Jewish Theatre: A Global View (Ijs Studies in Judaica)

Jewish Theatre: A Global View

IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA Conference Proceedings of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London

General Editors

Markham J. Geller Ada Rapoport-Albert François Guesnet

VOLUME 8

Jewish Theatre: A Global View

Edited by

Edna Nahshon

LEIDEN • BOSTON

2009

These volumes are based on the international conference series of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London. Issues are thematic, 250–450 pages in length, in English, plus at most two papers in one other language per volume. Volumes focus on significant themes relating to Jewish civilisation, and bring together from different countries, often for the first time, eminent scholars working in the same or allied fields of research. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jewish theatre : a global view / edited by Edna Nahshon. p. cm. — (IJS studies in Judaica, ISSN 1570-1581) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17335-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Jewish theater—Congresses. 2. Theater, Yiddish—Poland—Congresses. 3. Theater, Yiddish—Congresses. 4. Jewish theater—Europe, Western—Congresses. I. Nahshon, Edna. PN3035.J496 2009 792.089’924—dc22 2009009017

ISSN 1570-1581 ISBN 978 90 04 17335 4 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Prof. Paolo Puppa (University of Venice) for his insightful comments; Ginny Mathias (UCL) and Melanie Weiss for their editorial assistance and Michael J. Mozina, production editor (Brill). I am grateful to the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for supporting the publication of this volume. Edna Nahshon

In memory of John D. Klier (1944–2007) Scholar, Colleague, Friend.

CONTENTS List of Figures .............................................................................

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Contributors to the Volume .......................................................

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Introductory Essay: What is Jewish Theatre? ............................ Edna Nahshon

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SECTION ONE

THE WORLD OF YIDDISH Ritual Space as Theatrical Space in Jewish Folk Theatre .................................................................................... Ahuva Belkin

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Jacob Gordin’s Dialogue with Tolstoy: Di Kreytser Sonata (1902) ........................................................... Barbara Henry

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Isaac Bashevis-Singer’s Attitude to the Yiddish Theater as Shown in His Works ............................................................... Nathan Cohen

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SECTION TWO

BETWEEN JEWS AND POLES Józio Grojseszyk: A Jewish City Slicker on the Warsaw Popular Stage .......................................................................... Michael C. Steinlauf

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The Polish Shulamis: Jewish Drama on the Polish Stage in the Late 19th–Early 20th Centuries ............................................. Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska

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contents SECTION THREE

NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES IN ENGLISH, ITALIAN AND GERMAN Jewish Languages and Jewish Characters in Giovan Battista Andreini’s Lo Schiavetto ................................................................ 101 Paola Bertolone “The Christian will turn Hebrew”: Converting Shylock on Stage ........................................................................................ Shaul Bassi

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Philosemitism on the London Stage: Sydney Grundy’s An Old Jew ............................................................................... Edna Nahshon

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Jewish Self-Presentation and the “Jewish Question” on the German Stage from 1900 to 1930 ......................................... Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer

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Popular Jewish Drama in Vienna in the 1920s ......................... Brigitte Dalinger

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SECTION FOUR

PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE On Arriving Front and Center: American Jewish Identity on the American Stage ................................................................ Ellen Schiff Generational Shifts in American Jewish Theatre ...................... Linda Ben-Zvi

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SECTION FIVE

PERFORMING THE HOLOCAUST/DEBATING ISRAEL ON STAGE Staying Ungooselike: The Holocaust and the Theatre of Choice ................................................................................ Robert Skloot

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Job’s Soul and Otto Weininger’s Torments: Jewish Themes in the Theatre of Hanoch Levin and Yehoshua Sobol ......... Freddie Rokem

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Index ...........................................................................................

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APPENDIX Abraham’s Scene (introductory essay) ........................................ Paolo Puppa

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Abraham (dramatic monologue) ................................................ Paolo Puppa

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Illustration of 17th Century Purim Players ..............

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Figure 2. Photo of Bertha Kalich in Gordin’s Di kreytser sonata (1905) .................................................................

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Figure 3. Polish actor Ludwik Solski as Józio Grojseszyk ........

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Figure 4. Illustrated portrait of Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) .............................................................................

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Figure 5. Illustrated portrait of Giovan Battista Adreini (1576–1654) .............................................................................

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Figures 6 & 7. Photos of the Commedia dell’Arte Shylock produced by the Venetian company Pantakin (2005) ..............................................................................

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Figure 8. Photo of Sydney Grundy (1894) ...............................

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Figure 9. Caricature of John Hare (1890) ................................

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Figure 10. Photo of Israel Zangwill (1904) ...............................

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Figure 11. Photo of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree as Issachar in Hypatia (1893) ..........................................................................

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Figure 12. Photo of Abish Meisels (1896–1959) ......................

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Figure 13. Photo: From the final scene of Lieberman’s Throne of Straw, University of Wisconsin Theatre (1978) ........................................................................

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CONTRIBUTORS TO THE VOLUME Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare studies and postcolonial theory and literature. He has taught at Wake Forest University-Venice, Venice International University, and at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His main publications are Le metamorfosi di Otello: Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (2000) and Shakespeare in Venice: Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello (with Alberto Toso Fei, 2007). He is currently editing a new Italian edition of Othello. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer is Professor of Theatre Studies at Munich University. He studied in Tübingen, Hamburg, Berlin (Freier Universität) and New York. He focuses on the history and theory of the German language theatre in Europe since the Enlightenment. His especial interests are Jewish-German culture and theatre since Lessing, the relationship of German theatre with Polish and East European theatres, and the traditional theatre of Japan and Eastern Asia. He participates in research projects and symposia on the theatre worldwide, and is the author of several works on theatre and literature. Ahuva Belkin is Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Theatre Arts Department theoretical studies program. She is a former chairperson of the Israeli Society for Theatre Research. Belkin studied Theatre and Art History at the Universities of Toronto and Tel Aviv. She specializes in Jewish theatre, particularly folk theatre (the Purimspiel), the work of Avraham Goldfaden, iconography and theatre, theatrical fools and jesters, and feminist theatre. Her work was published in journals in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. Her books include The Joy of Purim in Gluckstadt (1650); Leone de’Sommi and the Performing Arts, and The Purimspiel: Studies in Folk Theatre [in Hebrew]. Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University and Professor emeritus, English and Theatre, Colorado State University. Holder of many distinguished posts and awards, she is President of the

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International Samuel Beckett Society, and Editor of Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, the Tel Aviv University English-language theatre journal. Her many published works on the theatre include several books on Samuel Beckett and Susan Glaspell. She is presently editing The Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell (with J. Ellen Gainor). Paola Bertolone is Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Siena. She is the author of several essays on Italian and Yiddish Theatre. Her books include L’esilio del teatro: Goldfaden e il moderno teatro yiddish (Rome, 1994); I copioni di Eleonora Duse (Pisa, 2000). She is co-editor of Café Savoy: Teatro yiddish in Europa (Rome, 2006). Dr Nathan Cohen is Senior Lecturer at the Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. His research focuses on East European Jewish cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is author of Books, Writers and Newspapers: The Jewish Cultural Center in Warsaw, 1918–1942 (Magnes Press, 2003) [in Hebrew]. Brigitte Dalinger teaches in the Institute of Theatre, Film, and MediaStudies at the University of Vienna. She is author and co-editor of works on the history of the Jewish theatre in Vienna. Her most recent book is a study of Jewish drama in Vienna, Trauerspiele mit Gesang und Tanz. She is also co-editor (with with Thomas Soxberger) of Abish Meisels’ play Fun sechisstow bis amerika (Vienna, 2000) in a bilingual Yiddish-German edition. Barbara Henry is an Associate Professor of Russian literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her doctoral degree from Oxford University, where she was also Max Hayward Fellow in Russian literature. She was a Mellon Fellow at Northwestern University, where she taught courses on Russian drama and Jewish studies. She has recently completed a book-length study of Jacob Gordin’s adaptations of Russian literature for the American Yiddish stage. Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, whose expertise is the history of theatre in Poland from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, is Professor at Ło’dz’ University and the Alexander Zelwerowicz Theatre Academy in Warsaw. She is the author of Scena obiecana: Teatr polski w „odzi 1844–1918 (1993) and the editor of Teatr żydowski w Polsce (1998)

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and of Wojciech Bogusławski i jego póΩne prawnuki (2007). She serves on the editorial board of Pami\tnik Teatralny and Tygiel Kultury and is the president of the Polish Society of Theater Historians. Edna Nahshon is Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has written extensively on the nexus of Jews, theatre, and performance. Her books include Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925–1940 (Greenwood, 1998), From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Jews and Shoes (Berg, 2008). She is currently working on Countering Shylock, a book that examines Jewish responses to The Merchant of Venice. Other major projects include a book on Jewish mock trials and a biography of Maurice Schwartz and the Yiddish Art Theatre. Paolo Puppa, a native of Venice, is Professor of the History of the Theatre and Director of the Department of the Arts at the University of Venice. He has written numerous books on the theatre and the dramas of Pirandello, Fo, Brook, Ibsen, Rolland, Svevo, and others. He is also author of plays that have been translated and produced in various countries, including the award-winning “La collina di Euridice” (1996), “Zio mio!” (1999) and “Parole di Giuda” (Critics Prize 2006). Recently he was co-editor of The History of the Italian Stage (Cambridge University Press) and Italian Literary Studies (Routledge). Freddie Rokem is the Emanuel Herzkowitz Professor for 19th and 20th Century Art at Tel Aviv University, and permanent visiting Professor at Helsinki University; he was also visiting Professor at Stanford University (2007–2008), the Free University of Berlin and UC Berkeley. His Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre won the ATHE Prize for best theatre studies book in 2001. His most recent books are Strindberg’s Secret Codes (2004) and Philosophers and Thespians. He is editor (2006–2009) of Theatre Research International, published by Cambridge University Press. Ellen Schiff is the author of the pathbreaking From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama, and the editor of four volumes of Jewish plays. She publishes and lectures widely on American and international plays of Jewish interest.

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Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama and Jewish Studies and a stage director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has also been inter alia Director of the Weinstein-Mosse Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust (1988) and editor of The Theatre of the Holocaust (2 vols. 1981, 1999) and the play “If the Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty against Genocide” (2006). He is the editor of the anthology The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Armenia (2008). Michael Steinlauf is Associate Professor of History at Gratz College near Philadelphia. He served as the theatre editor of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2008) and editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 16 (2003), dedicated to Jewish popular culture in Poland and its afterlife. He is also the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997). He currently serves as a member of the planning team of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, scheduled to open in Warsaw in 2011.

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY: WHAT IS JEWISH THEATRE? Edna Nahshon The essays included in this volume were originally presented at an academic conference titled “Jewish Theatre,” sponsored by the Institute of Jewish Studies in June 2002 at University College London. The term “Jewish theatre” was used by the organizers as convenient shorthand for a richly heterogeneous array of topics: Yiddish, Israeli, European and American theatres; playtexts written in Hebrew and Yiddish; others, dealing with Jewish topics in non-Jewish languages, works by Jews and Gentiles, some composed for Jews and others for distinctly non-Jewish audiences (at times even to the detriment of Jewish interests); folk theatre; popular theatre and cabaret. At the conference, the quagmire of defining the precise meaning and boundaries of its title was sidestepped, possibly as a result of academic prudence, for pinpointing the precise nature of “Jewish theatre” and arriving at a consensus as to what to include or preclude in this category is practically a hopeless task. This is so first and foremost because the very complexity of the term “theatre,” which encompasses practitioners (i.e. performers, directors, playwrights, designers, and producers), playscripts and textual material, non-literary elements of performance such as music, costumes and set design, physical spaces where performance take place, and the audiences assembled for a performance. Not only can these be theorized from literary, performative, historical, political, anthropological and sociological perspectives, but although most theatre scholars see the very core of the theatrical enterprise as the transaction between live performer and spectator, in effect most theatrical events are the result of a collaborative effort that cannot claim a single “author,” and they use a multiple syntax of mixed media that reflect their materiality and mutability. Add to this the problematic nature of the designation “Jewish,” which can be interpreted as pertaining to religious, national, ethnic and cultural identities, and you realize that the intersection of the broad, slippery, and continuously evolving concepts of “theatre” and “Jewishness” or “Judaism”, both of which reflect

