of the announcement Singer gave hundreds of interviews. A charming, formally dressed figure, he captivated reporters, who quoted him on his favorite subjects, from vegetarianism, “I don't eat meat because I'm worried about my arteries. I don't eat meat because I'm worried about the arteries of the
chicken,
” to philosophy, “We have to believe in free will. We have no choice,” to the future of Yiddish, “The language is ailing, yes. But in Jewish history, the distance between sickness and death can be a long, long time.” He iterated the last observation during his Nobel speech, begun in Yiddish:

“
Der groyser kovad vos di Shwedishe Acadamie hot mir ongeton is oich an anerkenung fun Yiddish—a loshon fun golus, ohn a land, ohn grenitzen, nisht gshtitzt fun keim shum meluchoh….
The great honor that the Swedish Academy has afforded me is also a recognition for Yiddish, a language of exile, without a country, without frontiers, that is not supported by any government.”

At a banquet given by the king of Sweden, Singer continued to praise Yiddish in a manner that ranged from wistful to tongue-incheek and back again. “His Majesty, ladies and gentlemen: People are asking me often, why do you write in a dying language? And I want to explain it in a few words. First, I like to write ghost stories, and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language, the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish; they all speak it. Secondly, I believe in resurrection. I'm sure the Messiah will soon come, and millions of Yiddish-speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day, and their first question will be, ‘Is there any new Yiddish book to read?' Thirdly, for two thousand years, Hebrew was considered a dead language.
Suddenly it became strangely alive. What happened to Hebrew may also happen to Yiddish one day.” When this gentle old man spoke, his lively blue eyes sparkled and his voice grew strong and persuasive. He was young again. So were his listeners and so was his language. That evening, anything seemed possible. Even rebirth. The illusion lasted until sunrise.

SEEN FROM THE INSIDE
, the Yiddish Theater was an institution in need of celebration. From the outside, it was perceived as an antique, an instance of naive art whose time had come and gone. Serious appraisals began. At the Museum of the City of New York, “A Celebration of Yiddish Theater in New York” was mounted; more than three hundred items of memorabilia went on display, including production snapshots, drawings, and posters. And in Washington, D.C., the Klutznick Museum mounted a show called “Hurray for Yiddish Theater in America!” It guided the visitor chronologically through the Yiddish Theater's peaks and valleys. Both exhibits treated the subject with esteem and dignity; both embalmed it.

Bridge of Light,
J. Hoberman's study of Yiddish cinema, added another valedictory. The medium in which so many Yiddish Theater stars found roles was long gone. Analyzing the film
Brussels-Transit,
the story of a family's flight from Poland to Belgium in the years of the Holocaust, Hoberman praised the Yiddish narration by the director's mother. “Postscripting the tumultuous history of Yiddish mass culture,” he concluded, “Samy Szlingergaum's austere film has the modesty of the pebble one places atop a Jewish grave. (This book, I put beside it.)”

Musicologist Jack Gottlieb weighed in with
Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish,
subtitled
How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood.
He noted that Jewish composers of the last century (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Schwartz et al.) borrowed from what they knew—Yiddish operettas and musicals. But Gottlieb also showed that gentile composers ransacked the products of Second Avenue. Cole Porter's “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To,” for example, bears a strong resemblance to the Yiddish Theater song “Oyfn Pripetshik” (“In the Fireplace”).

Indeed, in that melody “Porter conjures up a Russian-Jewish world to such an extent that Gregory Ratoff, the Russian-born movie
producer-director, on first hearing it, thought it came from the Caucasus.” Porter confessed that he paid close attention to Yiddish musicals and once boasted to Richard Rodgers that he had discovered the secret of writing hits. Said Rodgers, “As I breathlessly awaited the magic formula, he leaned over and confided, ‘I'll write Jewish tunes.’”

That he did. And in the process, Porter and his colleagues slowly brought the Yiddish Theater to Broadway, off-Broadway, and Hollywood. It took decades to make the crossover, and that once vital art form got lost in the transfer. Later, the lamentations were long, loud, and futile. For no matter how great the debt of the American stage to its sources, no “foreign” theater has ever endured for very long in New York. When the French Comédie Français does Molière, or an Italian company
commedia dell'arte,
or a Greek troupe Aristophanes, it is widely regarded as a novelty, lauded by critics but ignored by the general public. Only when classics put on English garb do they find popular favor. Such was the case of
Sly Fox,
based on Italian, Elizabethan, and German sources and reworked by Larry Gelbart,
Tartuffe
in the translation by Richard Wilbur, and the Seamus Heaney version of Sophocles'
Philoctetes.
For the enthusiasts of Yiddish Theater to expect any other fate was to indulge in fantasy.

Yet had they dug a little deeper, they would have found many reasons to rejoice. For if the Yiddish Theater barely had a pulse, its impact on American show business was profound and enduring. When Marlon Brando began filming
The Godfather,
the awed cast members could barely converse with him. Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall in particular were especially reverential. Producer Al Ruddy understood their attitude: “In a sense Marlon had created these guys.”

And Brando himself had been created by his teacher, Stella Adler, the daughter of a Yiddish Theater superstar. “If there wasn't the Yiddish Theater,” he once reflected, “there wouldn't have been Stella. And if there hadn't been Stella, there wouldn't have been all those actors who studied with her and changed the face of theater—and not only acting, but directing and writing.”

Among the Yiddish Theater's graduates and associates were actors Paul Muni, John Garfield, Zero Mostel, Walter Matthau, the acting teachers Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner, the playwrights Clifford Odets and Ben Hecht, the directors Harold Clurman and Sidney Lumet, and the stage designer Boris Aronson. The Yiddish Theater was their university, and when they left the ghetto and went out into
the world, they altered whatever they touched. Neither Broadway nor Hollywood has been the same since then.

IN
HASIDIC TALES
:
THE LATER MASTERS
, Martin Buber relates one of the classic stories: “Whenever the Jews were threatened with disaster, the Baal Shem Tov would go to a certain place in the forest, light a fire and say a special prayer. Always a miracle would occur, and the disaster be averted.

“In later times when disaster threatened, the Maggid of Mezritch, his disciple, would go to the same place in the forest and say, ‘Master of the Universe, I do not know how to light the fire, but I say the prayer.’ And again the disaster would be averted.

“Still later, his disciple, Moshe Leib of Sasov, would go to the same place in the forest and say, Ribono Sehl Olam, I do not know how to light the fire or say the prayer, but I know the place and that must suffice.’ And it always did.

“When Israel of Riszhyn needed intervention from heaven, he would say to God, ‘I no longer know the place, nor how to light the fire, nor how to say the prayer, but I can tell the story and that must suffice.’ And it did.”

DISTANT FROM ITS RELIGIOUS
underpinnings, bereft of its fire, without a permanent place, the story of the Yiddish Theater must suffice. We have no choice.