Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (7 page)

THE FIRST SON

A
FTER THE RUSSIAN TRIUMPH
, a Jewish soldier returned to his home in the port city of Odessa. The angular, highstrung veteran spent his days as a newspaper distributor and his nights at the town's major theater, smitten with an actress. Then again, Jacob Adler was always beguiled by one female or another. He was known in nearly every café, wine cellar, and bordello in Odessa. “And yet,” his memoirs note with melodramatic zest, “there was an emptiness. Something was lacking. I was restless, ill at ease, blindly seeking a place where my soul could find peace.”

One day as he sat in the paper's editorial offices, Jacob's eye was caught by a story about the Yiddish Theater in Bucharest. “My heart began to beat fast,” he recalled; “the blood rushed to my head and I sprang to my feet. I looked again. No, I have not dreamed it. Yiddish Theater! The language is Yiddish, the plays Yiddish, the actors Yiddish. The troupe is under the directorship of the poet Abraham Goldfaden. Gone, my vague longings, my melancholia and malaise! I had a goal, a purpose in life. I was determined to bring the Yiddish Theater to Odessa!” There is no more pregnant sentence in the memoirs of any Yiddish actor. In the years to come, the childless Goldfaden was to have three spiritual sons, and Jacob Adler was to be the greatest of them.

For more than a year Jacob sent the troupe letters full of promises, extolling his fellow Jews, who were “starved” for Yiddish theater. When the war ended, and the audiences trickled back from Romania, two Goldfaden performers sent the word Jacob had been praying for. They were on the way to Odessa. Adler waited for them at the station. As they stepped from the car he was not sure whether to laugh or cry. The hams were identical: “Rosenberg …not a hair on his face—a regular priest! Spivakovsky was clean-shaven. The two of them were as alike as two drops of water, both in black-winged capes, high hats, dangling pince-nez, gloves, spats, lacquered boots—a pair of barons!”

At the meeting Rosenberg boomed on about appearances before the king and queen of Romania. “Look at Spivakovsky,” he boomed; “all Romania rings with his name.” Jacob suspected that boast, like the finery, was all for show. His suspicions were confirmed when the two men asked for a loan. They were down to their last rubles. But not all was lost. Rosenberg turned out to be a practiced confidence man; Spivakovsky, who came from a prominent family, knew many of the local businessmen. Within a few weeks the pair had collected enough money for a first performance. Assembling capable players would be a more complicated matter.

The best candidates Jacob could find were folksingers, bearded, untutored Jews who had never played anything but themselves. He brought them before Rosenberg. The actor erupted: “You look like chimney sweeps, not actors! I need human beings. Do you understand? Go make yourself into human beings!” Excited by the possibility of Yiddish Theater, these amateurs did something no adult male in their families had ever done before. They shaved. Instead of short peasant
coats, heavy pants, and high boots, they assumed frock coats with narrow trousers, white shirts, black ties, silk hats.

Opening night would take place at a restaurant, where rehearsals began in early June. Passersby peeked in the open windows, gawked at the players, and asked for a song or two. Rosenberg turned on them: “We are no wine cellar entertainers, no folksingers and clowns. You will have to pay money to see us. We are actors—artists!” And pay they did: 5 rubles for the cheap seats, 10 for places down front.

Two brief sketches began the evening. They were followed by
Recruits,
starring Spivakovsky as the clueless soldier-in-training. Jacob recalled the openers: “The usual business of love. The parents are against the marriage. The lovers decide to elope. The matchmaker gives away their secret. Tears—the parents give their blessing—a song, a dance, the curtain falls.” Those appetizers went well, and the entrée overwhelmed the spectators. Curtain calls were greeted with ovations. Everyone agreed that Rosenberg had not exaggerated; these Yiddish speakers were indeed actors—artists, just like the gentile ones in Moscow.

