Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (45 page)

The man's last moments were in keeping with all that went before. He refused to enter a complaint against man or God in the hospital, where patients are permitted such things. Bontche was buried in a pauper's grave with a little branch to mark it. The wind blew the stick over the next day, and the gravedigger's wife used it to stir a pot of potatoes.

The Prosecuting Angel admits defeat. He can find no way to keep this poor Jew from his heavenly reward. The other angels surround Bontche and dress him in a celestial robe. The Presiding Angel speaks to the man who suffered and kept quiet all his life.

He offers Bontche whatever his heart desires. Anything, everything in heaven is his for the asking. For everything within it is a reflection of his decency and forbearance. Bontche looks around, unbelieving.

In the post-Holocaust world of the New York theater, this modest drama had enormous resonance. It was as if the story of Bontche had somehow foretold the most recent tragedy of humble, unarmed Jews going to their deaths in a silence more profound than screams. Irving Howe pointed out that in “Bontche the Silent” the archetypal
kleyne mentshele
(little man) evokes from the prosecutor “a bitter laugh, as if shamed before the paltriness of most human desire.” The writer, who “does seem a little like Kafka—touches in this story on one of the major themes of modern literature, the radical, hopeless incommensurability
between morality and existence, the sense of a deep injustice at the heart of the universe which even the heavens cannot remedy.”

Thus far
The World of Sholem Aleichem
had represented the
shtetl
as comic turf and heartbreak house. But there was a third strand still to be examined: the Jewish insistence on social equality. “The High School,” the third one-acter, was Sholem Aleichem's alone.

The place is Russia, the central characters young student Moishe Katz and his parents, Hannah and Aaron. The father is a careworn businessman, the mother a striver who wants her son to enter a secular, government high school—“
Their
high school,” in Aaron's aggrieved view.

A quota permits only a fraction of Jewish candidates to enter an academy, and Moishe studies hard to outscore the gentile candidates. To ensure his son's success, Aaron bribes the local principal. Having taken the payoff under the table, the principal then decrees that he already has enough Jews. There is no redress. The only institution willing to accept a Hebrew is many miles from home. His blood up, Aaron relocates at great personal cost, selling the business at a loss—only to learn that Moishe and his gentile classmate Kholyava are truants. But the boy offers an explanation. When he arrived at school he saw scores of his fellow students on strike, carrying a sign as they marched: no more quotas. And their leader was a Christian. Overjoyed, Hannah embraces Moishe. Aaron refuses to share in the family's sudden enthusiasm. He knows very well what the gentile boy said—a bunch of dangerous slogans—The world is altering. A new day dawns before us. No more ghettos. No quotas. No pogroms. Education will be free in this brave new world. There will be no underdogs, no undercats, no rich, no poor, only equals.

Hannah turns on him. Did he like the quotas? Did he enjoy pulling up roots, wandering the country until they found a school? Was it a pleasure, begging,
schmeering
the principal? Deep down doesn't he believe that school should be for all people, regardless of their circumstances and beliefs? The boys are at least trying to find an answer.
What is the answer that Aaron can give his son? More futile shouts and empty gestures?

To do a complete turnaround without benefit of words seemed impossible at first—the performer was being asked to show in face and posture what the playwright had failed to put into words. But Carnovsky proved to be more than equal to the task, not least because the message was one of social agitation. He and the other blacklistees had identified with Aaron from the first rehearsal. To them, the Yiddish Theater had come full circle, from the early days of tentative pushing against the oppressions of the Romanovs, to the full-throated chorus of Clifford Odets's first play,
Waiting for Lefty—
“Put fruit trees where our ashes are! Strike! Strike! Strike!”—to this earnest and desperate revival of classic tales spoken in English but
felt
in Yiddish.

SPEAKING ABOUT HER FATHER
in the 1940s, Svetlana Stalin remembered that “He never liked Jews, though he wasn't yet as blatant about expressing his hatred for them as he was after the war.” What was once an aversion became a paranoia and loathing. In the immediate postwar period Stalin professed support for a Jewish state because he believed it would rid Russia of its Hebrews, and because it would reduce British influence in the Middle East. At the same time, he directed the secret police to begin an undeclared campaign against the
Jews. It was to culminate in the execution of thirteen Yiddish writers, each shot in the head on the night of August 12, 1952.

They had been arrested for spying for the United States, an absurd charge, but one that went unchallenged by such pro-Soviet Americans as Paul Robeson and Howard Fast. It is doubtful that any protest could have forestalled the fate of the victims, but the silence of the American left bolstered Stalin's confidence. The second prong of his pogrom occurred the next year when a “Doctors' Plot”—purported to be a ring of physicians bent on killing the Russian leader—was uncovered.

