Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (5 page)

The gates of opportunity swing open again, and power of learning acquired at
cheder,
Hebrew school, is turned toward the other world— the real one—where for the first time Shlomo can be more than an obscure scholar in an unknown village.

THE SECOND INGREDIENT
is adaptability, as reflected in two old Jewish stories. In the first, a new flood covers the earth. After thirtyeight days and nights of rain, scientists forecast the end of the human race. A Catholic priest addresses his congregation: “My children, it is time to make our confessions and offer up our souls to God.” A Protestant sermonizer says: “Let us bow our heads together and recite the Lord's Prayer over and over again until the final annihilation.” A rabbi speaks to his people: “My children, we have forty-eight hours to learn how to breathe underwater.”

In the other, a rabbi visits Poland. Returning to Lithuania, he informs the congregation, “The Jews of that place are especially remarkable people. I saw a Jew who all day long was scheming how to get rich. I saw a Jew who's all the time waving a red flag and calling for revolution. I saw a Jew who was running after every woman. And I saw a Jew who was an ascetic and preached religion all the time.” A listener responds: “Why's so surprising? There are many Jews in Lithuania, all types.” “You don't understand,” says the rabbi. “It was the same Jew.”

For Hebrews of any age, social and governmental restrictions are a way of life. The trick is not to get around them but to use them. Are we forbidden to enter any other guild but the diamond cutters? Very well then, we'll learn the trade and dominate it. Are we kept from owning land? Then we'll move into the cities, seek livelihoods there and invigorate the culture. Are Christians not allowed to lend money? Then we will become the world's bankers. When
Haskalah
provides new opportunities we take whatever comes our way—law, medicine, finance, education, politics, it doesn't matter.

This pliability exacts a high price. For their efforts, Jews are called disloyal, usurers, cosmopolites, plotters. Since they have no way to win this age-old battle for unconditional acceptance, a vast collective neurosis settles in. Sigmund Freud detects it in himself and others; he
thinks it may be embedded in the genes. “Though we may admit for the memory-traces in our archaic inheritance we have so far no stronger proof than those memories evoked by analytical work,” he writes in
Moses and Monotheism,
“yet this proof seems convincing enough to postulate such a state of affairs.” It is an odd endorsement of Carl Jung's theories, which Freud so often opposes. Jung's monograph on analytical psychology posits a “collective unconscious” that constitutes “the residue of the life of the ancestors.” Whether the doctors are correct or not remains debatable to this day. But there is no arguing the psychology of apprehension among the world's Jewry, perhaps inherited, perhaps acquired in early childhood. If it is a source of unhappiness, it is also responsible for their social cohesion and their urge to make a place for themselves, however prohibitive the cost.

THE THIRD INGREDIENT
is humor. Just as the word “laughter” is buried in the word “slaughter,” so the tragedies of Jewish history hide a subversive wit. We know that even in Auschwitz jokes made the rounds; common sense tells us that a people, no matter how oppressed, will find moments of humor in the long day's journey. Many times the Bible instructs the Hebrews to take harps, trumpets, cymbals, and lyres, and make “a joyful noise unto the Lord in all the earth.” Surely that noise must have been accompanied by merriment. In the postbiblical era, there are many descriptions of Jewish celebrations accompanied by hilarity. And in the Middle Ages, a new Jewish occupation is born: the
badkhn,
Hebrew for jester. A sixteenth-century poem speaks of a merchant who “danced so merrily/with the beautiful maidens/that he became thirsty/he forgot all his cares/to the jesters he nodded/that they stop not too soon.” Regulations regarding the Jews of Hesse in 1690 prohibit “the custom in vogue to date of riding to meet the bridegroom—except for waiters and jesters.” The method of compensation has not varied from that time to this: a Jewish wedding song of the eighteenth century pleads, “Give also gifts today to the clowns and to the musicians.”

The roots of modern comedy lie in the Jewish past. “The merrymaker did not occupy a prominent social position,” notes historian Ezekiel Lifschutz. “He was feared on account of the rhymes which he freely utilized to his own purposes and frequently caused embarrassment.
People exploited his friendship for their personal advantage, they were amused by his apt parables, paraphrases and merry songs and then proceeded to censure him as a sinner.”

Comic stories, spread orally through the centuries, eventually catch Freud's attention. In a letter to his colleague William Fleiss in 1897, he writes, “Let me confess that I have recently made a collection of deeply significant Jewish jokes,” psychical productions that he finds analogous to dreams. Some of the most meaningful stories, he goes on, are those concerned with Jews hiding under layers of pretension: “The doctor, asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounces that the moment has not come, and suggests to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness strikes the ears of the two men: ‘
Ah, mondieu, queje suffre!
’ Her husband springs up, but the doctor signs for him to sit down: ‘It's nothing. Let's get on with the game!' A little later there are again sounds from the pregnant woman: ‘
Mein Gott, mein Gott was fur Schmerzen!
’ ‘Aren't you going in, Professor?' asks the Baron. ‘No, no, it's not time yet.’ At last there comes from next door an unmistakable cry of ‘
Oy vay!
’ The doctor throws down his cards and exclaims, ‘Now it's time.’”

Such tales are usually told by Jews in mixed company, and they tend to make gentiles uncomfortable. But that is their point—to discomfit the outsider. Somerset Maugham describes a relevant incident in “The Alien Corn.” A wealthy Jew, Fred Robenstein, mimics the accent and ghetto mannerisms of a pushcart peddler until his listeners are weak with laughter. But the listener cannot join in the amusement: “I was not quite sure of a sense of humor that made such cruel fun of his own race.”

