Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (51 page)

FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
:
Yiddish Vaudeville on the Lower East Side; the Moorish-style Irving Place Theater “uptown” at 15th Street; Jacob P. Adler's
Grand Theater, at the Bowery and Grand Street; Max Reinhardt's striking production of
At the Gate
for the communist ARTEF company

ABOVE
: Groyser Kundes
(The Big Stick), a comic periodical, depicts a mannerly Broadway audience—in contrast to the crowd at a Yiddish Theater production, who yell, hiss, and read newspapers during the onstage drama.

BELOW
:
The Orchard Street Market ca. 1898, when an influx of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe eventually made the Lower East side more crowded than Calcutta

ABOVE
:
In 1909 Boris Thomashefsky's Arch Street Theatre Company in Philadelphia outspent and outperformed productions in New York and Europe.

BELOW
:
From a 1916 issue of
Groyser Kundes
:
“If Shakespeare Had to Sell a Play Today” shows the Bard being rejected by Kessler and Adler, as well as by the impresarios Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky.

Copyright © 2006 by Stefan Kanfer

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Kanfer, Stefan.

Stardust lost: the triumph, tragedy, and
mishugas
of the Yiddish theater in America /
by Stefan Kanfer.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Theater, Yiddish—United States—History. I. Title.

PN3035.K36 2006

792.089′924073—dc22

20060410374

Author photograph
©
Andrew Castle

eISBN: 978-0-307-54747-7

www.vintagebooks.com

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