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changing realities, perceptions and agendas, presents a confounding construct that palpitates with definitional uncertainties. As mentioned, the designation “Jewish theatre” is used as an inclusive and accommodating tent. Though hard to pin down, it is convenient and familiar, inherited from previous generations for whom “Yiddish” and “Jewish” were practically interchangeable. The playwrights, performers and audiences of the Yiddish theatre, located in a somewhat mythical “Yiddishland,” an imagined place whose homogeneity is open to debate, may have indeed shared similar ethical, religious and cultural values, yet clearly, this theatre is largely a phenomenon of the past. The physical, linguistic and cultural topographies of the Jewish world have changed, re-shaped by acculturation, assimilation, genocide and political sovereignty. Today, most of what seems to belong inarguably to the rubric “Jewish theatre” comprises two distinct bodies. The first includes works in non-Jewish languages that are essentially considered part of the theatrical culture of the respective countries within which they were created and which occasionally enter our global theatrical culture. The second group consists of works of the Israeli stage, mostly, though not solely, performed in Hebrew. These are produced primarily (though not exclusively) by Jews for Jews and are strongly connected to various concerns and issues of Zionism and Israeli reality. Given the porous nature of cultural boundaries, works created within these separate spheres often travel in translation, though their transfer nearly always impacts their Jewish (and other) meaning. Given the complexity of the term, it may be instructive to examine definitions of “Jewish theatre” offered by encyclopedias and theatre dictionaries whose organizational system requires precise categorization. Normally, in addition to personal biographies and professional specifics (proscenium arch, props), the two dominant organizational principles of theatre dictionaries and encyclopedias are either genre (farce, romantic theatre), or historic/national/linguistic (Greek theatre, French theatre). Since Jewish theatre is clearly not a genre, one would assume it would be discussed within the “national” rubric. This, however, presents a problem, for while definitions of Russian or German theatre are essentially grounded in territorial domains—“Italian theatre” is, ultimately, understood as theatre made in Italy—the term “Jewish theatre” lacks both geographic and linguistic underpinnings. As a result, both theatre and Jewish studies encyclopedias shy away from the fuzziness inherent in the term and either avoid it altogether or, when offering an entry, tend to immediately subdivide it into separate units such as “Hebrew

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Theatre”, “Yiddish Theatre”, “the Jew in Drama”, biographical entries for individual dramatists, directors and actors, and so forth. The classic Oxford Companion to the Theatre, first published in 1950, does include a long entry devoted to “Jewish Drama”, the title reflecting the now defunct approach that does not distinguish between “theatre” and “drama”.1 Written by E. Harris, it opens with the following statement: Jewish drama has no territorial limits. Its sole boundaries are linguistic—Hebrew, the historical and religious language which has never ceased to be written and has now been reborn as a living tongue; Yiddish, the vernacular of the vast Jewish communities lying between the Baltic and Black Seas, one which emigrants have spread over the world; and Ladino ( Judaeo-Spanish), the speech of the Jews who live round the Aegean Sea.2

Yet Harris immediately modifies this language-based definition, noting that “Even the linguistic frontiers are not clearly defined”, and cites as example the Anglo-Jewish dramatist Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), who wrote in English.3 Harris, however, neglects to mention that Zangwill, though a pioneer and path-breaker, was not a solitary phenomenon, and he ignores the existence of other contemporary Jewish playwrights such as the Dutch Herman Heijermans (1864–1924), the French Henri Bernstein (1876–1953), the Austrian Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), and the Danish Henry Nathansen (1868–1944), who wrote plays about Jewish themes in their respective languages. Moreover, by the time Harris had composed his essay, presumably not too long before the Companion’s publication—and certainly at the present time—there existed a very significant cadre of Jewish dramatists who have been writing in English, French, Spanish, Russian and other languages. Indeed, a mere listing of their names would occupy nearly half of this page. If the language-based principle was already obsolete by the time he composed his entry, why did Harris choose to employ it as the basis for definition, especially when Jewish subject-matter could have been used as the criterion? Perhaps this was done in order to avoid

1 E. Harris, “Jewish Drama,” Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll, Third edition (London: Oxford University Press: 1967) 515–20. 2 Ibid. 515. 3 For further discussion of Zangwill’s Jewish dramas see Edna Nahshon, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006).

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another definitional pitfall, for if “Jewish plays” are about Jews, then anti-Semitic works might also fit into the rubric, and authorial intent would need to be introduced into the formula. Additionally, by relying on the language yardstick, Harris avoided the problematic question regarding the Jewishness of Hebrew theatre in Israel, though he surveys Israeli theatre thoroughly. One cannot avoid the impression that Harris sensed the inadequacy of his approach and rushed to conclude his four-sentence introduction with a brief and not very convincing statement that “any study of Jewish drama must be viewed in the light of the Jewish approach to the theatre in general.”4 He then proceeded to offer a historical narrative that begins with the Bible and concludes with modern Israeli drama. The shift in emphasis in theatre studies from drama to performance, with a special interest in ritual, the body, and other non-literary aspects, is reflected in the new and authoritative two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2003), edited by Dennis Kennedy.5 The encyclopedia mostly eschews separate entries for national drama and theatre. Accordingly, the reader who searches for “Jewish theatre” finds the heading on page 647 with the instruction: “See judio, teatro; Yiddish theatre.”6 In this manner, the encyclopedia acknowledges that the term “Jewish theatre” holds some currency while politely declaring it unsuitable for separate discussion. As for Jewish reference materials, a good case in point is the recently revised Encyclopaedia Judaica, whose “Theater” entry offers an extensive multi-authored survey that begins with the Bible and ends with late 20th century developments. The entry does not include a general introduction, or a preliminary discussion of the term “Jewish theater.” Rather, it consists of sub-sections written by various contributors and is organized according to historical, linguistic and geographic principles.7 Similarly, the extensive essay titled “Jewish Theatre” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2005), a milestone collection whose goal is to reflect the state of scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies and which is geared

Harris. Op. Cit. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance 2 vols., ed. Dennis Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 Ibid. Vol. I 647. 7 “Theater,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. Vol. 19. 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007) 669–685. 4 5

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primarily for academic readers, offers no definition of the field of knowledge that it discusses. The Drama Review (TDR) and Perspectives, two respectable academic journals based in New York and Jerusalem respectively, have each devoted a full issue to “Jewish Theatre.” Definitional nebulousness permeates the “Introduction” to the September 1980 “Jewish Theatre Issue” of TDR, a highly regarded periodical, known for its academic rigor and espousal of theory. Mel Gordon, an American scholar and editor of the special issue, rejected language-based definitions and proclaimed: “For us, Jewish theatre consists of all performances and performance modes that are an expression of Jewish culture.”8 The cautious qualification “for us” is used not only to avoid the usual authorial omnipotence of encyclopedic definitions, but also to concede the possibility of alternative interpretations. Still, the reader is left without any explanation of the editor’s notion of “Jewish culture”. Fernande Bartfeld and Yehuda Moraly, who wrote the “Introduction” for the French-language Perspectives 2003 issue on “Le Théatre Juif ”, open their short essay with the question “Qu’est-ce que c’est le théatre juif ?” (What is Jewish Theatre?)9 They respond that the strictest definition would be a theatrical text (including ballet or song) written by a Jew and inspired by Jewish tradition, though they quickly admit that this definition raises numerous questions for which they provide no answer. Playwright Victor Haim, a contributor to the issue, titled his “Un Théatre Juif ? Une Appartenance Affective” ( Jewish Theatre? An Emotional Attachment), and accordingly opened his essay with the fundamental questions: “Existe-t-il un théatre juif ?” and “Existe-t-il des auteurs dramatiques qui revendiquent leur qualité d’auteur juif ?” (Does Jewish theatre exist? Are there dramatists who keep reasserting their core distinction as that of Jewish writers?) His personal and moving essay ends with no clear-cut conclusions.10 Not only academics but also practitioners need a definition of their field as a compass for artistic and practical navigation. For example, during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, some serious discussion

8 Mel Gordon, “Jewish Theatre Issue: An Introduction,” The Drama Review, 24: 3, (2–4), (1980): 2–3. 9 Fernande Bartfeld and Yehuda Moraly, “Presentation,” Perspectives: Revue de L’Université Hebraïque de Jérusalem, 10, (2003): 5. 10 Victor Haim, “Un Théatre Juif ? Une Appartenance Affective.” Perspectives 243.

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of what constituted “Negro theatre” took place in conjunction with the emergence of the African-American theatre. In 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois formulated his “four fundamental principles” of “a real Negro theatre” as follows: The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: 1. About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. 3. For us. That is, the theatre must be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. 4. Near us. The theatre must be near a Negro neighborhood, near the mass of ordinary people.11

Similarly, if you are involved in an enterprise that defines itself as “Jewish theatre,” you need a clear sense of what this designation means. Yet institutions and organizations committed to the production and promotion of Jewish theatre, notably the Jewish Theatre Association ( JTA) and its later manifestations, have vacillated in their commitment to self-possession and self-expressiveness.12 Writing about the First Jewish Theatre Festival, organized by the JTA at New York’s Marymount Manhattan College in June 1980, and supported by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, co-authors Tina Margolis and Susan Weinacht note that “rather than attempting to define ‘Jewish Theatre,’ the association is interested in presenting the diversity of the work being done.”13 They quote Richard Siegel, then the executive director of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, as proclaiming: “We want to stay away from pat definitions. For us to define the field now would be premature.”14 Margolis and Weinacht, who write from a decidedly American perspective, explain that the JTA was inspired by contemporary (American) Black and Chicano theatre groups, and sees itself “as part of the ethnic theatre movement and is connected to the upsurge in religious theatre of all denominations which is taking place throughout the country.”15 They

11 Quoted from Chidi Ikonné, From Du Bois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature 1903–1926 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981) 99. 12 . The Association for Jewish Theatre began as one of the Councils of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In 1979, it was reorganized as the JTA. It later split off from the NFJC and became independent, operating under the general network of the JCAA. 13 Tina Margolis, Susan Weinacht, “Jewish Theatre Festival 1980, Introduction,” The Drama Review, 24: (1980): 95. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.

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state that the JTA’s goal is to bring together artists who are interested in investigating theatrical expressions of Jewish identity and culture, yet emphasize that Jewish theatre is not simply for Jews, that some groups report that a large percentage of their audiences are non-Jews and that some included non-Jewish actors. This pronouncement may have served the operational needs of the organization, but is neither academically satisfying nor does it reflect the full gamut of Jewish theatrical activity taking place in North America at the time. Readdressing the issue in 2005, Mira Hirsch, president of the Association of Jewish Theatres (AJT), the current incarnation of the original JTA, acknowledged the complexity of the question “What is Jewish Theatre?”16 Writing for the AJT bulletin, Hirsch admits that the issue had arisen at every AJT conference she has attended. Her response to the question is liberal and open ended: “. . . for each one of us . . . Jewish Theatre had its own definition. For some—a theatre based on spirituality, for others—theatre originating in Jewish texts, for many more—theatre with a culturally-specific connection to a people, a history, and a tradition.”17 Despite Hirsch’s all-embracing approach, some of the short articles in the publication convey a desire for a more clear-cut definition: Irene Backalenick’s report on the AJT Jewish Theatre Conference held in New York in 2005 begins with the million-dollar question: “How do we define Jewish theatre?” Not surprisingly, Deborah Freedman, covering the International Festival of Jewish Theater held in Vienna in March 2007 for the magazine Jewish Renaissance, titled her essay “So What Is Jewish Theater?” Her answer: “I no longer care whether my theater is Jewish or not. Neither, I can assure you, will theater repair our world. But I can promise you this—at its best, Jewish or otherwise—it reflects and illuminates it.”18 Fuzziness is, however, anathema to academic purists. In 1982, in a review of the First International Conference and Festival of Jewish Theatre held at Tel Aviv University, July 3–9, 1982, Annabelle Henkin Melzer, a professor at the University’s theatre arts department, critiqued the event, noting: “The conference floundered on its inability to confront

16 Mira Hirsch, “A Message from the President,” Association for Jewish Theatre Bulletin, (Fall 2005): 1. 17 Ibid. 18 Deborah Freeman, “So What Is Jewish Theatre?” Jewish Renaissance, July 2007: 33.

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the question, ‘What is Jewish theatre?’ . . . papers were delivered from pigeonholes and all Jewish artists were embraced.”19 According to Mel Gordon, who was present at the conference, presentations sometimes erupted into bitter exchanges, challenging the very concept of “Jewish Theatre.”20 In 2006, Bar-Ilan University in Israel announced the launch of an academic programme in Jewish theatre studies and again needed to respond to the question “What is Jewish theatre?” The explanation it offered was: “Jewish Theatre is a general term that addresses a vast variety of subjects and creative activities with Jewish interest and Jewish values. Jewish Theatre is not necessarily created by Jewish artists but it has to deal with some aspect of the Jewish culture to be included in the Jewish Theatre Studies program.”21 Like the definition, with its use of the vague term “Jewish values,” the sample of topics to be studied in the program is not free of ambiguity. What does Bar-Ilan mean by the topic “Famous Jewish playwrights of our times”? Are these playwrights who were born and/or raised as Jews or Jews who write on Jewish topics? Or take another bulleted topic, “Jews and Judaism in the Israeli theatre.” Does a Hebrew-language production, staged by mostly Jewish artists for mostly Jewish theatre-goers, qualify as “Jewish theatre” or is its identity defined solely on a thematic basis? Even the innocuous “The Bible in the Theatre” does not clarify if the intent is to discuss plays based on biblical text from a Jewish perspective or whether this sub-category includes plays infused with Christian theology and, at times, with anti-Jewish agendas. Again, the criteria are inconsistent, shifting between subject matter and personal identities. The Bar-Ilan definition does make an important point, however, in its mention of “Jewish interest,” which signifies a shift from the fixity of the personal identity of author and playscript to the interpretative meaning attached to a performance by its audiences. Looking at the concept of Jewish theatre from the perspective of its consumer opens new definitional vistas, as noted by Judi Herman in her review of the 2007 Globe production of The Merchant of Venice, a play that never 19 Annabelle Henkin Melzer, “The First International Conference and Festival of Jewish Theatre,” Theatre Journal, 34.4 (December 1982): 519–521. 20 Mel Gordon, “First International Jewish Theatre Conference and Festival,” The Drama Review, 26: 4, (1982): 92. 21 Dan Ronen, “Call for Proposals: Jewish Theatre Studies and International Jewish Theatre Festival at Bar-Ilan University”, .