Several weeks later the group performed at a bigger venue—a real theater. There they did a string of Goldfaden comedies, including
Shmendrik
and
Breindele Cossack,
in which Jacob Adler made his first stage appearance playing a young soldier. All seemed well; the troupe was moving from strength to strength. Then, abruptly, bad news arrived. Goldfaden was on his way to Russia. Jacob made a dire forecast: the Master will have all the great stars in his company. He will make us look like the amateurs we are. He will use up all the oxygen in Odessa. We must get out of town before he arrives. The others sighed like actors and obeyed like employees. The company booked passage for the provinces.

But Rosenberg, ever the confidence man, was not content to surrender all that he had won. An idea came to him as they made ready to leave. “They have a Goldfaden?” he told his colleagues. “We
also
have a Goldfaden.” It happened that Abraham Goldfaden's brother Naphtali lived in the outskirts of Odessa. He was a watchmaker, but what of that? Rosenberg dropped in, dangled rubles, and hired him as a nonacting member of the troupe. Now they, too, could call themselves “The Goldfaden Company.”

Theoretically, this should have given Russian Jews twice the opportunity to see well-done comedy and drama. In fact neither company
was much good. Goldfaden's leading actor was as deaf as a post, “catching cues as a dog catches fleas,” says Jacob's memoir. As for his own troupe, the prompter was missing two front teeth, so that when he supplied a line the words were accompanied by unplanned whistles and hisses. It hardly mattered. The Russian Jews
were
starved for theater, and both organizations played to full houses. After a triumphal tour of the major cities, Abraham Goldfaden crossed the Romanian border and charged into Bucharest. As he predicted, the city's Jewish population treated him as a celebrity. Now that the Father had exited Russia, Jacob's pseudo-Goldfaden company had no competition. They confidently booked a theater in Kishinev, where they alternated with a czarist Russian company on tour from Moscow.

At that venue Adler got his first glimpse of big-time backstage life: “The leading tragedian was a great actor but a great drunkard. One night, watching in the wings, I saw him so loaded he could barely be understood when he spoke. Nevertheless, he put on his makeup without even looking in the mirror. He played magnificently, made a marvelous exit, then fell, weeping, into the stage manager's arms, beat his breast, swore he would never drink again, and made his way with a bowed head to his dressing room. The stage manager told me the same scene took place every night.”

Jacob also got his first glimpse of a man he would see a great deal in another country, at another time. An eighteen-year-old peddler named David Kessler had fallen in love with the Yiddish Theater. Against the wishes of his deeply observant family he contrived to meet Adler and persuaded him to arrange an audition. Even though some of the actors mocked the bumpkin's manner and delivery, Jacob thought he spotted talent and offered Kessler a job. He might as well have asked for a conversion to Greek Orthodoxy; the senior Kesslers raised such a storm that David backed off. He would not leave home for another two years, when a traveling group of Yiddish players passed through Kishinev. When they departed, he left with them to become, in time, Goldfaden's spiritual third son. David's shocked parents went into mourning. As far as they were concerned, their defiant boy was dead.

IN DANNENBERG
the curtain rose on Jacob's troupe—and just as swiftly rang down. The date was February 28, 1881, and the buzz backstage was that something had happened outside, a street fight perhaps, or an explosion. A Russian officer took the stage and made an announcement that drained the blood from everyone's face: Czar Alexander II had just been murdered. An immediate question rang out among the actors and the ticket-holders. Were the assassins Jews?

Within weeks all the plotters were rounded up. Several of them confessed and named their fellow conspirators, hoping to save themselves from the gallows. It happened that all the activists were of Christian background; during the planning stages, however, they had stayed at the house of a young Jewish woman. The Russian government, fearful of radical activities and badly in need of a scapegoat, used that connection to build a case against the Hebrews. They were portrayed as people whose loyalties were suspect, whose rites and temples, whose very language separated them from the
real
Russians.

