New York's Yiddish Theater, Edited by Edna Nahshon

New York’s Yiddish Theater

Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of “Yiddish Broadway” and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women’s rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York’s Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country’s cultural and artistic development.

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in Canada

About the Editor Edna Nahshon is professor of theater and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary and senior associate at Oxford University’s Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She is the author of Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context and Jewish Theatre: A Global View, and the editor of From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays.

BACK COVER Grand Theatre poster, 1933.

Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Nahshon, ed.

FRONT COVER Grand Theatre.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1905.

Museum of the City of New York, The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.810.

From the Bowery to Broadway

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City’s Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European and Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage.

COLUMBIA ISBN: 978-0-231-17670-5

9 780231 176705

COLUMBIA

New York’s Yiddish Theater From the Bowery to Broadway Edited by

Edna Nahshon

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overture From the Bowery to Broadway Edna Nahshon

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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!

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page 6 Star from Second Avenue's Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame, 2015.

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

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above 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.

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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 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 12

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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

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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.

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opposite top The Grand Theatre presents Jacob P. Adler in The Broken Hearts

by Zalmen Libin.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1903.

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opposite bottom 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.

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above Spectators in front of the Grand Theatre.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1905.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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 18

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Jacob M. Gordin cabinet card, c. 1900.

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

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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.

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 writer Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) joined forces with two singers, then performing at a local tavern, and provided a skimpy storyline that offered narrative continuity to their musical numbers. The new entertainment was soon all the rage, and before long Goldfaden was heading his own traveling theater company, for which he functioned as producer, playwright, director, composer, and librettist. He soon began to author lavish 22

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previous spread 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. above The Yiddish Art Theatre building occupied by the 12th Street Cinema.

Photograph by Edmund V. Gillon, 1975.

Built in 1926, this is the only surviving Yiddish theater building on Second Avenue. It is currently home to Village East Cinema. right Hebrew Actors’ Union building at 31 East 7th Street.

Photograph by Martin Leifer, 1968.

The Hebrew Actors’ Union, founded in 1900, was the first actors’ union in the country.

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Yiddish operettas, some of which — The Witch (1879), The Two Kuni–Lemls (1880), and Shulamith (1880) — became classics that are occasionally still performed. From the beginning, music was part of the DNA of the Yiddish stage, and the operetta was the most popular and beloved genre. Its musical numbers, hummed and sung at home and in shops, were recorded and did a brisk business as sheet music, especially as immigrant Jews began to purchase upright pianos for their tenement living rooms, one of the first luxuries of the Lower East Side.13 At times, the theatrical origin of a song was obliterated by its popularity, as was the case with “Donna, Donna,” often thought of as an old folk song though originally composed by Sholom Secunda for the Yiddish Art Theatre production of Aaron Zeitlin’s Esterke (1940–41).

Given Goldfaden’s influence, it is not surprising that the first record of a Yiddish theatrical production in New York is of one of his operettas — The Witch. The event, featuring a newly arrived troupe headed by the brothers Golubock, was financially backed by Frank Wolf, a well–to–do saloon owner who was also president of the Henry Street Synagogue, where the sweet–voiced Boris Thomashefsky (1866/8?–1939), a recent arrival then employed at a cigar factory, was a chorister.

In his memoirs, Thomashefsky offered a transparently self–serving and sensational description of events surrounding this first production, including a highly questionable account of efforts to sabotage the evening by uptown “German” Jews. We do know, however, that the performance occurred on August 12, 1882, at Turn Hall, located at 66–68 4th Street (between Second Avenue and Bowery), home to a local branch of the Turnenverein, a progressive German–American fraternal and gymnastics society. It was presented as the “grand entertainment” for a benefit organized by the HEAS (Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society) to raise funds for a small group of Russian immigrants.14 This first performance was inconspicuous, attendance sparse, and the acting amateurish, but the timing was fortuitous: the number of Jewish newcomers was growing rapidly, and their yearning for amusement would soon be felt. Many were young and unmarried and, though poor, eager to spend the little extra cash they had on entertainment. By year’s end, the troupe, now calling itself the Hebrew Opera and Dramatic Company, moved to the Old Bowery Garden at 113–113½ Bowery, a former beer garden owned by a German Jew, Edward Levy. The Garden was already the site of various theatrical productions, including English and German plays and vaudeville. The company presented a repertoire consisting primarily of Goldfaden operettas and some new plays. Of the original plays staged by the company, Israel Barsky’s The Orphans is credited as the first Yiddish play about life in New York.