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fails to arouse Jewish interest but would hardly qualify as a Jewish play. Herman notes that “if it [ Jewish theatre] is any theatre that is of interest to Jewish theatre-goers because of the subject matter, the writer, the actor(s), the character(s), then plays like Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ earn their place here.”22 Clearly, the non-catchy moniker “theatre of Jewish interest” ought to be re-introduced into the conversation about “Jewish theatre”. It is a most useful concept, first, because it is fitting for works like Passion Plays and Shakespeare’s Merchant, and second, because it acknowledges the shifting nature of the theatrical “text.” Even those who regard the written drama as the soul of the theatre would acknowledge that different productions of the very same playscript may result in completely different works—Miller’s Death of a Salesman can be presented as suffused with Jewishness, or as having no ethnic traits whatsoever. Verbal and visual elements can easily Judaize or de-Judaize a production, and at times can even function as tongue-in-cheek commentary that may carry meaning for those in the know: the distinction between a menorah and a candelabra on stage will be noted and registered by some, but would go unnoticed by others with different cultural baggage and sensitivities. It is also clear that a distinction needs to be made between theatre in and outside Israel, as the designation “Jewish” hinges largely on one’s point of view. When discussed from within Israeli culture, a normative production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House would not be considered “Jewish.” Yet upon considering such productions from without, one could argue the very opposite, making the case that the verbal and physical language and the shared associative system of artists and spectators, which is grounded in Jewish culture and norms, renders practically every Israeli Hebrew language production “Jewish.” Those who despair of the indefinable nature of the term “Jewish theatre” may find consolation in a statement posted recently in the Guardian by Dawn Walton, the new artistic director of the Eclipse Theatre, a London-based black theatre.23 In the post, titled “Stop trying to define black theatre,” Walton protests: “Everyone, it seems, has a really

22 Judy Herman, “ ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre” . 23 Dawn Walton, “Stop trying to define black theatre,” Guardian, October 29, 2008. .

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fixed idea of what black theatre is. Everyone wants to define it.” Her answer, with some minimal changes, could be applied to the question of “Jewish theatre,” especially outside Israel. She explains: “To define black British theatre in terms of race alone is to miss the point. Black practitioners are uniquely placed to deliver an incisive view of Britain today because we view it from two perspectives—black and white. We ask more questions, we challenge perceptions, we stimulate more debate.” “What is Jewish theatre?” and “Is there Jewish theatre?” are challenging questions laden with issues of identity. As the questions of who is a Jew and what defines Jewishness have become increasingly complex, and as traditional concepts of theatre are changing, with artists pushing new boundaries, we need to remove the dust from the faded truisms of yesteryear and examine old concepts with fresh eyes. It is my hope that the essays included in this volume will help foster further discussion. Though may be unable to reach a consensus regarding the nature of “Jewish theatre” the very act of problematizing and debating the term will deepen our understanding of a most important aspect of Jewish creativity and identity. Bibliography Bartfeld, Fernande and Yehuda Moraly. “Presentation.” Perspectives: Revue de L’Université Hebraïque de Jérusalem, 10 (2003): 5. Berenbaum, Michael and Fred Skolnik, eds. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Freeman, Deborah. “So What Is Jewish Theatre?” Jewish Renaissance 6: 4, (July 2007): 32–33. Gordon, Mel. “Jewish Theatre Issue: An Introduction.” The Drama Review 24: 3 (1980): 2–3. ——. “First International Jewish Theatre Conference and Festival.” The Drama Review 26: 4 (1982): 91–92. Haim, Victor. “Un Théatre Juif ? Une Appartenance Affective.” Perspective: Revue de L’Université Hebraïque de Jérusalem, 10 (2003): 243. Harris, E., “Jewish Drama.” The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll. 3rd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. 515–20. Herman, Judy. “ ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.” . Hirsch, Mira. “A Message from the President.” Association for Jewish Theatre Bulletin. (Fall 2005): 1. Ikonné, Chidi. From Du Bois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature 1903–1926. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Margolis, Tina and Susan Weinacht. “Jewish Theatre Festival 1980, Introduction.” The Drama Review 24: 3 (1980): 93–99. Melzer, Annabelle Henkin. “The First International Conference and Festival of Jewish Theatre.” Theatre Journal 34: 4 (1982): 519–521. Nahshon, Edna. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Ronen, Dan. “Call for Proposals: Jewish Theatre Studies and International Jewish Theatre Festival at Bar-Ilan University.” . Walton, Dawn. “Stop trying to define black theatre.” Guardian 29 Oct. 2008. .

SECTION ONE

THE WORLD OF YIDDISH

RITUAL SPACE AS THEATRICAL SPACE IN JEWISH FOLK THEATRE Ahuva Belkin The Jewish religion has mostly rejected frivolous types of celebration. Holy days have always been solemn occasions, with one notable exception: the holiday of Purim. Celebrated since the second century BCE and based on the canonized Book of Esther, the holiday commemorates Haman’s plan to annihilate the Jews, and their miraculous rescue by the beautiful Queen Esther and her righteous uncle Mordechai. According to the Book of Esther, these events took place during the reign of the Persian King Ahasverus, whose identity and period were later disputed by both ancient sources and modern scholars.1 Over the years, many customs have developed around the holiday, and while Purim has remained an occasion for collective catharsis over a people’s deliverance from its enemies, it has also gradually taken on the attributes of a riotous, licentious feast, into which old rituals have been integrated. The liturgy of the synagogue and the rites at home were supplemented by saturnalian and carnivalesque elements: a mimesis of vengeance against evil through the abuse of Haman, the exchange of gifts, parodies on the liturgy, intoxication and disguise. The fifteenth century saw the development of the Purimspiel—a festive folk theatre of amateur players dressed in costumes and masks, who performed in yeshivas (religious schools), or took their playlets from one house to another.2 According to Victor Turner’s term for a creative, reflective leisure activity, the Purimspiel was a liminoid manifestation. Like other folk dramas, it preserved the dynamic liminal symbols of ritual.3 This essay 1 N. S. Doniach, Purim or the Feast of Esther (Philadelphia: The Jewish Society of America, 1933). 2 Chone Shmeruk, “The beginning of the Purim play and its sixteenth century remnants,” Yiddish Biblical Plays 1697–1750 ( Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, 1979) [Hebrew]. 3 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).

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Figure 1. Purim Players (From Leondes, “Philologus Hebreo-Mixtus,” 1637).

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focuses on the spatial factor of the Purimspiel, as the locations of its performance—mostly private homes—were characterized by some basic elements of so-called “environmental theater”.4 The locations were not designated places of performance, yet by accepting the invading players who negotiated with them, these dynamic spaces became separated from the mundane world. The interaction between visiting performers and spectators (members of the household and guests) created a shared, overlapping framework where the spectators were not just mute participants invited to attend an iconic space; through the home-based ritual, which repeats the original mythic act, performers and spectators became partners in creating the theatrical fiction, in which the present and the past merged in the very same space. Richard Schechner was the first to coin the term “environmental theater” for the sort of theater that rejects artificial structures, and replaces them with places and instruments of daily life. He wrote: “I call the theater environmental theater because its first principle is to create and use whole spaces—literally spheres of spaces—which contain, or envelop, or reach out into all the areas where the audience is or the performers move”.5 However, the fact that a play is performed on the street or in a village square does not in itself produce environmental theater. In his seminal study of this subject, Michael Kirby pointed out that only when the physical components that surround the spectators constitute an inherent part of the show, and the show, unfolding in an everyday environment, makes use of these components, can one define it as environmental theatre. Though Schechner uses this category in its widest sense and includes in it distinct rubrics such as happenings, street theater, political rallies and ritual plays, scholars tend to associate the term “environmental theater” with a modern movement that studies audience/actor relationships from a theoretical angle and consciously manipulates space in the anti-realistic mode. Kirby regards this as “new”

4 Arnold Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1973). 5 Schechner has observed that where no separation exists between audience and performers, a whole new set of relations becomes possible: physical touch, sound levels, intensiveness of acting and the feeling of a shared experience. The activity “breathes” and the spectators can become part of the scene and even, in certain situations, create a new space and unexpected possibilities. See Richard Schechner, “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater”, The Drama Review, 12 (Spring 1968): 41–46. Schechner later expanded his principles in his Environmental Theatre (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973).

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theater, yet the “new theater” is far from new.6 Although modern-day environmental theater is not in and of itself the product of long tradition, its approach to the conception of space is manifest throughout the history of Western theater. Moreover, it has practically dominated non-Western theater as well as various forms of the folk theater. The Purim play exemplifies this fully. The disguised Purim players paraded down the streets with songs and music, much like revelers in other European communities—mummers, Fastnachtspieler or Christmas carol singers—who made their way from one house to another, performing their short pieces.7 The movement of the revelers transformed the pedestrian space into a festival arena. Although their activities may be perceived as a series of repeat performances, their use of the town as an encompassing environment and the continuation of the show outside the houses with the costumed players in procession, loudly advertising their show to the amusement of the crowd, argues for its interpretation as a single event. The movement back and forth, from and into homes, produced an audience that was at times stationary, at other times mobile, and on occasion a mixture of both. As the players were marching down the street, they were watched by people looking from the windows of houses, or by passers-by. Some of the crowd even followed the troupe around and accompanied it from place to place. The distances between the houses in which the same play was repeatedly performed (on the same day), and the passage from the open street space to interior rooms, which restricted the development of a proper mise-en-scène, dictated the length of performance as well as its pace and progression.8 The space in which the festive theater took place was thus prone to extremes: from the open air of a public space to the privacy of one’s home. Yet even while the players were inside private homes, the street still remained part of the theatrical space, a sort of off-stage and green room that determined the nature of the relation between the diegetic and the mimetic spaces of the event. While on the street, the players might perform spectacles such as riding hobby horses to

6 Michael Kirby, “Environmental Theatre,” Total Theatre, comp. and ed. E.T. Kirby (New York: Dutton, 1969) 265 ff. 7 See for example Daniel Perski, “Jolly Purim”, Hado’ar (New York, March 1940) [Hebrew]. 8 According to Aaron Lavedav’s account, the organizer of the play in Gomel (Russia) instructed the Purimspilers not to stay a long while in any home and move forward as quickly as possible. See Lavedav, “Lavedav dertseylt,” Frove (New York, Dec. 1943).

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commemorate the abuse of Haman and the glory of Mordechai;9 but once they moved into home interiors, the action became restrained, the atmosphere more intimate, with the players concentrating on text, and the story unfolding primarily in a verbal manner. Clearly, neither the street nor the family room had been originally designed to host theatrical performances, both constituting “found environment”, exploited as is for the presentation of a theatrical performance. Liminoid activities usually take place at times and in places set aside for leisure—in opposition to the workplace. In the Jewish festive atmosphere, where a great part of the liturgy takes place at home on holy days and Friday and Saturday night, with everything mundane and secular set aside, the home is transformed into a sacred domain. The disguised Purim players, who were members of the community, thus burst into the home and turned this “found environment” into leisure-time place. On Purim, the festive rite had already occupied the household space well before the arrival of the players, usually while the family was in the midst of the Purim ritual: the Book of Esther was being read from a scroll—the Megillah—and a festive meal was held to commemorate its events. The costumed players who had been performing in the street now invaded the terrain of the household and expanded the physical and psychological space with the same rite and message that had preceded their arrival, though in parody mode, while appropriating the home for their theatrical burlesque. The family and its ritual were thus drawn into the space and time of the performance, while the performance itself became part of the ongoing ritual. The players organized the theater space and the mimetic space accordingly. Some texts suggest that the players would come in and ask those present to make way for them and their spectacle.10 For example, in an eighteenth century Purimspiel from Prague, a player in the role of a Persian courtier, dressed anachronistically as an Indian nobleman, came into the house and asked the guests to move the chairs and benches away from the door because his majesty the king needed the place to present some interesting history. In other plays the laufer (the crier),

9 Ahuva Belkin, The Purimspiel: Studies in the Jewish Folk Theatre ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2002) [ Hebrew]. 10 See for example “Sheyn Purim Spiel (1697),” Yiddish Biblical Plays 1697–1750, ed. Chrone Schmeruk ( Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, 1979) 15–21 [ Hebrew].

