New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway

New York’s Yiddish Theater

New York’s Yiddish Theater

From the Bowery to Broadway

Edited by Edna Nahshon

Featuring Images from the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Contents

SUSAN HENSHAW JONES

Director’s Foreword

EDNA NAHSHON

Overture: From the Bowery to Broadway

ACT

1

HASIA DINER

Yiddish New York

ACT

2

NAHMHA SANDROW

Popular Yiddish Theater: Music, Melodrama, and Operetta

ACT

3

BARBARA HENRY

Jacob Gordin: The Great Reformer

ACT

4

Pathbreakers and Superstars

Jacob P. Adler and the Formation of a Theatrical Dynasty

By Edna Nahshon

Boris Thomashefsky: Matinee Idol of the Yiddish Stage

By Stefanie Halpern

Molly Picon: Darling of Second Avenue

By Joshua S. Walden

Intermission

ACT

5

EDNA NAHSHON

Maurice Schwartz and the Yiddish Art Theater Movement

ACT

6

EDNA NAHSHON

Yiddish Political Theater: The Artef

ACT

7

ARNOLD ARONSON

Yiddish Theater and the Transformation of American Design

ACT

8

EDDY PORTNOY

Modicut: The Yiddish Puppet Theater of Yosl Cutler and Zuni Maud

ACT

9

Yiddish Vaudeville

Entertaining the Crowd

By Edna Nahshon

Early Yiddish Vaudeville in New York City

By Judith Thissen

ACT

10

EDNA NAHSHON

Borscht Belt Entertainment

ACT

11

ALISA SOLOMON

Tevye’s Travels: From Yiddish Everyman to American Icon

FINALE: A GALLERY OF STARS OF THE AMERICAN YIDDISH STAGE

By Stefanie Halpern and Edna Nahshon

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ENDNOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway

Star from Second Avenue’s Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame, 2015.

Listed on this star are actors Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalich.

Exhibition Sponsors:

Puffin Foundation

David Berg Foundation

Righteous Persons Foundation

Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust

Lucius N. Littauer Foundation

Atran Foundation

Additional Support:

Broad Art Foundation

Charles and Mildred Schnurmacher Foundation

Suzanne Davis & Rolf Ohlhausen

Mr. and Mrs. David Levine

Michael and Tatiana Reiff

Larry Simon

Sy Syms Foundation

Lee Gelber

Bernard W. Nussbaum Family Foundation

Deborah and Peter Wexler

Co–presenters:

National Yiddish Book Center

National Yiddish Theater–Folksbiene

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Director’s Foreword

From the late 19th to the mid–20th century, a thriving Yiddish theater culture blossomed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Second Avenue became a Yiddish Broadway, where over 1.5 million first–and second–generation Eastern–European Jewish immigrants came to celebrate their culture and to learn about urban life in the city. They did so via cutting–edge dramas, operettas, comedies, musical comedies, and avant–garde political and art theater.

But New York’s Yiddish theater’s influence was felt way beyond the Lower East Side, as it paved the way for many Yiddish theater directors, designers, and performers to cross over and find success in the mainstream on New York stages and in Hollywood. Moreover, it forged a New York–style humor and Yiddish–isms that made their way into the American comedy vernacular via the Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains, where vaudevillians and comedians from Danny Kaye to Sid Caesar to Jerry Lewis launched their showbiz careers.

So, why New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway in both book and exhibition form at the Museum of the City of New York? Because it has all to do with New York’s art and culture and because the City Museum’s holdings include a splendid Yiddish Theater collection comprised of posters, prints, drawings, costumes, and many other artifacts. It was David Chack, president of the Association for Jewish Theatre, who urged us to take on this important topic, and who generously provided guidance along the way.

But the group who made this project a reality is our funders, and I thank each and every one of them. A lead gift came from the Puffin Foundation, and I remain grateful to Gladys and Perry Rosenstein for their years of support at the City Museum. And I salute Executive Vice President of External Affairs Susan Madden for corralling the support needed for this ambitious undertaking.

Finally, our co–presenters deserve our thanks—not only for what they enabled us to borrow for the exhibition but also for the advice and support over the several years it has taken to complete this project. They are the National Yiddish Book Center, the National Yiddish Theater–Folksbiene, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Both the book and the exhibition have been skillfully realized by Dr. Edna Nahshon, who is a professor of Jewish theater and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She was ably supported by Sarah Henry, the Museum’s deputy director and chief curator; Autumn Nyiri, manager of curatorial affairs; Becky Laughner, curatorial associate; and Stefanie Halpern. Morgen Stevens-Garmon, theater archivist, helped to navigate the City Museum’s Yiddish Theater collection, as did Phyllis Magidson, curator of costumes and textiles. It was a magnificent team effort. I thank the many institutions and individuals who lent artifacts and images to bring the project to life. The design of the book and the exhibition have been undertaken with great panache by Pure+Applied.