Freud's disciple Theodor Reik explains that kind of uneasy comedy in a paper entitled
Jewish Wit.
In desperate times, “the Jew sharpens, so to speak, the dagger which he takes out of his enemy's hand, stabs himself, then returns it gallantly to the anti-Semite with the silent reproach: ‘Now see whether you can do as well.’” In less threatening situations, the humor acts “to bring relaxation in the ardor of battle with the seen and with the invisible enemy; to attract as well as repel him; and to conceal one's self. Jewish wit hides as much as it discloses. Like the seraph in the Temple of the Lord, it covers its face with two of its wings.”

THE FOURTH INGREDIENT
is Judaism's other language, Yiddish. The primary tongue of the Jews is Hebrew, the language of the Bible and of prayer, and therefore sanctified. Yiddish is the common speech of the ever mobile people. It begins as a kind of slang, stirring Old High German with backchat from the Western European ghettos. As the Jews are forced to the Middle Countries, then north and east, they pick up phrases from the Romance languages and Slavic tongues. Although Yiddish is written in phonetic Hebrew, it is pronounced with greater expression and a more musical cadence. In time the irony, spirit, and rhythms of this polyglot vernacular begin to shape Jewish culture.

Condensed folktales spring up. Not quite jokes, not quite anecdotes, they find a home in the wry, ironic attitude and rapid pulse of Yiddish:

• Two Jews decide to assassinate the czar. They bring sharp instruments and conceal themselves behind trees in a park where the Russian leader takes his daily stroll. Hours pass and the czar fails to appear. At sundown one of them worries: “I don't know what's wrong. I hope nothing happened to him.”
  

• One Jew sighs to another, “It would be best never to have been born.” His friend agrees: “True, but how many are that lucky? Maybe one in a hundred thousand.”
  

• Two Jews are sentenced to be executed by a firing squad. The captain offers Sol and Mendel blindfolds. Sol accepts. Mendel spits in the officer's face: “Keep your lousy blindfold!” Sol demurs: “Mendel, don't make trouble!”
  

• As a magnificent funeral procession passes by the
  shtetl
  gates an old man weeps. “You're a relative?” asks an astonished friend. “No.” “Then how come you're crying?” “That's why.”
  

In time a literature rises from the chatter-poems, romantic stories, moral fables. By the middle of the nineteenth century Yiddish has developed from a kind of enriched patois, claimed one poet, into “the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bears the marks of our expulsion from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the
generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.”

Not everyone agrees with this assessment—including some very prominent Jews. In his lavish
omnium gatherum, The Joys of Yiddish,
Leo Rosten notes that from the start purists derided Yiddish for its “bastard” origins, its “vulgar” idioms, its “hybrid” vocabulary. “Germans called it a ‘barbarous argot'; worse still, Hebraicists called it uncivilized cant.”

An intense battle gets under way. On one side are the pedants who want Hebrew to be the one and only Jewish language—and their unwitting allies, the assimilationists who want Jews to discard Yiddish in favor of demotic German, French, and the Slavic tongues.

Against them are the common people who have no intention of abandoning what they called their
mamaloshen—
mother tongue. A
badkhn
known as Sanye of Bialystok foretells the outcome of this language war by voting with his feet. A nineteenth-century account describes the jester as one who “possessed great gifts of mimicry and comedy. He carried with him a suitcase with false beards, various costumes, even women's costumes, and portrayed every role with mimicry and comic gesture like a true artist.” By the end of the century, however, as the Jews drained out of the Pale, Poland, and Lithuania, seeking the freedom of Western Europe and the New World, life became insupportable for professional comedians. “Once, early in the morning on a summer day I met Sanye coming from a wedding. He complained to me: ‘Brother, things are bad. There is no longer any room for me here.’ Six months later he left for America.”

Sanye is not alone.

THE FATHER

L
OOKING BACK IN OLD AGE
, Abraham Goldfaden came to recognize New York as Zion, the fulfillment of Jewish dreams. But it would not have seemed so back in Zhitomir. He was twenty-five when the United States finished its notorious Civil War. He had read about that conflict for nearly five years. Early on, the papers made much of the order from a General Ulysses S. Grant, who disliked Jewish peddlers catering to the Union soldiers: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department are hereby expelled from the department.” This dictum
was rescinded by Abe Lincoln, but look what happened: scarcely three years later the president was shot by a maniac, an actor. Who could tell what was in store for the Jews of America?

Goldfaden was content to stay put. On the one hand, Russia was not such a wonderful country for its Jewish residents. On the other hand, things were beginning to loosen up. The Enlightenment had brought big changes. There were now a few progressive Jewish academies, places where you could read not only the Torah and the Talmud, but also Western novels and plays. Abraham's parents sent him to one, and were delighted with the results. Their son had turned out to be intelligent, original, and funny—Abie the Jester, they called him. When he graduated, the young man shocked the neighborhood: he took a leading role in an amateur production. This was not a normal thing for a Jewish boy, and even his liberal parents cautioned against it. He went ahead anyway.

From the first rehearsal Abraham was aisle-struck. Performing exerted very little appeal—almost every member of the cast had more stage presence. But writing; that was different. He could see himself as the first Yiddish playwright. Maybe the first Yiddish composer. Early signs were encouraging: Abraham couldn't read a note, but he managed to pick out one-fingered tunes on a piano. Verse was written to accompany the melodies, and a student hired to write down the notes. (Another thirty years and a musically illiterate Jewish youth would do the same thing. Irving Berlin had genius, Goldfaden was to concede, but he was not the first of his kind.)

Abraham's songs caught on; they were published and played in Jewish neighborhoods. Royalties, however, amounted to pennies. Clearly, he needed some other way to make a living. Well dressed, cleanshaven, except for a carefully trimmed military mustache, the young man went out to meet his destiny.