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as well as the actors, moved some of the furniture aside.11 Sometimes the actors deliberately created chaos as if to emphasize the inverted world of the festive play. The spectators, still seated around the feast table, could rearrange their position in order to see the performance better and become involved. The resulting space had no regular theatre seating arrangement. Although everyone saw everything, as in frontal theatre, the frame was fluid. The family, with their invited guests around the feast table, did not leave much room for a large-cast spectacle. The players had to wait outside the door, first for permission to enter, and often also for their cue to enter the house and play their parts. This accounts for the role of the laufer in festive folk plays. The various formulas used by the laufer to address the family upon entering the house were more than a matter of oral tradition passed from one actor to another.12 They point to a genuine attempt at staging a play in homes where such measures were necessary. In order to gain attention and earn goodwill, the laufer of the Purimspiel often wore a fool’s habit, and was the first to enter the house, greet the guests on the occasion of the holiday, announce the play, and ask for permission to present it.13 He delivered the argument or prologue, introduced the characters and gave the players their entrance cues. The laufer’s cues to the waiting players extended the mimetic space beyond the room to “offstage”, from where their voices could be heard, alternating the atmosphere between illusion and reality. The room became the historical site even before the play had begun. The laufer might call from outside: “Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, I ask each and every one of you, let me in to the King”, followed by: “Now that I have reached the King’s door . . .”14 Devoid of any stage-set, these brief verbal hints sufficed to locate the various scenes. Indeed, given the improvised, one-time nature of the space where the performance took place, no attempt was made to create the illusion of a concrete place. The room was not camouflaged and the surroundings

Sigfried Kapper, “Ahasverus—Ein Jüdisches Fastnachtspiel”—Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Offentliches Leben IV (Leipzig, Deutsches Museum 1854): 490–497; 529–543. 12 Chone Shmeruk, “The beginning of the Purim play and its sixteenth century remnants,” Yiddish Biblical Plays 1697–1750. 13 Ahuva Belkin, “ ‘Habit de Fou’ in Purim Spiel?” Assaph, C. 2 (1985): 40–55. 14 Kapper. 11

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remained familiar. The invading players turned the provisional space into an intimate theatrical space by incorporating the existing state of an ongoing rite. As no less than nine lavish banquets are described in the Book of Esther, the action of the play takes place mainly in Ahasverus’s palace during various feasts. Since the play was performed during the ritual festive meal, the dinner table as “iconic identity”, to cite Kier Elam’s term, provided sufficient background for most of the play’s content.15 Other household objects were also used as needed; this is typical of folk plays, which often transform available items into props that serve as iconic and symbolic stage signs. Benches, chairs, and coat hangers were rustled up in the room where the show was to take place, and helped transport the audience to the throne-room, the royal banquet or the gallows. The absence of a sealed enclosure and the mix of actors and audience in time and space are consistent with the play: the characters do not present a different reality from that of the audience. Temporal and spatial relations between illusion and its destruction, between inclusion of spectators in the show and their separation from it, were intertwined in the Purimspiel. Embodying the ancient myth, the players enhanced the ritual through a fictional world, drawing their audience back in time 2000 years to the palace of the Persian King Ahasuerus. And although the show evolved—or degenerated, as some rabbinic authorities argued—into clownish manipulation that portrayed the mythical heroes as parodies of the contemporary rabbi, matchmaker, cantor and other recognizable community members in which the spectators saw themselves, the liminal symbols were intensified.16 Though the mythical events were represented by “home-spun” actors in a burlesque that evolved into actual parody, the spectators who were performing their ritual in which they were repeating the same myth identified with it. They identified with the plot and the message of the Purimspiel and regarded it as analogous to their situation as Jews in the Diaspora. They were Jews suffering persecutions and gaining redemption; they were the Jews whom Haman disparages in his “delivery”; they were the members of

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Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980). Belkin 2002.

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the community whose institutions and professions, habits and behavior were parodied in the play. For the audience the text was loaded with meaning by way of links to other texts, including non-theatrical texts that the community had created: oral history, tales, legends and mythology. However, the emotional reaction did not only result from sharing cultural and social symbols, as might be experienced by any homogenous group of people. For, whether the Jewish folk play referred to the remote myth or to the spectators’ actual life, the spectators also identified personally with the situation, as they shared the space with the players as part of the play. Unlike other revelers who went from house to house to present shows based on movement, song, clowning and tricks, the Purimspiel players unfolded a dramatic play. In enacting the mythic content of the Purim ritual of abusing Haman and the festive meal, the players simultaneously incorporated the spectators. The visible dining table and its inhabitants related to the diagetic diners: those from the mythical past in the court of King Ahasverus were personified in the spectators, who were declared as the king’s guests and were invited to take part in the narrative as part of the dramatis personae. Their actual seats at the table, from where they watched the show, represented part of the fictional world. Reality mixed with theatre as they sat around a laden table, either as Shushanites partaking of King Ahasverus’s lavish table, or as Jews from Shushan celebrating the first Purim at Mordechai’s command. Though the spectators were themselves, they did not act or do anything special to reinforce the narrative. They were simply part of the performance because they were included in the performance space. The play that invaded their rite put them—according to Kirby’s “amount of acting scale”—somewhere in between “non-matrixed” representation, defined as “when referential elements are applied to the performer and are not acted by him”, and “received acting”, where they were not acting but behaving without pretension, following their routine; they belonged to the category of those we nevertheless “also see . . . as characters”.17 The fluidity between pretense and life, acting and non-acting, also reveals itself in the players, who detached the play from illusion by making the spectators aware of the theatrical mechanism and by slipping in actual traits. The players, as untrained “found actors”, were

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Michael Kirby, “The New Theatre” The Drama Review 10 (1965): 23–43.

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visible within the characters, since they were recognized as community members. They would also improvise, turning to the spectators from time to time, announcing the show, asking them to listen, to keep quiet. They would confront their hosts, even offend them with use of licentious language, and finally they would request an invitation to partake in the food and accept a donation, the collection of money demanding direct interaction with the audience. The players employed exaggerated banquet imagery, commented on the meal in progress, angled for their share and praised the delicacies and the wine. This was flattery of the head of the household, but also of the “King” at whose table they were regaling themselves. Swift shifts between creating an illusion and exiting to reality again, the alternation between myth and everyday life, and the reference to the play while the illusion was being created, alternately cancelled each other out and restored the representative drama. Even when the illusion was shattered, the audience remained under its spell and the necessary artistic distance was maintained. The perception of theater did not vanish even though the holiday performance had abandoned the traditional convention with regard to stage-audience relationship. Although the spectators, their actual rite and mundane life were integrated into the play, as an audience they were involved in the fiction and its experience: suspense, fear, triumph and joy. Sometimes, when the boundaries between fiction and reality became blurred, the spectators even intervened in the proceedings. On one occasion the audience became so excited by the hanging scene that they interrupted the performance in order to save the fellow who played Haman.18 The two worlds, the real and the artistic, merged, producing a balance between involvement and aesthetic distance. Typically, at the end of such folk performances, the players join the watching guests at the banquet table; or else, the spectators join the performers in a song or dance. In the Purimspiel, the performance usually ended with players and audience singing together popular, festive or liturgical songs. The audience, no longer an anonymous and passive congregation, having experienced an ad hoc encounter with the theater, now became an intimate group: the family and its invited guests, and the familiar players, members of the community. Such an ending

18 Leksikon fun yidishn teater, ed. Zalmen Zilbercweig, 3rd vol. (New York, Farlag Elisheva, 1959) 1702.

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could be seen as a reintegration of the players with the community and the final transformation of the theatrical space. The dual aspect of the liminal reality, when feast and drinking to the point of inebriation mingled with the sobriety of religion and tradition, enhanced the sense of illusion of the liminoid performance. The continuity of theater as an institution is associated with a stable, defined space. Yet even without a place set aside for performance, without a stage, scenery, a dedicated building or an organized audience, the Jewish folk play, the Purimspiel, a “poor” theater, stripped down to its basics, nevertheless endured, thanks to a blurred space that brought the spectators into the dramatic process, merging the festive ritual and theatrical ritual into a single holiday catharsis. Bibliography Aronson, Arnold. The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1973. Belkin, Ahuva. “ ‘Habit de Fou’ in Purim Spiel?” Assaph C: 2 (1985): 40–55. ——. The Purimspiel: Studies in the Jewish Folk Theatre. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2002. [ Hebrew]. Doniach, N. S. Purim or the Feast of Esther. Philadelphia: The Jewish Society of America, (1933). Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London and New York: Routledge, 1980. Kapper, Sigfried. “Ahasverus—Ein Jüdisches Fastnachtspiel,” Zeitschrift fur Literatur, Kunst und Offentliches Leben IV (Leipzig: Leipzig: Deutsches Museum, 1854): 490–543. Kirby, Michael. “The New Theatre”, The Drama Review 10 (1965): 23–43. ——. “Environmental Theatre.” Total Theatre. Ed. E.T. Kirby. New York: Dutton, 1969. Lavedav, Aaron. “Lavedav dertseylt.” Frove (New York, December 1943) [Yiddish]. Perski, Daniel. “Jolly Purim.” Ha’doar (New York, March 1940) [Hebrew]. Schechner, Richard. “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater.” The Drama Review 12 (1968): 41–46. ——. Environmental Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973. Shmeruk, Chone. “The Beginning of the Purim Play and its Sixteenth Century Remnants.” Yiddish Biblical Plays 1697–1750. Ed. Chone Shmeruk. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, 1979 [Hebrew]. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Zilbercweig, Zalmen, ed. Leksikon fun yidishn teater. Vol. 3. New York: Farlag Elisheva, 1959. [Yiddish].

JACOB GORDIN’S DIALOGUE WITH TOLSTOY: DI KREYTSER SONATA (1902)* Barbara Henry Sex, violence and classical music: Count Lev Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) scandalous Russian novel The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova sonata, 1889) offered all of these to shocked readers in Europe and America. But Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin (1853–1909) went further still when he adapted Tolstoy’s novel for New York’s Thalia Theatre in 1902.1 Into Tolstoy’s already inflammatory polemic, Gordin added immigration, a thwarted conversion to Christianity, two illegitimate pregnancies, agrarian utopianism, a double homicide, and trade unions—as well as several musical numbers. Gordin’s Tolstoyan melodrama proved so popular that it was translated into both English and Russian, was performed on Broadway, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and served as the basis for a silent film.2 Gordin’s works were one of the cornerstones of the American Yiddish repertoire from the 1890s through the first decade of the 20th century. His plays are regarded as the first instances of more naturalistic drama on the Yiddish stage, for their use of colloquial language, contemporary * The present chapter is a substantially revised version of an article, “Tolstoy on the Lower East Side: Di Kreytser Sonata,” published in the Tolstoy Studies Journal 17 (2005): 1–19. 1 Kreytser sonata: a drame in fir aktn fun Yankev Gordin (New York: M. Mayzel, 1907). All subsequent quotations are from this edition. All translations from Yiddish are my own. I have standardized Gordin’s spelling to reflect modern usage. 2 There are two English translations of Gordin’s Kreutzer Sonata, the first by Samuel Schiffman, the second by Langdon Mitchell. The latter was used for the 1906 production at New York’s Lyric Theatre, which proved to be Yiddish actress Bertha Kalich’s (1876–1939) breakthrough English role. The play was revived in 1924, in a production at the Frazee Theatre. Mitchell’s translation was also adapted in 1915 by Herbert Brenon for the film version, starring Nance O’Neil as Ettie (“Miriam”) and Theda Bara as Celia. There are several Russian translations. Za okeanom was translated by S. M. Gennerman and used for a production in 1911 at Moscow’s Korsh Theatre, and for a revival in Petrograd in 1916 at the Teatral’nyi Zal “Pollak.” A second translation (also as Za okeanom), by Z. M. Erukhimovich, was probably used by the Moscow Maly Theatre in 1927. Gordin’s play was also performed in St Petersburg in Yiddish in 1908, 1909, and 1917. The most recent and faithful translation of Gordin’s play, by Ruth Levin, appears in Polveka evreiskogo teatra: 1876–1926, ed. Boris Entin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Paralleli”, 2003).