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Bi–annual publication Kunst un Teater (Art and Theater) with cover illustration by Boris Aronson, 1937 Communal interest in the Yiddish theater was expressed by the significant number of Yiddish books and periodicals devoted to the stage.

Aronson signed this illustration “Baruch Aronson” in Hebrew letters.

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The Hebrew Opera and Dramatic Company performed twice a week. The shows were on Friday night and Saturday afternoon; in the absence of a strong rabbinical authority, there was no serious objection to this violation of the Sabbath. Still, the stage respectfully reflected the audience’s religious sensibilities. There was no evidence of activities specifically prohibited on the Sabbath: the lights were turned on in advance, matches and cigarettes were not lit, and letters arrived conveniently unsealed. Friday and Saturday performances remained the most popular and lucrative for the Yiddish theater and were frequented by traditional Jews as well as freethinkers.

The first company was short–lived, however. In 1883, the year after its opening, plagued by financial difficulties and personal feuds, the troupe split in two. Neither fared well, and by the end of 1884, the arrival from Europe of the more professional Karp–Silberman company forced the Golubocks and Thomashefsky to leave town.

Most of the original players never developed much of a career on the stage. The notable exception was Boris Thomashefsky, who returned to New York three years later to become the long–time matinee idol of the Yiddish theater.

More actors arrived over the next few years, an influx triggered by the 1882 czarist ban on Yiddish–language performances. Many of the exiled Russian Yiddish actors first moved to London, but they soon migrated to America, the new central source of audiences and capital, and they made New York the headquarters of the Yiddish stage worldwide. The Karp–Silberman troupe, known as the Russian Yiddish Opera Company, leased the Bowery Garden (by now renamed the Oriental Theatre), and, though Goldfaden operettas continued to be a major attraction, the troupe also introduced historical operettas by other writers. Notably, they staged works by their own resident playwright and prompter, Joseph Lateiner (1853–1937) whose Esther and Haman and Joseph and His Brothers both proved highly successful. Lateiner’s output was legendary. By 1903, he had written and staged more than 100 plays, some of them originals, others adaptations from German, French, or English sources. Lateiner would come to write some of the most successful musical melodramas of the Yiddish stage, including The Jewish Heart (1908), a huge box–office success.

Another new troupe arrived from London in August of 1886. The Romanian Opera Company was an accomplished ensemble that gained its name from having played for two seasons in Romania. Their resident playwright and prompter was self–anointed “Professor” Moyshe Hurwitz (1864–1910), who, like Lateiner, kept the scripts flowing, authoring more than 100 melodramas and operettas. Unlike Lateiner, however, Hurwitz wanted to do more than write. He became the lessee of the Windsor Theatre 26

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Sheet music for “Isrulik Kim a Heim” (“Israel Come Home”) from Tate–Mamme’s Zures (Father and Mother’s Trouble), sung by Boris Thomashefsky, 1904.

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at 37–39 Bowery and went on to successfully manage his own company for several years until a new owner took over the house. Hurwitz died penniless, a broken man.

During their heyday, Lateiner and Hurwitz ruled the stage. Pressured to produce a constant stream of scripts, they and their imitators supplied their companies with often half–baked goods that usually consisted of historical and biblical operettas, some melodramas, and tsaytbilder — dramatizations of such contemporary events as the notorious Tisa Esslar blood libel, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Dreyfus Affair. Though most of the plays were crude and filled with plagiarized scenes and historical inaccuracies, they transported unsophisticated spectators from the dreariness of their tenements and sweatshops to a fantasy world of glamour and heightened emotion.

As the theatrical field deepened, a fierce rivalry developed between the companies. They used printed pamphlets to discredit and denigrate each other, and when possible lured away each others’ actors. At times, the plays bore nearly identical titles: when the Romanian Opera House produced Hurwitz’s opera King Solomon, the Oriental immediately responded with Lateiner’s Solomon’s Trial. In his memoirs, Thomashefsky offers a vivid description of the competitive culture of the period: To look like a star an actor had to wear slashed doublets, satin cloaks, golden crowns. Everyone had to do it, there was no other way. [Actor David] Kessler wore a hat with a feather, bare feet, and a shirt with red silk patches. [Jacob P.] Adler, to outdo him, wore a hat with three feathers, a naked throat, a spangled throw over his shoulders, and to make it more realistic, he put on chains, bracelets, and long Turkish earrings.

I showed the two of them I could play the game! I put on a crown, a sword, chains, bracelets, silk hose in three colors, and three cloaks instead of one! If they had lightning I had thunder. They declaimed; I sang.