With statistics to back him up, Irving Howe characterizes 1881 as “a turning point in the history of the Jews as decisive as that of 70 a.d., when Titus's legions burned the Temple at Jerusalem, or 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the expulsion from Spain.” Up until that year, New York Jewry was largely composed of a few thousand Ashkenazis from Germany and a smaller number of Sephardics from Spain and Portugal. They had prospered in the New World, founding charitable organizations, building the world's largest synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, as well as a major Manhattan hospital, Mount Sinai. Anti-Semitic incidents were few, and tended to be snobbish rather than violent (in the novel
Redburn,
for example, Herman Melville describes a New York City Jew as “a curly-headed little man with a dark oily face, and a hooked nose, like the pictures of Judas Iscariot”).

But from 1881 on, wave upon wave of Hebrews fled Eastern Europe
and sailed for the United States. It made no difference that another American president, James Garfield, had just been shot to death. The carnage of war and assassination was now commonplace to Russian Jews; notions of wild Indians and criminal gangs no longer served to intimidate. They had seen worse, and there were more horrors to come.

This mass exodus, some twenty million souls when the final tally was in, was prompted by a series of pogroms—the Russian term for devastations—sponsored by czarist officials. Among the incidents were house burnings, beatings, theft, massacres of men, women, and children. The violence culminated in the May Laws of 1882, restricting Jews from owning land, practicing a profession or craft, or attending schools and universities. The decrees immediately altered the villages and cities of Imperial Russia. Anti-Semitism had been granted official sanction and “spontaneous” riots broke out in carefully selected cities. The Yiddish troupes, fragmented and jittery, scattered in the aftermath of Alexander's murder, waiting for the ax to fall. On August 7 of the following year, it did. A decree was nailed up in every town square. Henceforth, it said, Yiddish Theater was forbidden throughout the land.

Jacob, now married and the father of a young girl, spoke for the actors, designers, directors, and hangers-on. “There was no way around the ukase. It was steel and iron—the law. Nothing remained then but to leave Russia entirely. But where were we to go?” Rosenberg stayed behind in Russia; he saw himself as a crafty loner whose silver tongue and quick hands could get him through any conditions. The others, including Spivakovsky, abandoned theater for other jobs, or toured as street entertainers. To get around the authorities, they called their presentations “German concerts.”

Jacob refused to follow their lead. He informed the few remaining members of his company that there was “one piece of light still visible above the flood. London.” Privately he had doubts: “Would we survive there? Would Yiddish Theater be possible? Could we play, earn our bread?” There was only one way to find out, and on a cold November day he and his fellow émigrés sailed off to England with little more than the clothes on their backs and the costumes in their trunks.

Aside from a restaurant owner who could feed them for a night or two, Adler knew the name of only one other Englishman. Happily, he was Jacob's distant cousin, Rabbi Nissim Hillel Adler, one of the most influential Jews in the city. The spiritual leader of London's Jewry
granted an audience. The clergyman looked down his nose at the actor. Adler remembered that “the very twist of his mouth as he pronounced the word ‘Yiddish' told me our beloved language had no place in his heart. And I had come to spread this ‘jargon' further, popularize it still more? Worst of all, to do so in a theatre where, God forbid, strangers might come and jeer?”

Faced with such a firm refusal, Jacob had no choice; he put ads in the Jewish papers, asking for financial aid. Some businessmen kicked in enough for several bare-bones productions. He paused, uncertain of how to proceed. The Goldfaden repertoire had always made him uncomfortable—too many bromides, too many fools, too many crowdpleasing numbers at the expense of character. He wanted to play complex, credible figures, men like himself who spoke from the heart without breaking into song. Yet no one had dared to produce really serious Yiddish Theater, and it could very well be that there was no audience for such dramas. Jacob's ambition had a poignance about it; within him was an uneasy mix of Jewish tradition and
Haskalah
freedom. He knew that the conflict would either tear him apart or help him to bring a new intelligence and art to his chosen profession.