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settings and focus on modern social problems. Di Kreytser sonata is typical of Gordin’s dramas in that it borrows the structure, themes, and title of a well-known work of non-Jewish literature, shifts the action to contemporary Russia and New York, and uses the borrowed work to address issues of importance to Jewish immigrant audiences. This working method was envisioned as a means of reforming the “low” and “parochial” Yiddish stage through adaptation for it of “high” and “universal” works of secular, non-Jewish art. The practice was meant to signal to Jewish audience members not only the relevance of non-Jewish culture for their own lives, but to assert that they too had a stake in that culture—that it belonged to them as it did to the nations that had created it. Jewish interests were not alien to world culture, but a part of it. To this end, Gordin borrowed freely from a variety of writers, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goethe, and Turgenev, and was always careful to incorporate information on the source within the play itself. Despite its melodramatic turns, the Yiddish Kreytser sonata is a complex interrogation of its source material which aims to pique an audience’s interest in Beethoven and Tolstoy, while illustrating Gordin’s own cherished views on socialism, women’s emancipation, and trade unionism. Of these, only the issue of women’s emancipation features in any meaningful way in Tolstoy’s original, and even then Tolstoy’s arguments can hardly be said to constitute a transparently feminist view. In order to render Tolstoy’s work more conducive to conveying Gordin’s own ideas, the Yiddish playwright substantially reorganizes and reinterprets the source material. The resulting play offers some surprising insights. Di Kreytser sonata presents an original critical perspective on the novel that departs significantly from traditional readings of it as a warning against the fatal link between musical sensuality and human sexuality. Rather, the emphases of Gordin’s play suggest that the novel is really about the dangerous powers of fiction itself, both as art form and as social performance. This idea, in turn, becomes the subject of Gordin’s play, in which he examines the manifold destructive effects of performance, pretense, and literary fiction on one Russian-Jewish immigrant family. The process of “Judaizing” works of non-Jewish literature emerges as a genuine confluence of Jewish and non-Jewish, Russian and American, novelistic and dramatic forms, that yield new insights into the processes of cultural assimilation and adaptation that are the hallmark of the immigrant experience. Jacob Gordin enjoyed a reputation in New York’s immigrant community as a passionate follower of Tolstoy, a renown derived in large

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part from the Yiddish writer’s social and political activism in Ukraine prior to his emigration in 1891. From 1880 until 1891, Gordin had led a Jewish sectarian commune in Ukraine called the “Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood” (Dukhovno-bibleiskoe Bratstvo).3 The Brotherhood rejected Talmudic authority, advocated a return to “pure” biblical Judaism, and urged Jews to take up “productive” agricultural labor, rather than commerce.4 The consonance of the Brotherhood’s ideas with Lev Tolstoy’s own recommendations, from the 1880s on, for spiritual and social renewal, contributed greatly to Gordin’s standing as a Tolstoyan reformer. This link was reinforced by the fact that Tolstoy himself came, as one of Gordin’s biographers, Zalmen Zylbercweig, notes, to be regarded among American Jewish immigrants as the “spiritual father of agricultural sectarians in Tsarist Russia”.5 While Gordin’s Brotherhood initially had more in common with the ideals of Russian For histories of the Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood see N.A. Bukhbinder, “Iz istorii sektantskogo dvizheniya sredi russkikh evreev: Dukhovnobibleiskoe Bratstvo,” Evreiskaya Starina 11 (1918): 238–65; L. Burshtein, “Kistorii ‘Dukhovno-bibleiskogo bratstva,” Perezhitoe 1 (1908): 38–41; John D. Klier, “From Elisavetgrad to Broadway: The Strange Journey of Iakov Gordin” Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert. (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003) 113–125; Ezekiel Lifschutz, “Jacob Gordin’s Proposal to Extablish an Agricultural Colony,” The Jewish Experience in America, Vol. 4. Era of Immigration. (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1969) 252–64; A.S. Prugavin, “Dukhovno-bibleiskoe bratstvo. (Ocherk evreiskogo religioznogo dvizheniya)”, Istoricheskii Vestnik 18.11 (1884): 398–410; 18.12 (1884): 632–49. Lifschutz (1969), Prugavin (1884). 4 This idea had been a feature of Haskalah discourse since the 18th century, when it was argued that turning Jews to agriculture would relieve Jewish-Gentile tensions by relocating urban Jews to rural areas, and demonstrate that Jews were capable of more than “parasitic” occupations. As early as 1781, the German legal scholar and friend of Moses Mendelssohn, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820) argued for such a plan in his “Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews” (reprinted in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 32–3. Similar ideas were taken up in Russia in 1802, when Alexander I convened a special committee to investigate the possibility of settling Jews on the land in the southern territories of Novorossiya, annexed under Catherine II. From 1807 until 1866, the Tsarist government offered various (and inconsistent) monetary incentives and military exemptions to Jews who settled on the land in Podolsk, Bessarabia, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav guberniyas. By the time the Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood was formed in 1880, Kherson guberniya was home to twenty Jewish agricultural colonies. After the pogroms of 1881, however, the Russian government forbade further Jewish settlement outside of shtetlakh, a move that doomed the Brotherhood’s repeated attempts to buy land for farming. For an authoritative history of the Jewish agricultural movement in Russia in the 19th century. See V. N. Nikitin, Evrei zemledel’tsy: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel’noe, administrativnoe i bytovoe polozhenie kolonii so vremeni ikh vozniknoveniya do nashikh dnei. 1807–1887 (St. Petersburg: Tipographiya Gazety “Novosti”, 1887). 5 Zalmen Zylbercweig, ed. “Gordin, Yankev,” Leksikon fun yidishn teater, vol. 1 (New York: Farlag “Elisheva” 1964) 86. 3

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Populism and an established tradition of Jewish agricultural settlement than with Tolstoy, as Tolstoy’s reputation as a moral philosopher grew, the linkage of Gordin’s group with Tolstoyanism was inevitable.6 Gordin did not abandon his agrarian dreams when he arrived in New York in July of 1891. Within weeks, Gordin applied to the Baron de Hirsch Fund, a charitable organization responsible for the creation of the Jewish Woodbine Colony in New Jersey. Given the precarious success of Woodbine, and the failure of other Jewish agricultural colonies in Kansas, Oregon and South Dakota, it is not surprising that Gordin’s application was rejected.7 Following this bitter disappointment, Gordin attempted to earn a living as a journalist for New York’s Russian6 There were real links between Gordin’s Brotherhood and Tolstoy, but these dated to June 1885, when Isaak Borisovich Fainerman (1863–1925), who would become a leading member of Gordin’s sect, made a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy. Fainerman remained in the area with his wife, living among the peasants and engaging in manual labor, and was baptised in August, with Tatiana L’vovna Tolstaya standing as his godmother. See N. Gusey, Letopis’zhizni i tvorshestva L.N. Tolstogo, 1828–1919 (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiya, 1936) 336. His conversion was undertaken so that he might teach at Yasnaya Polyana’s school. Fainerman’s time at Yasnaya Polyana coincided with visits by William Frey (1839–1888, born Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins), a Russian-born non-Jew who was the revered leader of Jewish agricultural settlements in the United States (see Avrahm Yarmolinsky, A Russian’s American Dream: A Memoir on William Frey (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1965). The twin presence of Fainerman and Frey may explain certain of Tolstoy’s remarks in Chapter XVII of What Then Must We Do? Discussing the ideal agricultural community, Tolstoy notes that such colonies do in fact exist: “I am not fantasizing when speaking of such societies of men, but am describing what has always taken place and which is taking place now not only among Russian settlers but everywhere, where the natural qualities of man are as yet unviolated” Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90-i tomakh, akademicheskoe yubileinoe izdanie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1928–1958) 25:250 [This publication is listed in subsequently notes as PSS]. After joining the Brotherhood in the late 1880s, Fainerman continued to correspond with Tolstoy, and Tolstoy’s circle provided crucial financial support for Fainerman’s agricultural projects. In December 1889, Fainerman leased the shtetl Glodosy in the Ukraine, and settled there with a small group of the Brotherhood’s adherents. Gordin was not among them. The venture was short-lived, and Fainerman and his followers returned after several months to the original Elisavetgrad group (Gusev 1936, 413; Lifschutz 258; Ob obshchestve Elizavetgradskom Dukhovno-bibleiskom bratstve. GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow) Fond 102, 3-e deloproizvodstvo, opis’ 87, 1889, ed. khr. 606 (1, 2); Ob obshchestve Elizavetgradskom Dukhovno-bibleiskom bratstve. GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow) Fond 102, 3-e deloproizvodstvo, opis’ 87, 1889, ed. khr. 606 (1, 2) 67). 7 The history of Jewish agricultural colonies in the US has been extensively researched. Among the many works devoted to the topic, both on Frey’s colonies, those of Am Olam, and the de Hirsch Fund, see Brandes, in association with Martin Douglas, Immigrants to Freedom: Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey Since 1882 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), Uri D. Herscher, Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America 1880–1910 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981; Ellen

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language newspapers. When this did not prove financially feasible either, Gordin took up a career as a playwright for the entirely disreputable Yiddish theatre; to this undertaking he brought the full force of his Russian Populist and Maskilic sympathies. Gordin is widely regarded as a “reformer” for his use of standard Yiddish, rather than the artificial, Germanized dialect (“daytshmerish”) that had been the theatrical norm, and for his efforts to treat the theatre as a forum for education, as well as entertainment.8 As part of this acculturating mission, Tolstoy was an obvious and bankable source for adaptations. In common with Anglophone America of the period, public interest in the Yiddish community in Tolstoy’s art and politics ran high. Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata itself had been available in Yiddish translation since 1895.9 Yiddish speakers could read translations of Tolstoy’s complete works, see stage adaptations of Resurrection, Yiddish-language productions of A Living Corpse, and Gordin’s own translation of The Power of Darkness.10 The Socialist daily Forverts (Forward) offered volumes

Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural colonies in New Jersey, 1882–1920 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995). 8 For English-language accounts of Gordin’s place in the American Yiddish theatre see: Joel Berkowitz, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); David S. Lifson, The Yiddish Theatre in America (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965); Leonard Prager, “Of Parents and Children: Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear” American Quarterly 18: 3 (1966): 506–16; Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); JudithThissen, “Reconsidering the Decline of the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s,” Theatre Survey 44: 2 (2003): 173–97. See Berkowitz (2002), Lifson (1965), Prager (1966), Sandrow (1977, 1996), Thissen (2003) for English-language accounts of Gordin’s place in the American Yiddish theatre. For Yiddish-language accounts, see B. Gorin, Di geshikhte fun yidishn teater (New York: Literarisher Farlag, 1918), Kalmen Marmor, Yankev gordin (New York: YKUF, 1953); M. Winchevsky, A tog mit yankev gordin (New York: M. Mayzel, 1909); Zylbercweig Leksikon; Zalmen Zylbercweig, Di velt fun yankev gordin (TelAviv: Hadfus “Orli”, 1964). 9 The first Yiddish translation appeared in 1895 in Abraham Cahan’s monthly Di Tsukunft (The Future), in Cahan’s own translation (under the pseudonym David Bernstein). Nina Warnke notes that another translation of The Kreutzer Sonata was published in 1899, in a translation by Dovid Hermalin. Abraham Cahan’s translation was republished in 1910 in the Forverts (Forward) as part of an ongoing posthumous tribute to Tolstoy. In addition, the catalogues of The Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) list translations of The Kreutzer Sonata in 1906, 1911, 1914, and 1929, in addition to collected Yiddish editions of Tolstoy’s work, which included The Kreutzer Sonata. 10 There is some disagreement as to when this production ran, and what it was called. The actress Bessie Thomashefsky’s memoirs, cited by Zylbercweig in Leksikon 424 list Gordin’s translation as Di makht fun finsternish, and date it to 1902. But B. Gorin is cited by Zylbercweig as noting the play as Di finsternish in rusland, and dating its opening to 1905.

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of Tolstoy as a subscription incentive, while the Yiddish press published interviews with Tolstoy and assiduously reported his pronouncements on war, patriotism, the Russian government, and his excommunication by the Orthodox Church.11 For New York’s Yiddish press, Tolstoy was the model of an artist’s commitment to literature, social justice, and personal integrity.12 In radical circles of the Jewish intelligentsia, Steven Cassedy notes: [. . .] Tolstoy was a hero both because of what they perceived as either anarchist or socialist views in his writings and because of his undying commitment to the welfare of the Russian peasants; to others he was a false prophet; to political moderates and conservatives, he was an object of curiosity as the head of a growing international movement; to all, he was a powerful symbol of resistance.13

The American journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869–1944), author of a series of sensitive profiles of the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side’s Russian-Jewish immigrants, found that Russian radicals “look up to Tolstoi and Chekhov, and reject all principles founded upon more romantic and genial models.”14 Jacob Gordin, a prominent member of the socialist intelligentsia in New York, was known as a particularly committed Tolstoyan. Gordin’s admiration for Tolstoy, however, did not imply reflexive obeisance to all of the Russian writer’s positions. While Gordin was a tireless champion of Tolstoy the artistic genius, his attitude towards Tolstoy the moralist was more measured, and Gordin’s play itself demonstrates a combative engagement with Tolstoy’s homonymous original.15 11 Among the many articles on Tolstoy in Forverts, see “Tolstoi in kampf,” 18 Mar. 1901: 1; “Tolstoi oysgevizn fun rusland,” 2 Apr. 1901: 1; “Tolstoi tsum tsar,” 21 Apr. 1901: 1; “Tolstoi vegn amerike—an interviu,” 2 Oct. 1901: 4; “Sholem Aleichem un Tolstoi,” 19 Jul. 1903: 4. In Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Worker’s Newspaper): Kh. Aleksandrov, “Tkhies hameysim: Tolstois letster roman,” 11 Mar. 11, 1900: 4; “Graf Tolstoi in kheyrem,” 10 Mar. 1901: 1; “Tolstois protest-briv,” 16 Aug. 1901:1. 12 See A. Cahan, “Realistishe literature: Zol der shrayber zikh araynmishn in bild?” Forverts, 17 Dec. 1903: 4–5; “In vos beshteyt Tolstois groskayt?” Forverts, 23 Nov. 1910: 4; “Tolstois groskayt als a shrayber,” Forverts, 24 Nov. 1910: 4, 8; M. Rozenfeld, “Ruslands neyr-tomed: Gedankn iber Graf Tolstoi,” Forverts, 19 Nov. 1910: 4. 13 Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 92. 14 Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967) 199. 15 An article from 1904 on “Realism and Romanticism” regretfully categorizes contemporary Tolstoy as an adherent of the latter. For Gordin, romanticism was an inherently religious sensibility, concerned with distant ideals and impossible utopias, rather than with empirical realities. The Tolstoy of War and Peace was a realist, but “Tolstoy has become a romantic in his old age. He has begun longing for the old