All told, this book and exhibition will appeal to fans of all theater, as well as to those who love New York City and its fascinating artistic history. New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway illustrates the rich story of Yiddish theater in the city and explores the ways in which the world of Second Avenue in the early to mid–20th century has influenced the American theatrical experience of today.

L’Chaim!

Susan Henshaw Jones

Ronay Menschel Director

OVERTURE

From the Bowery to Broadway

Edna Nahshon

February, 1901. The play at the 2,500–seat People’s Theatre at 201 Bowery was Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear, starring Jacob P. Adler in the title role he had originated nine years earlier. As spectators flocked in, they faced a splendid curtain displaying a grand rendition—almost the size of the proscenium opening—of Moses atop Mount Sinai presenting the Ten Commandments to the Children of Israel, their multitudes stretching into the distance.¹ This depiction of the quintessential moment when Jews became a distinct people with an ethical and religious code redefined the generic interior of the People’s Theatre as a decidedly Jewish space, one that reflected the cultural and religious heritage that audience, performers, and staged material shared. Grounded in the Exodus narrative, the curtain evoked collective and personal memories of dislocation and an arduous journey from oppression to freedom, an experience the newly arrived Yiddish–speaking immigrants shared with their biblical ancestors. It also implicitly conveyed the lofty aspirations of the serious Yiddish stage to serve as educator and guide for the Jewish immigrant masses in America, where the religious hegemony of Eastern Europe no longer held sway.

Writing in 1968, Harold Clurman noted that, between 1888 and the early 1920s, when immigration had ground to a virtual halt, the Yiddish theater more than the lodge or the synagogue, served as the meeting place and forum of the Jewish community in America.² Clurman (1901–1990), a leading theater director and critic, a founder of the Group Theatre, and a devotee of the Yiddish stage, was not engaging in hyperbolized nostalgia. In its day, New York’s Yiddish theater offered its public—many of them young men and women navigating their way in a new land—a decidedly Jewish lens for looking at such key issues as acculturation, labor relations, women’s rights, intergenerational conflicts, and personal relationships. It also represented a sanctuary where one could luxuriate in memories of the old country—the home, family, and community left behind. And where but in the Yiddish theater could these new New Yorkers feel their hearts clench with emotion upon hearing Anshel Schorr and Sholom Secunda’s 1915 song A Heym! A Heym! (Homeward! Homeward!), the shattering outcry of a lonely greenhorn who feels like a lost bird pining for its nest. A fine example of the theater’s impact could be seen on an early morning in 1892, immediately after the premiere of The Jewish King Lear, when a very long line of young men and women formed in front of the Jewish bank on Delancey Street. Stirred by the theatrical event of the previous night, they had queued up to send money back to their parents in the Old Country.³

Interior of the former Yiddish Art Theatre (today the Village East Cinema), at 181–189 Second Avenue, 2015.

The ornate, Moorish–style auditorium boasts a unique ceiling; a double–tiered, gold–leaf chandelier hangs from the center of a shallow dome within which is set a Star of David. In 1993, the auditorium and other interior spaces were officially designated by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in recognition of the theater’s historical and aesthetic significance.

Historian Moses Rischin estimates that in 1900 alone, when New York City’s Jewish population had reached 580,000, the three local Yiddish theaters, the People’s, the Windsor, and the Thalia (all located on the Bowery) presented 1,100 performances, selling some two million tickets.⁴ Noting this extraordinary popularity in 1902, the Jewish Messenger explained to its uptown readers, The East Side has but one chief amusement, and that is the theatre. Instead of attending prize–fights, football games, dog shows, and automobile races, it centers its interest, spends its money, and flocks in great numbers to the People’s Theatre, the Thalia Theatre, or the Windsor’s Theatre. It loves their plays, admires their actors, and sings their music.⁵

The stars of the Yiddish theater were the royalty of an otherwise drab Lower East Side. During its formative years, enthusiastic young patriotn (fanatical fans of a particular star) fought over the merits of their respective idols, occasionally engaging in fisticuffs. The actors’ lifestyles, the clothes they wore, and their romantic affairs were closely followed by an adoring public. Yet these stage actors were not fabricated personae. They were familiar faces who shared the same roots, experiences, and ethnic commitments as their more plebeian admirers, and they never detached themselves from their community and its concerns. When a star of the Yiddish theater succeeded on Broadway, the triumph was seen as being shared with every ghetto Jew. When some returned to the Yiddish stage after failing in the English–speaking world, their faithful public embraced them with welcoming arms. When they were sick or down on their luck, special benefit performances were arranged in order to provide financial support. The enormous crowds that came to pay their respects when a popular actor passed away revealed the community’s emotional bond with the great performers who had brought joy and laughter and passion into their lives. When Jacob P. Adler died in 1926 at the age of 71, well over 50,000 mourners packed every square inch of the Bowery pavement as the cortege moved past the Yiddish theaters en route to Mount Carmel cemetery.⁶