The extension of Hitler's genocide had begun on a January night in 1948. Only three months before, Shlomo Mikhoels had proclaimed, “Jews feel more physically secure in the Soviet Union than in any other country in the world.” He had been an avid fund-raiser and the recipient of many medals and awards, including the coveted Order of Lenin. All this made the Yiddish actor/director too famous to criticize for “cosmopolitanism”—Stalin's code word for any specifically Jewish activity. So Mikhoels could not be dealt with in the usual manner.

He was invited to Minsk, ostensibly to meet some important theater people. Upon arrival thugs set upon him. The beating, as Stalin had ordered, was fatal. Mikhoels's body was then run over by a truck and left in a side street, to make his death appear to be an automobile accident. The physiologist who had embalmed Lenin was promptly dispatched to the scene of the crime. He removed all evidence of the brutality. A state funeral followed.

The truth did not emerge until well after Stalin's death in 1953. It was then that Joseph Buloff, who had been put down by Mikhoels on the stage of the Polo Grounds, enjoyed his moment of schadenfreude. The great Yiddish personality “was taken from his hotel, beaten to death and left in the snow,” wrote the actor in his memoirs.

“Thus perished Mikhoels, slain by the hand he had blessed.”

Thus also perished the Russian Yiddish Theater. Now only America played host to Jewish acting companies, and even without interference from Moscow, every one of them was in trouble.

NOW HE'S EXORCISING
DYBBUKS

W
E HAVE BEEN IN SACKCLOTH
for too long, Maurice Schwartz told his colleagues. He was going to produce
The Shepherd King,
an epic with huge scenes and long speeches in the old Second Avenue style. What's more, he intended to go Broadway one better, turning the play into a musical. Who better for that than Sholem Secunda? The composer was invited to Schwartz's 8th Street apartment, along with Herman Yablokoff, who had produced a profitable
“Yinglish” pageant,
Uncle Sam in Israel.
In the impresario's opinion, this was a triumvirate that couldn't lose.

He read them the play. “After Schwartz finished,” Yablokoff was to remember, “we didn't have the heart to tell him what we really thought. Instead, we told him, ‘Well, it's only a first draft, you'll work on it.’” Those were, and remain, some of the most lethal words in show business. The two men left 8th Street and drove uptown in silence. The composer and the producer went ahead with
The Shepherd King
anyway.

Euphoric and dreamy, Schwartz courted the press. “This is our renaissance,” he told a reporter. “For this I gave thirty-one years of life, thirty-one years of talent. This is our most important attempt.” His rich bass hesitated for dramatic effect. “Maybe our last attempt. If this does not work then we know where we stand.” He brightened. “But I know we are on the way back to those wonderful days.”

He spoke about plans to have an extended season, bolstered by a long list of patrons, including 25,000 Yiddish-speaking union members and their families. Thousands would subscribe to the Yiddish Art Theater at fees ranging from $5 to $25 a year. Finances would no longer be a concern. Art would be the only subject on the agenda. There were some fifty classic plays in the repertory just waiting to be revived. Schwartz was not worried that they would be presented in Yiddish. “After all,” he reminded his listener, “the Jewish people have somehow managed to keep alive their good literature and their culture. And for those who don't speak Jewish, I don't believe language is a barrier to real art.”

To back up this declaration, Yablokoff placed an article in the Yiddish papers, praising Schwartz for his new community theater. “Now, with the opening of
The Shepherd King,
” he affirmed, “the curtain rises again on the first chapter of the resurrected Yiddish Art Theater in America. The second chapter must be written by the Jewish community itself with its financial support of this cultural institution. Who is the Jewish community? You are!”

On opening night Yablokoff found himself maligned before the curtain had risen on act one. A generation later, he bitterly recalled the grumbles: “Why is so-and-so and his missus seated up front, while I and my wife are stuck in the back? Does he rate more prestige than I, in my community-run theater?” After the first act, he knew the worst. “Several dramatists eyed me with scorn, gloating as they milled in the lobby. I read in their sarcastic glances, ‘Our dear Mr. Schwartz didn't want to produce my play? Fine! Now you're stuck with a turkey!’”

The Shepherd King
was worse than they wished. The
Times
critic singled out one miseen-scè¨ne for special condemnation, writing that it “wallowed in dialogue that was somewhere between Italian and soap opera.” Sholem Secunda was let off the hook; he had “shaped an intelligent, sympathetic score.” And the grudging conclusion noted that “a number of actors did the best they could.” But their best was insufficient. Schwartz shut down the production and immediately mounted a new one, as if to erase a bad memory. His revival of
The Brothers Ashkenazi
received glowing reviews. They were too late. Burdened with debt, surrounded by indifference or outright hostility, the theater closed “for repairs.” It would not reopen.