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Some of the arguments presented in the Russian novel, regarding the economic exploitation of women by men (and that of Jews by Gentiles) were wholly in accordance with Gordin’s own views.16 But Gordin was as staunch an advocate of “free love” as he was of Beethoven’s music, and his play finds neither guilty of inciting the violence and depravity with which they are associated in Tolstoy’s novel. Instead, Gordin’s play finds literary fiction and “fictions” in general to be more culpable in the violent conclusion of his play. Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata takes the form of a long monologue by a repellent anti-hero, Pozdnyshev, an acquitted wife-murderer who relates the tale of his stormy marriage to an unnamed narrator whom he encounters on a train-trip. This framing device brackets a tale that begins with Pozdnyshev’s recollection of his dissolute youth, spent drinking, gambling, and frequenting brothels. He finds nothing shameful in his way of life, nor does he find it absurd that what he allows himself he would not tolerate in a prospective wife. Still, Pozdnyshev wishes the innocent young girl to whom he becomes engaged to know what his life has been like before marriage, and he shows her his diary. Although she is horrified by his promiscuity, she does not break off the engagement. The marriage that follows is not a happy one, but every bout of rage, jealousy and hate is followed by an equally fiery reconciliation, and Pozdnyshev comes to believe that this is the normal state of marriage. Sexual passion merely masks the hate that Pozdnyshev and his wife come to feel for each other. Children are born, but this does little to quell the couple’s enmity. After one difficult birth, the wife—who is never named in the novel—is advised to have no more children. Her doctors instruct her on means of contraception, and Pozdnyshev is horrified to see how happily she embraces this option. No longer hampered by yearly pregnancies, Pozdnyshev’s wife finds more time to enjoy herself, and she takes up the piano once more. Her interest in

Christian past” (Gordin, Ale shriftn fun yankev gordin, vol. 4 (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1910) 180). 16 Gordin first gained notice (and the Jewish public’s justified ire) in Russia for an “open letter to Russian Jewry”, published in Elisavetgradskie Vedomosti and Yuzhnii Krai in 1881, after the outbreak of anti-Jewish pogroms in April 1881. Signed “A Biblical Brother”, the letter argued that Russia’s Jews had brought the hostilities on themselves by engaging in repugnant commercial trades and by their haughty indifference to the non-Jewish majority. The letter was widely marked in the Russian and Jewish press, and was the subject of a scathing editorial in the journal that also reprinted it, Russkii Evrei 3 September 1881: 1424–26.

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music brings a violinist called Trukhachevsky into the family circle. The two begin to practice Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” for an informal recital. Their musical collaboration leads to Pozdnyshev’s suspecting that his wife and the violinist are lovers. There is never any evidence that this is actually true, and Pozdnyshev leaves for a few days on a business trip. While away, he receives a letter from his wife that mentions that the violinist stopped by to drop off some sheet music. Inexplicably enraged, Pozdnyshev returns home, travelling day and night, arriving home late in the evening. He finds his wife having dinner alone with Trukhachevsky, and, in a fury, he stabs her to death. Only when she lies dying is Pozdnyshev able to see her as a human being, and not as a sexual object. The lesson that Pozdnyshev draws from these events is that marriage demeans both men and women because it legitimizes the destructive sexual instinct. Sexual passion prevents men and women from seeing each other as human beings; only when it is conquered can human beings devote themselves to fulfilling God’s “true plan”—altruistic connection with one another, empathy, and the betterment of human lives. It would be better to live an entirely chaste life, argued Tolstoy himself in a afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata, than to give in to the erotic desires that dehumanize men and women alike. Both Tolstoy and his spokesman Pozdnyshev implicate disparate social and cultural institutions in the pernicious campaign to legitimize sexual passion. The Christian church’s elevation of marriage to a sacrament, over-stimulating arts such as music, duplicitous literary fiction, provocative dress-making, rich foods, indolence, and contraception all contribute to the dehumanization of women, and invite women’s retributive exploitation of men through mens’ own sexual weaknesses. Each form of sensual aesthetic stimulation—particularly that offered by the arts—is a diversion that makes possible a universal avoidance of the “truth” that sexuality is a force of destruction, not love. It is Pozdnyshev’s self-appointed task to reveal the “truth” of our dissembling and the toll that it exacts. Music, long the object of Tolstoy’s troubled affections and repudiations, is impugned in The Kreutzer Sonata as the most “dangerous” art, the one most likely to rouse unproductive emotions and license unseemly appetites of the kind that lead Pozdnyshev to murder. Many critical analyses of the work take their cue from Tolstoy himself regarding the novel’s thematic foci.17 The novel’s title reflects its aesthetic preoccupations 17 See Caryl Emerson’s “What Is Art? and The Anxiety of Music.” Russian Literature 40 (1996): 433–50; and “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics: A Harmony and Translation of the Five

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and structure, and Tolstoy’s own numerous pronouncements on music, both in his letters and diaries, and in the theoretical tract, What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo? 1898), are an important component in the analysis of this work. Gordin’s adaptation of Tolstoy, however, absolves music of any destructive role in instigating or abetting the murders with which Kreytser Sonata concludes. This is only one of many points on which Gordin parts ways with Tolstoy. Where Tolstoy indicts church-sanctioned sexual oppression in marriage, Gordin rails against the hypocrisy of Jewish patriarchal authority. Where Tolstoy argues for chastity, Gordin advocates sexual emancipation and intermarriage. And where Tolstoy implicates music in his novel’s violent end, Gordin uses Tolstoy’s own Kreutzer Sonata as an agent of revelation, and destruction. Gordin’s play is set first in the Russian Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century. At rise, Ettie Friedlander has tried to convert to Christianity in order to marry her Russian officer lover, by whom she is pregnant. The plan is foiled, and in despair, Ettie’s lover kills himself. In order to protect the family reputation, Ettie’s father, Raphael, plans to marry her to an ambitious musician, Gregor Fiedler, and pack them both off to America. “There no one will ask when you were married, and no one will count the months after the wedding.”18 When informed of her fate, Ettie, nervously clutching a book, dutifully agrees to the plan: Ettie: As you think best, Papa. (She presses the book to her heart.) Raphael: (in a friendly tone) Well, why are you standing? Sit down. (She sits) What is that book? Ettie: This is volume eleven of Tolstoy’s works . . . in this book . . . I will tell you the truth, Papa . . . ( frightened) Raphael: (warmly) There, there, now, you can talk calmly about a book. What is it?

Senses.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 12 (2000): 9–17; David Herman, “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata.” Slavic Review 56: 1 (1997): 15–36; Liza Knapp, “Tolstoy on Musical Mimesis: Platonic Aesthetics and Erotics in The Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 4 (1991): 25–42; Ruth Rischin, “Allegro Tumultuosissimamente: Beethoven in Tolstoy’s Fiction,” In the Shade of the Giant Ed. Hugh Maclean. California Slavic Studies 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 12–60; Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus: Slavica, 1991); Janneke Van de Stadt, “Narrative, Music, and Performance: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and the Example of Beethoven,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 12 (2000): 57–69. 18 Kreytser 1907 10.

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Raphael hands the book—whose powers are such that merely holding it forces Ettie to tell the “truth”—to Ettie’s poisonous younger sister, Celia, as Ettie cannot be trusted with such stirring material. Ettie symbolically buries her past in the novel by putting her lover’s photograph and his last letter to her in its pages, and she resolves to make amends. She will do her father’s bidding, provide her child with a father, and preserve the family honor by fleeing to New York. Before marrying, Ettie confesses her sins to Gregor in a manner that recalls Pozdnyshev’s (and Tolstoy’s own) confession to his fiancée. Gregor, however, is unfazed by Ettie’s sexual indiscretion: “Ah, who among us has not had love affairs? And how many love affairs! As I live and breathe, I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been in love.” Gregor is more disturbed, though, when he learns that his fiancée is pregnant, a circumstance that will become a source of bitter recriminations as the play unfolds. Ettie swears that she will be faithful to Gregor, but warns that she will never love him. For now, Gregor reckons that Ettie’s generous dowry provides sufficient compensation for a loveless marriage. Seven years later, Ettie, her son Albert, and Gregor are living in Manhattan, where Gregor is the director of a musical conservatory. The rest of the Friedlander and Fiedler families join them in America. Ephraim, Gregor’s exuberant klezmer musician father, struggles with the regulations and fees of the musician’s union. Ettie’s father, Raphael, buys a farm in Connecticut and tries to live a Tolstoyan dream of agrarian redemption. The farm is losing money and alienating his family, who are baffled as to why a once-wealthy businessman needs to spend his twilight years working the land in rural Connecticut. The family spends as much time as possible in the city, where Celia and Gregor carry on a torrid affair while rehearsing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Beethoven’s work figures in a musical competition between Ephraim, Gregor, and Celia. Following Ephraim’s performance of a soulful

19

Ibid. 11.

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klezmer variation, Gregor and Celia enter the fray with the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata—including the Presto that is the object of Pozdnyshev’s most hysterical fears. Embodying Tolstoy’s characterization of a “good” artist—Ephraim—the authentic folk musician is spontaneous, sincere, and joyous. But Gregor and Celia—depraved, cynical, trained professionals—do not entirely conform to the image of “bad” artists that Tolstoy outlined in What Is Art? In Gordin’s play, “bad” artists may be morally corrupt, but they are nonetheless entrusted with introducing the audience to secular, non-Jewish music. The music itself is impervious to corruption, even though it requires a performer as mediator between artist and audience. Ettie finds that when her spouse plays Beethoven, he is transformed, and she forgets all the anguish that he has caused her. On learning the sonata’s title, Ettie says to herself, “The Kreutzer Sonata! The book . . . I need to find it and finish it . . .”20 Out of sight of others, Celia tells Gregor, “When we were playing the sonata I suddenly recalled how Tolstoy described the effect their playing had on his heroes . . . My heart suddenly began racing and the sweet sounds began to merge with the fire in your eyes . . . Were you to always play that way, I would always love you . . .”21 It is not Beethoven’s music, but Tolstoy’s novel that impresses Ettie and Celia; the latter sees Pozdnyshev’s unnamed wife and the violinist Trukhachevsky as the “heroes” (“heldn”) of the novel, and casts herself and Gregor in their roles. When Ettie spies the two embracing, she extracts a promise from her sister that she will end the affair—a promise Celia does not keep. Act Three is set on Raphael’s farm at Christmastime, where Ettie finds her copy of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and rereads her lover’s letter, “I will relive the whole terrible drama again, and then I will destroy it, purge everything, forget . . .”22 Gazing at her dead love’s photograph, Ettie reflects, “I belong now to another, to whom I have sworn to be true.” Gregor catches Ettie reading the letter, and snatches it from her, but Ettie betrays a will of steel and commands him to return it. Somewhat fearfully, Gregor does as she wishes. The act includes a raucous scene of song and dance involving caroling farmers, the performance

20 21 22

Ibid. 38. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 52.

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of a wistful song by Ettie, and Celia’s revelation to Gregor that she is pregnant. The final act takes place months later, in Ephraim’s fledgling music school. Raphael has come into town for supplies, and to beg Gregor for money to save the farm. Gregor refuses, and swans off to the opera with Celia, who is lately returned to New York after an unexplained absence of several months. When it is revealed that Gregor and Celia are actually visiting their illegitimate child, Ettie confronts them. She has until now tried to ignore their continued affair, out of a feeling that she, of all people, has no right to cast stones. But this revelation pushes Ettie over the edge. Why does Celia suffer no consequences, while she, Ettie, has endured such torment and misery for her own transgressions? Hysterically, she cries, “That was your last lie! There will be no more lies!” [. . .] Did you think that you’d live out your whole life with opera, songs, and lies? There are no more songs! The terrible end is coming!”23 Gregor tries to calm Ettie by claiming, “Only you are dear to me, only you are truly mine!” But Ettie answers: Ettie: Yours? I know what it means to be “yours”! Your property! My body belongs to you! My body has belonged to you since I was born and will belong to you until I die! When you need my body, you say you love me. When you say you love me, you need my body! You say you’ll protect me, that I am dear to you—like any piece of property! My body interested you, but you murdered my soul every day ten times over! With every look you trampled my human feelings underfoot! For nearly ten years I’ve lived with you, and for not even a minute have you ever thought of me as a person—only as a woman, as a wife, as a servant! You never would or could understand me. You never would or could know what I’ve endured in that time. I swore to endure and keep silent—I have been silent and borne more than I needed! Enough! No longer will I be a piece of property to be trod on and degraded! No! No more!24 Gordin’s gender-switch has the effect of rendering Ettie both Pozdnyshev and his nameless wife, an element that Celia notes, and to which she responds by laughing mockingly and accusing her sister of poaching this

23 24

Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90.