Seen within a larger context, The Jewish King Lear, a play about Jewish life in Russia that was written and first produced in New York, illuminates the relationship of Jewish immigrants both to their European past and to their new surroundings: their keenness to engage in a conversation with America and to incorporate icons of Anglo culture while still preserving and cultivating a distinct ethnic subculture. In fact, the theater often served as mediator between the ghetto and American life and culture. Audiences of New York’s early Yiddish stage loved plays about sensational national and world events, such as Marie Barberi notorious murder trial, the Johnstown Flood, or the sinking of the Titanic, and adaptations of popular American works like Trilby and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Their hunger for exposure to the wider culture is also reflected in the popularity of Shakespearean productions in Yiddish, beginning in 1893 with Moyshe Zeifert’s adaptations of Othello and Hamlet, staged respectively at the Windsor Theatre and its rival, the Thalia Theatre. The audience clearly preferred Judaized versions over straight Yiddish translations of Shakespeare’s work, much to the chagrin of the Jewish literary intelligentsia, who scoffed at the adaptations as corrupt and foolish.

Yiddish theater audience, drawing by Jacob Epstein for Hutchins Hapgood’s book The Spirit of the Ghetto, 1902.

The use of the term ghetto to mean a homogenous urban enclave with its own subculture was introduced by Anglo–Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in his best–selling novel Children of the Ghetto (1892). It was quickly incorporated into the titles of other works on the life and culture of Yiddish–speaking immigrants. Hapgood’s work must be seen within the context of the public’s interest in Jews, primarily triggered by the massive immigration from eastern Europe, as well as by hair–raising reports of Russian pogroms, shockwaves of the Dreyfus Affair, and a measure of philo–Semitic sentiments triggered by progressive ideals and religious interest in the Jewish origins of Christianity.

The Grand Theatre presents Jacob P. Adler in The Broken Hearts by Zalmen Libin.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1903.

Thalia Theatre and Atlantic Garden, engraving, 1912.

The theater opened on the Bowery in 1826 as the New York Theatre, changed names several times, and was renamed the Thalia in 1879. It functioned as a Yiddish theater from 1891–1911. In 1929, the building was destroyed by a fire.

Spectators in front of the Grand Theatre.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1905.

The marquee announces Jacob P. Adler in The Jewish King Lear.

It did not take long for America to take notice of the booming Lower East Side theatrical scene. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, such New York–based writers as Hutchins Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens were fascinated by the downtown Yiddish theater. They admired the exuberance of the Yiddish stage, the forceful expressiveness of its actors, the intensity of audience response, and the palatable connection between stage and auditorium. In 1903, reviewing a Yiddishized version of Romeo and Juliet by Nakhum Racov, John Corbin of The New York Times contrasted the blandness of Shakespeare productions on the American stage with their vibrant Yiddish paraphrases and posited rhetorically, Given a devitalized Shakespeare plus an anemic drama on the one hand and an adapted Shakespeare plus a vital drama on the other, which would a wise man choose?⁷

English–language critics may have poked good–natured fun at the informalities of the immigrant audience, many of whom had not been to the theater before arriving in America, and whose folksy conduct, especially in the early years, included munching on food, popping soda bottles, talking among themselves, and treating the theatrical gathering as an occasion for socializing. But uptown visitors also recognized the seriousness and rapt attention the immigrant audience accorded the stage. Writing in 1910, the New York Dramatic Mirror exclaimed, You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Not a soul in the audience stirred. It hardly breathed. There was no coughing, no clearing of throats. The little children kept their eyes riveted on the stage and listened as intently as their elders.⁸

Poster for a September 3, 1897, performance of Moyshe Horowitz’s King Solomon at the Thalia Theatre, with first–rate artists Regina Praeger, Bertha Kalich, Dina Fineman, David Kessler, Bernstein, and Heine. At the bottom, two performances for Saturday, September 4, are advertised: a matinee of Bar Kokhba starring Regina Praeger and an evening performance of Kol Nidre starring Bertha Kalich.