If they shot, I stabbed. If they made their entrance on a horse, I came in on a golden coach drawn by a team of horses. If they had thunder, I had lightning. If it snowed in their theaters, I had rain. If Kessler sang the Prayer for Forgiveness, I sang the Mourner’s Kaddish. If, at their theaters, they murdered one enemy, I murdered many and all at one blow.”15 Most of the first generation of actors who began their careers in the 1880s were reared in the culture of popular entertainment, where scripts served largely as vehicles for the display of performative skills. At the heart of their world stood the actor, not the text, and acting was considered most commendable when it hoisted primal emotions to fever pitch. On the New York Yiddish stage, actors were known to 28

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The actor–managers of the young Yiddish stage in New York were eager to offer their patrons renditions of popular American fare. In 1901, following an immensely successful English–language revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Academy of Music, two competing downtown Yiddish theaters, the Thalia and the People’s, produced near–simultaneous productions of the racial melodrama.

Adapted from the 1852 novel by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the play follows the journeys of several long–suffering slaves. The subject matter, milieu, religious sentiment, and Southern vernacular of the story presented a unique challenge for linguistic and cultural translation.

The Thalia production, which used an adaptation by Isidore Zolotarevsky, a popular Yiddish dramatist, sidestepped some of the obstacles by keeping the original English lyrics for at least some of the musical numbers: “In Ol’ Kaintuck,” and “Down on the Swanee River” were

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sung entirely in English; the character of Topsy sang “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me,” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” in Yiddish, but the refrains were sung in English.

Since the Christ–like submissiveness of Uncle Tom was alien to the immigrant Jewish ethos, the Yiddish play emphasized the combative spirit of the slave who is willing to fight for his freedom. But Jewish actors and audiences alike also experienced an affinity for Stowe’s sympathetic figures. “Members of one persecuted race portrayed the wrongs of another,” wrote the Chicago Tribune of their local production. The character of George Harris, noted one critic, “became a desperate and solitary Maccabee,” and when Legree whipped Tom, the audience hissed out of pure hatred of him. One member of the audience declared, “The play is not so strange to us of the Israelitish descent as its American setting may suggest.”

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improvise lines and interject songs or vaudeville shticks that had no bearing on the storyline. Thomashefsky used to insert his popular song “A Letter to Mother” whenever the pace of the performance slackened. Actors adlibbed, slipped in lines from other plays, and relied heavily on the prompter, a fixture of Yiddish theater.

Young intellectuals were contemptuous of the popular Yiddish fare, labeling it shund (trash), and they called for a more elevated theater for New York Jewish audiences.

Their hope for a Yiddish Henrik Ibsen was finally realized in Jacob Gordin (1853– 1909). Gordin, who introduced literary melodramas to the Yiddish repertoire, had no theatrical experience, but he impressed Jacob P. Adler, by then an important actor–manager, with his intellect and command of Russian culture. Adler commissioned him to write a play; the result was Siberia (1892), which failed to capture its audiences. But Gordin quickly followed it with the enormously successful The Jewish King Lear (1892), in which Adler played the old patriarch — one of his signature roles.

Gordin went on to pen more than 30 original dramas, mostly domestic “problem plays,” written in what was then considered a realistic mode. The best known are God, Man, and Devil (1900), based on the Faust legend, albeit with a happy ending; Mirele Efros (1898); and The Kreutzer Sonata (1902). He also translated and adapted more than 40 plays from other languages, introducing Jewish audiences to the works of Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky.

Before literary and cultural reformers like Gordin began to change Yiddish theatrical culture, actors generally had delivered their lines in Daytshmerish, an artificially Germanized Yiddish deemed more appropriate for “higher–class” characters.

Gordin was important in instituting a more natural stage language. He demanded a faithful rendition of the author’s text and forbade adlibbing and interpolation of unrelated musical and comedic numbers. Writing on commission, he provided actors with strong parts, and the reputation of actors associated with his work — Jacob Adler and his wife Sarah, David Kessler, Sigmund Mogulesko, Keni Liptzin, and Bertha Kalich — rested largely on their roles as the originators and interpreters of specific Gordin characters. His The Kreutzer Sonata was the first Yiddish play to be translated into English. It was in the lead female role that Bertha Kalich captured the attention of American producers. Known as the Yiddish Eleonora Duse, she was the first leading actress to cross over to major roles on the English–speaking stage, appearing in works by Victorien Sardou, George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hermann Sudermann, and other important European writers.

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