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Figure 2. Bertha Kalich (1874–1939), who played Ettie in both Yiddish and English versions of Di kreytser sonata (1902) pictured on the cover of The Theatre ( July 1905).

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speech from Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. Ettie warns Celia to stop laughing, and seizes a bottle of carbolic acid from the bag of supplies that Raphael has left on the piano. Ettie threatens to burn out her sister’s eyes “so that you can’t look at other people’s husbands!” If Celia is hideous to men, screams Ettie, perhaps then she will remember that she is a mother. When Gregor and Celia wrest the bottle of acid from her, Ettie reaches for Raphael’s loaded revolver, also lying (conveniently) on the piano. She shoots Gregor and then pumps the remaining five bullets into Celia. The curtain falls as Ettie collapses, delirious, crying to her nanny that she cannot see. The audience is left not knowing Ettie’s ultimate fate. Clearly, Gordin’s play is far from a straightforward transfer of Tolstoy’s novel to the Yiddish stage. Rather, Gordin’s treatment emphasizes those aspects of the original text that coincide with his own aesthetic and political sympathies. Particularly striking in this respect is his exoneration of Beethoven’s “terrible” sonata. On one level this is not surprising, given that music features prominently in nearly every one of Gordin’s plays.25 Yet while Yiddish theatrical convention all but required some musical elements, the symbolic significance that Gordin attaches to music in his plays suggests that his use of it was less a capitulation to public demand than a conscious aesthetic strategy. Indeed, in an essay entitled “Drama”, Gordin describes the range and depth of the playwright’s art itself in musical terms. He aligns the playwright with the pianist, a solitary voice that blends with the orchestra but nonetheless remains a distinct, guiding presence: The piano is a unified entity, a common force of sounds. The talented pianist commands a great sea of sweet, strong, and powerful tones; he

25 Gordin’s Russian writings also reveal a strong interest in and love for music. An early series of sketches for the St. Petersburg newspaper, Nedelya, “Tipy shtundistov” (15: 518–24; 24: 679–86; 35: 1158–62, 1884), feature folk and spiritual songs as expressions of faith and integrity. In Gordin’s story cycle, “Evreiskie siluety”, serialized in Nedelya’s literary supplement, Knizhki Nedeli, heroes are always possessed of good singing voices and musical talent. In Gordin’s Yiddish treatment of the Faust legend, God, Man, and Devil (1900; published as Got, mentsh un tayvl: drama in 4 aktn mit a prolog, New York: Internatsyonale Biblyotek Pablishing Komp., 1903), the protagonist’s violin is the voice of his soul, and its silencing coincides with his own corruption. Zelig Itsik the Fiddler (unpublished, manuscript copy at YIVO, in the Jacob Gordin Papers), an adaptation of Schiller’s Kabal und Liebe, features a violinist as tragi-comic hero, and the heroine of Khasye the Orphan Girl (1903; published as Di yesoyme: drama in fir aktn fun yankev gordin. spetsyele geshribn far madam k. liptsin. New York: no publisher listed, 1903), sings Russian songs until she is silenced by family betrayal.

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harmonizes, creates varied combinations, and plays on all manner of feelings . . . Among the arts, the drama occupies a position that is analogous to that of the piano among musical instruments. The playwright has all of the arts at his command. He has in his hands an immense sea of disparate psychological tones; he an ocean of colors, a world of feelings and ideas. He has only to combine these to suit his own desires . . .26

Gordin’s Kreutzer Sonata features both “bad” musicians and “good” ones, but no morally corrupting forces are attributed to the works of Beethoven, or even to the opera (Tolstoy’s most despised musical form for its artifice and excess), which makes a late appearance in Act Four. Rather, it is literary fiction, and in particular, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, that play a pivotal role in the play’s violent dénouement. From her first appearance, clutching a volume of Tolstoy, Ettie Friedlander demonstrates a powerful identification with fiction, such that her father has to confiscate the offending material, lest it prove too stimulating in her vulnerable state. But it is too late—Tolstoy has awakened her to the ugly truth of human relations, and no amount of pretense can now conceal it. Though Ettie acts as a dutiful daughter, devoted mother, and obedient wife, her family regards her as simply playing a role. She is accused of reiterating an “old routine” (“an alte shtik”),27 of behaving like a “big hero” (“a gantser held”).28 As Ettie begins to unravel she intones, “I am afraid I will depart from my role . . . the end is coming! The end! The end!” (“Ikh hob moyre, ikh vel aroys fun mayn role . . . der sof kumt! Di ende! Di ende!”).29 Ettie herself sees that she is playing a role, and goes so far as to emphasize the Germanic “ende”, used to describe dramatic and novelistic “ends”, in contrast with the more conversational Hebraic “sof ”.30 Part of the failure of her performance owes to the incompatibility of Ettie’s adopted roles with the one that has been established for her from Act One, that of the “fallen woman”. Fallen women are traditionally accorded few narrative options in 19th century fiction—social exclusion, removal of their children, death, or all three, as in the case of Tolstoy’s own Anna Karenina. As a woman of the 20th century, Ettie suffers none of the traditional consequences that are the fallen

26 27 28 29 30

Gordin 1910 53. Kreytser 1907 31. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 80.

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woman’s lot—she departs from this “role” as well. Ettie’s final act of rebellion is to depart even from the role of Pozdnyshev’s wife, to take up that of Pozdnyshev himself. This act of literary homage, which would appear to confirm age-old Platonic suspicions of the perilous powers of mimesis, reflects the symbolic and practical functions that Gordin’s play assigns to Tolstoy’s novel. The novel is an agent of revelation; a repository for Ettie’s memories, romantic dreams and ideals; a catalyst for family antagonism, and finally a model for conduct. It is a far more potent and volatile work than Beethoven’s, and is the real focus and namesake of Gordin’s play. Ettie is many respects an “ideal reader”, in that she finds Tolstoy’s novel so distressing (“it makes life so ugly, so much uglier than I had thought before”). This is exactly the reaction that Tolstoy intended it to have. Awakening readers to the lies that surround them was the first step to seeing the “truth” and making efforts to live by that truth—which in Tolstoy’s case meant his heretical variety of revisionist, radical Christianity. Yet the means through which this awakening is effected—literary fiction—was fundamentally suspect. Tolstoy’s own grave doubts about literary fiction’s suitability as a vehicle for aesthetic and moral reform led him in the 1880s to repudiate his own novels, including Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as “bad” works of art that served no redeeming social or aesthetic purpose. While Kreutzer Sonata’s enlightening mission presumably absolved it of charges of also being a “bad” work of art, its medium nevertheless remained open to suspicion. Gordin’s dramatic emphasis on the potential of literary fiction to act as a stimulant to extreme action is one measure of just how dangerous it could be. His play draws attention to this anti-literary aspect of Tolstoy’s original, an attribute that has been little remarked upon in critical literature. Pozdnyshev, the anti-hero of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, himself despises narrative fiction, which he accuses of fostering illusions in its gullible readers. In answer to a remark that love is a preference for one person for one’s whole life, Pozdnyshev snorts, “Oh, but that happens only in novels and never in real life. In real life this preference for one over another might last for years—that’s very rare—more often for a few months, or perhaps for a few weeks, days, or hours,” he said, evidently aware that he was astonishing everyone with his views, and was pleased by this. (Tolstoy, PSS 27: 13)31 31 I am indebted to one of the Tolstoy Studies Journal’s anonymous readers for this observation. Poetry that suggested that there was truth to be found in ancient literature,

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Pozdnyshev continues his anti-literary tirade in a speech about novels’ contributing to the fiction of male chastity before marriage. Pozdnyshev complains that men are “married” dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of times before they are legally wed: And everybody knows this and pretends not to know it. In all the novels they describe in detail the heroes’ feelings, and the ponds and bushes by which they walk, but when describing their great love for some maiden, nothing is written about what has happened to him, this interesting hero, before: not a word about his frequenting certain houses, or about maids, cooks, other people’s wives. If there are such improper novels, then they’re not put into the hands of those who most need to know all of this—unmarried girls. In front of these girls they first pretend that this debauchery, which fills half the life of our towns and even villages, does not exist at all. Then we are so accustomed to this pretense that finally, like the English, we ourselves truly begin to believe that we are all moral people and live in a moral world.32

As the passage continues, Pozdnyshev’s diary—ostensibly a work of non-fiction—is accorded powers of revelatory truth that counter the illusions of fiction. In contrast, Gordin’s play uses fiction itself—Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata—as a source of terrible truths. Where Tolstoy and Gordin converge is in their confidence that fiction has the power to affect conduct. Pozdnyshev’s vile fictions are complicit in the social conspiracy that hoodwinks innocent girls into depraved marriages. Ettie’s reading reveals to her the scope of this conspiracy, but offers her no escape route from it save by the violent means that Pozdnyshev himself takes. In Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnyshev’s loathing of the lies and “pretense” (pritvorstvo) that he finds in literary fiction extends to all activities invested with any degree of artifice—be it the arts, personal appearance, or social relations. He draws no distinction between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of pretense, takes no account of the blurring of the feigned and the creative.33 Novels, plunging necklines, and arranged

but not in contemporary works: Even if one allows that Menelaus might prefer Helen for his whole life, Helen would prefer Paris, and that is how it always was and is in the world. It cannot be any other way, any more than there can be two marked peas lying side by side in a cartload of peas. Besides, it is not just the unlikelihood of this, but the inevitable satiety of Helen with Menelaus or vice versa. The only difference is that with one it comes earlier and with the other, later. It is only in stupid novels that they write that they loved one another their whole lives. And only children can believe that (Tolstoy, PSS, 27: 295–6). In the final version of the novel, the epic received no dispensation from the accusation that fiction fosters lies. 32 Tolstoy, PSS 27: 21–2. 33 His morbid preoccupation with pretense merges most vehemently with his loathing of the visual display of performance, rather than with the aural experience of music,

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marriages are all symptoms of the same disease to Pozdnyshev. Music only becomes a source of Pozdnyshev’s anxiety in the latter half of the novel because experience of it does not exist outside of performance, and for Pozdnyshev, performance is indivisible from pretense. These anxieties surface when his wife meets Trukhachevsky, the violinist. Their excitement at playing together is conveyed not through music, but through visual exchanges, which Pozdnyshev takes for feigning: But catching sight of me, she immediately understood my feeling and changed her expression, and a game of mutual deception began. I smiled pleasantly, pretending that I liked it very much. He, looking at my wife as all lechers look at beautiful women, pretended that he was only interested in the topic of conversation—namely, that which no longer interested him at all. She tried to seem indifferent, though my false smile of jealousy, which was familiar to her, and his lewd gaze, evidently excited her.34

Pozdnyshev’s tirade against the “irritating” properties of music—which make him feel what he does not truly feel, understand what he does not truly understand, and do what he is normally incapable of doing—is not, however a spur to his jealous rage, but a brief, if illusory, respite from it. Far from providing him with a license to kill, the music awakens in Pozdnyshev a feeling of joy. Similarly, in Gordin’s play, Ettie is able to forget who Gregor is when he plays the piano, and forgive him—for a time—for his ill-treatment of her. Her murderous rage is not triggered by Beethoven, or even by Tolstoy, but by the lies that Gregor and Celia tell about their affair. This echoes Pozdnyshev’s own burst of homicidal rage, which also takes place after a period of seeming calm. After the recital, Pozdnyshev leaves on a business trip, still “in the very best and calmest of moods”.35 His mood is altered disastrously, though, by the receipt of a letter from his wife. He regards the letter as a duplicitous fiction, much as he regarded the narrative fiction that he dismissed as “pretense” in the first chapter of the novel. The next morning he dashes off to Moscow, where he stabs his wife to death.

a trait which is emphasized through pervasive references in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata to “appearances” actual and metaphoric. Indeed, the novel’s very first lines point to the fatal role of the visual in determining its murderous conclusion. The biblical epigraph from Matthew 5:28, “But I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” presents the eye, not the ear, as the agent of the adulterous fall. 34 Tolstoy, PSS 27: 53. 35 Tolstoy, PSS 27: 63.