It is noteworthy that the three theaters that served Yiddish audiences in 1900 had storied histories of catering to earlier immigrant groups, particularly Germans and Irish. Their conversion into Yiddish houses points to the layered history of the Bowery’s entertainment venues and to the commercial and creative exchange among ethnic cultures, at least at the professional level. At times, economic necessities encouraged interethnic collaboration. From June 1 to June 15, 1902, for example, Italian–American actor Antonio Maiori performed an Italian–language repertoire at the normally Yiddish–language Windsor Theatre, with costumes loaned by Jacob P. Adler, who held the lease on the theater. In the spring of 1905, Maiori leased another Yiddish house, the People’s Theatre, where he staged a series of Shakespearean productions, including his own interpretation of Shylock, a role that had already earned Adler the admiration of New York’s theatrical world. Maiori capitalized on this association, and shortly before his own opening of The Merchant of Venice he took the confrontational step of sending a letter to The Times in which he extolled his own portrayal of Shylock and rejected Adler’s outright as all wrong. But there was also a more benevolent aspect to interethnic theatrical relations. In 1903, when the harrowing news of the Kishinev pogrom in Russia reached New York, the actors of the city’s Chinese theater on Doyers Street put up three benefit performances to aid the victims.⁹ The bond between Jews and Chinese as persecuted minorities was the key theme evoked by speakers from both communities.

The relationship between the Yiddish and German stages in New York is particularly interesting: first, because the linguistic affinity between the two languages greatly facilitated intercommunication and, second, because of the significant presence of Jews in New York’s German theater, both as artists and spectators. German–language theater preceded Yiddish performance by half a century in the city, and by the late 1800s, newly arrived Yiddish thespians were able to negotiate and contract with local German theater people, take over leases of theatrical properties, and even import some of the German actors—not all of them Jewish—onto the Yiddish stage. The first notable crossover was the much admired classical tragedian Morris (Moritz) Morrison (?1855–1917), a Romanian–born Jew who began his acting career in Germany in 1878 and came to America by the late 1880s. He was hired by Yiddish–speaking actor–manager Boris Thomashefsky and performed his classical repertoire in German while the rest of the cast spoke Yiddish. Around 1900, Morrison was also the first actor to introduce un–adapted Shakespeare originals to the Yiddish stage, playing Othello and Hamlet.¹⁰ Another recruit from the German stage was Rudolph Schildkraut (1862–1930), a Jewish actor who had developed a notable career in Germany and had been a leading actor at the Max Reinhardt–led Deutches Theater in Berlin. He began his American career at the German–speaking Irving Place Theatre in 1911, but soon crossed over to the Yiddish stage when he was offered a highly lucrative contract by Thomashefsky, and switched to performing in Yiddish. Jacob P. Adler, Thomashefsky’s rival, countered Thomashefsky’s coup in nabbing Schildkraut by contracting Ferdinand Bonn, a gentile German–American actor of some renown. Yet another interesting import from the German–American stage was gentile actress Jennie Valliere, who in 1918 was recruited by actor–manager Maurice Schwartz for his Yiddish Art Theatre. Valliere learned Yiddish for the job and in the 1920s performed leading roles as written in the original, starring in major works by Gordin and others.

Jacob M. Gordin cabinet card, c. 1900.

Gordin (1853–1909) was the first major dramatist of the American Yiddish stage.

Funeral procession for Jacob P. Adler, April 2, 1926.

More than 50,000 mourners followed Adler’s casket from the Hebrew Actors’ Union, where he lay in state, to David Kessler’s Second Avenue Theatre for the service. He is buried in Mount Carmel cemetery in Brooklyn.

Insufficient command of Yiddish was an issue on both sides of the Yiddish footlights. From the early days, anglicized and translated titles appeared on posters and advertisements, and an English–language synopsis was a regular feature of Yiddish playbills. Language proficiency became even more of a problem when American–born actors began joining the Yiddish stage. Molly Picon (1898–1992), a superstar of the Yiddish stage, born in New York and raised in Philadelphia, wrote in her autobiography that in the early 1920s her husband, Jacob Kalich, took her on an extensive tour of Europe before launching her career in America because the Yiddish I spoke was completely bastardized, and part of our plan was for me to learn correct Yiddish, with its soft, guttural European accent.¹¹ By the 1930s, the acting studio of the Artef workers’ art theater, which attracted second–generation youth, devoted considerable time to the instruction of the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. Actor and distinguished film director Jules Dassin (1911–2008), who began his professional training at the Artef, said he was not alone in having to learn Yiddish in order to become part of that theater.¹²

The first Yiddish theatrical production in America took place in New York in 1882, when theater was still a novel phenomenon in Jewish life. Yiddish theater had come into being only six years earlier in Jassy, Romania, when