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For Jacob Gordin, condemnation of “performance” and “pretense” is of course more problematic in the theatre, an art that relies entirely on obfuscating the distinctions between what is, and what appears to be. In Gordin’s Kreutzer Sonata, “pretense” and “role-play” do not lead to a critique of the theatrical medium itself, but refer instead to the veneer of bourgeois propriety that the Friedlanders work furiously to sustain. Pretense is the foundation of the social code that necessitates Ettie’s unhappy marriage, the family’s immigration to the U.S., the lies surrounding her son’s parentage, and the concealment of Celia and Gregor’s own child. Shoring up this façade is his characters’ attachment to status symbols such as titles, reputations, costly clothing and jewelry, which lend the appearance of successful assimilation into Russian and then American society. The villainous Gregor works the most successful transformation, remaking himself as the spurious “Professor Fiedler”, establishing his own conservatory, cutting off ties with his embarrassingly humble parents, and lavishing expensive gowns on the indifferent Ettie, while refusing to loan her desperate father the money that he needs. Money itself is the measure of Ettie’s existence and the instrument of her fate—she is the sum of her dowry and the price of passage to New York, where “no one will count” the months to determine the true date of her son’s conception. Numbers themselves are a recurring motif in the play, reflecting the characters’ obsessive concern for money and status. Figures tally the number of Gregor’s lovers, the cost of Raphael’s watch, the streets of midtown Manhattan, the acreage of Raphael’s farm, the taxes owed on it, and the miles from Russia to America. Ettie is even given to paraphrasing Pozdnyshev himself, who is fond of quoting invented statistics and percentages to support his outrageous remarks. Ettie notes of her married life, “As always, two days in love, two weeks of conflict. [. . .] Of a thousand married couples, as I see it, nine-hundred and ninety live as I do.”36 The surfeit of numbers in Gordin’s play at times approaches the absurd, as when Ettie and Celia’s ne’er-do-well brother, Samuel, asks Raphael: “Papa, why do you need the farm? With your capital you could have seventy-seven thousand businesses right here in New York. When there was a panic on the stockmarket my broker made eighty-four thousand dollars in exactly sixty-five minutes—eighty-four thousand to a cent, I swear.”37

36 37

Kreyster 1907, 48. Ibid. 41.

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Natasha, the Friedlanders’ faithful Russian peasant nanny, argues with Celia in the play’s opening exchanges about the girl’s age—is she seventeen or eighteen? Celia snarls, “You can’t even count past eleven.”38 Natasha’s ignorance of numbers is also played for laughs, as when she reasons that Christmas must come twelve days earlier in America than it does in Russia because Americans are always in such a hurry.39 But her innocence of numerical values is also a mark of her goodness, of her indifference to financial capital as constituting any real measure of worth. Ettie, on the other hand, is alternately vague and canny about money. In Act One, she discusses her dowry with Raphael: Raphael: [. . .] I have promised him only twenty-five hundred for the dowry, not five thousand, as I figured on giving before. Why are you looking at me like that? Ettie: Papa, don’t be angry, but I think he might treat me better if you didn’t scrimp. Raphael: (angrily) Scrimp? I know what kind of a dowry you deserve! Five thousand! I must say . . .40 In Act Four, however, when Ettie begs Gregor for a loan for Raphael’s farm, she asks, “Gregor [. . .] how much money do you have? You have never once told me, and I have never asked.”41 Yet four pages later she is pressing her estranged mother, Khava, to give the six-hundred dollars that Ettie “knows” she has in the bank to Raphael for the taxes.42 The extent to which money determines identity is most pronounced in the case of Raphael, as is evident from his negotiations with Gregor over Ettie’s dowry: Raphael: [. . .] After the wedding I will give you twenty-five hundred. Gregor: I know . . . and the truth is, twenty-five hundred is not at all bad. Raphael: I will not deceive you. She was long ago promised for five thousand.

38 39 40 41 42

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

6. 47. 11. 77. 80.

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Gregor: Oh! You want to take twenty-five hundred away from me because now you are unhappy with her? Raphael: That is what she thinks. I can say to you that I will take nothing away . . . Three years after the wedding you will receive the remaining twenty-five hundred, with interest. Do you hear me? Friedlander’s word is as good as a Kaiser’s bond. Yes! With interest . . . Of course, that’s if you are living as people should . . . and if she has no reason to complain . . .43 The terms of Raphael’s agreement with Gregor necessitate the pretense that Ettie’s marriage is a happy one. Filial duty, always a contested issue not just in Gordin’s dramas but for the Jewish immigrant audience as a whole, is here allied with the destructive forces of social pretense, hunger for wealth, and the commodification of women. Ettie’s rebellion against her role as an object of trade is declared in her climactic speech, in which she repudiates Gregor’s “ownership” by proclaiming that she will no longer be trod upon “like a piece of property”.44 Her rhetorical independence is short-lived, though, as she swiftly proceeds to enact a murderous revenge that replicates Pozdnyshev’s own. And like Tolstoy’s anti-hero, Ettie faces an uncertain future: will she be arrested and hanged? Will she commit suicide, or be acquitted? Neither character’s story is given a conclusive ending. Pozdnyshev finishes his monologue only to board another train in search of a confessor, and Ettie’s only certainty is another night’s performance, during which she will “relive the whole terrible drama again”.45 For both, eternal reenactment of their sin is sentence itself. For Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev, this is a fate worse than death, for there can be no greater punishment for a man who despises fictions and “pretense” than to become a storyteller himself. Tolstoy’s novel attempts to cast Pozdnyshev’s purgatorial existence in a more productive light via an afterword, in which the author outlines a radical Christian alternative to the life of violent sexuality and sensual indulgence that the novel describes. For Gordin’s audience, of course, Tolstoy’s religious solution is hardly feasible. The crucial failure of Raphael Friedlander’s farm in Di Kreytser sonata also casts doubts on the other key element of Tolstoy’s

43 44 45

Ibid. 18. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 52.

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program for redemption—useful agrarian labor. This solution—to alienated labor, to Jews’ concentration in “parasitic” professions—may have seemed promising in peasant Russia, but was less practicable in the United States, as Gordin’s own experiences had shown. Only one of the factors that Tolstoy finds complicit in the ills that plague his characters—performance—emerges in Gordin’s play as anything like a redeeming feature. By categorizing “pretense” and “performance” in Di Kreytser sonata as a social and economic condition, rather than an artistic one, Gordin exempts music, theatre, and literature from Tolstoy’s assessment of them as likely to net destructive results. Music—Beethoven’s, opera, and Jewish folk music—is absolved of culpability in the play’s murders. Literature itself, while stimulating and provocative, is not a source of lies but of terrible truths which society is not prepared to address. And performance as a theatrical mode is a key element in Gordin’s own recommendations for Jewish renewal and redemption. These are the proper domain of art itself—through the communal experience of the theatre, whose enlightening aspirations offers a more productive example of the “performance” that is the target of Pozdnyshev’s and Tolstoy’s opprobrium. Kreytser sonata is evidence of Gordin’s steadfast commitment to his medium, despite the corrupting potential that always threatens to render “performance” mere “pretense”. The play is evidence both of his continuing debt to Tolstoy, and a sign of his emancipation—a Jewish “son’s” acknowledgement of, and liberation from, his Russian “father’s” influence. My thanks to Nina Warnke, Joel Berkowitz, Michael Denner, Andrew Wachtel, and the Tolstoy Studies Journal’s four anonymous readers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper; John Klier for his article on Gordin’s political career; David Herman for an expanded copy of his article on art and the Kreutzer Sonata, and Steven Cassedy for his great generosity with his invaluable index of Yiddish newspapers. Bibliography Advertisement. “Kreytser sonate, oder etiniu fridlender: a familien drama in fir aktn fun yankev gordin.” Forverts, Jan. 9, 1902: 2. [Yiddish] ——. “Yankev gordins naye drama.” Forverts 10 Jan. 1902: 2. [Yiddish] Berkowitz, Joel. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

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Brandes, Joseph, in association with Martin Douglas. Immigrants to Freedom: Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey Since 1882. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Bukhbinder, N. A. “Iz istorii sektantskogo dvizheniya sredi russkikh evreev: Dukhovnobibleiskoe Bratstvo,” Evreiskaya Starina 11 (1918): 238–65. Burshtein, L. “Kistorii ‘Dukhovno-bibleiskogo bratstva,” Perezhitoe 1 (1908): 38–41. Cassedy, Steven. To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Eisenberg, Ellen. Jewish agricultural colonies in New Jersey, 1882–1920. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Emerson, Caryl. “What Is Art? and The Anxiety of Music.” Russian Literature 40 (1996) 433–50. ——. “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics: A Harmony and Translation of the Five Senses.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 12 (2000): 9–17. Gordin, Yakov. Letter to the editor. Russkii Evrei. 3 September 1881: 1424–26. ——. “Tipy shtundistov.” Nedelya 6 April 1884: 518–62; 13 May 1884: 679–86; 26 August 1884: 1158–62. ——. Za okeanom: P’esa v chetyrekh deistviyakh Ya. Gordina. perevod Z. M. Erukhimovicha, censor’s typescript, St. Petersburg Theatrical Library, No. 49134 [no date]. ——. (Yankev), Got, mentsh un tayvl: drama in 4 aktn mit a prolog. New York: Internatsyonale Biblyotek Pablishing Komp., 1903. [Yiddish] ——. Di yesoyme: drama in fir aktn fun yankev gordin, spetsyele geshribn far madam k. liptsin, New York [no publisher listed], 1903. [Yiddish] ——. Kreytser sonate: a drame in fir aktn. New York: M. Mayzel, 1907. [Yiddish] ——. “Drama.” Ale shriftn fun yankev gordin, vols. 4. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1910a. 53–62. 4 vol. [Yiddish] ——. “Realizm un romantizmum.” Ale shriftn fun yankev gordin, 1910a. 176–84. [Yiddish] ——. Kreitserova sonata: Drama v chetyrekh deistviyakh, soch. Ya. Gordina, perevod M. S. Kogana, 1910; censor’s typescript. St. Petersburg Theatre Library, No. 33775/33663. 1910. ——. Yankev gordin: dray drames. Khasye di yesoyme, got, mentsh un tayvl, mirele efros [reprint, reliable]. Buenos Aires: Yosef lifshits-fond fun der literature gezelshaft baym yivo, 1973. [Yiddish] ——. “Kreitserova sonata: Drama v chetyrekh deistviyakh,” perevod Rut Levina, Polveka evreiskogo teatra. 1876–1926: Antologiya evreiskoi dramaturgii. Ed. B. Entinym, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Paralleli”, 2003. Gorin, B. Di geshikhte fun yidishn teater. New York: Literarisher Farlag, 1918. [Yiddish] Gusev, N. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorshestva L.N. Tolstogo, 1828–1919. Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiya, 1936. Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Hapgood, Hutchins. The Spirit of the Ghetto, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967. Herman, David. “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata.” Slavic Review 56: 1, 1997: 15–36. Herscher, Uri D. Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880–1910. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981. Kaplan, Beth. The Shakespeare of the Jews. Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1988. Klier, John D. “From Elisavetgrad to Broadway: The Strange Journey of Iakov Gordin.” Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber. Ed. Marsha Siefert. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003. 113–125. Knapp, Liza. “Tolstoy on Musical Mimesis: Platonic Aesthetics and Erotics in The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 4 (1991) 25–42.

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Kopper, John M. “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of Father Sergius, The Devil, and The Kreutzer Sonata.” In the Shade of a Giant. Ed. Hugh McLean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 158–86. LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Tolstoy’s Way of No Flesh: Abstinence, Vegetarianism, and Christian Physiology.” Food in Russian History and Culture. Eds. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 81–102. Lifschutz, Ezekiel. “Jacob Gordin’s Proposal to Establish an Agricultural Colony.” The Jewish Experience in America Vol. 4. Era of Immigration. New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1969. 252–64. 5 vols. Lifson, David S. The Yiddish Theatre in America. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965. Mandelker, Amy. Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1993. Marmor, Kalmen. Yankev gordin. New York: YKUF, 1953. [Yiddish] Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Nikitin, V. N. Evrei zemledel’tsy: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel’noe, administrativnoe i bytovoe polozhenie kolonii so vremeni ikh vozniknoveniya do nashikh dnei. 1807–1887. St. Petersburg: Tipographiya Gazety “Novosti”, 1887. Ob obshchestve Elizavetgradskom Dukhovno-bibleiskom bratstve. GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow) Fond 102, 3-e deloproizvodstvo, opis’ 87, 1889, ed. khr. 606 (1, 2). Prager, Leonard. “Of Parents and Children: Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear.” American Quarterly 18: 3 (1966): 506–16. Prugavin, A. S. “Dukhovno-bibleiskoe bratstvo. (Ocherk evreiskogo religioznogo dvizheniya)”, Istoricheskii Vestnik 18.11 (1884): 398–410; 18.12 (1884): 632–49. Rischin, Ruth. “Allegro Tumultuosissimamente: Beethoven in Tolstoy’s Fiction.” In the Shade of the Giant Ed. Hugh McLean. California Slavic Studies 13, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 12–60. Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper and Row, 1977; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Silbajoris, Rimvydas. Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art. Columbus: Slavica, 1991. Thissen, Judith. “Reconsidering the Decline of the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s.” Theatre Survey 44: 2 (2003): 173–97. Tolstoy, L. N. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90-i tomakh, akademicheskoe yubileinoe izdanie, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1928–1958. Van de Stadt, Janneke. “Narrative, Music, and Performance: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and the Example of Beethoven.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 12 (2000): 57–69. Warnke, Nina. “Kreutzer Sonata or What Is To Be Done?” Unpublished paper given at “Russia/US: Reflecting Cross-Culturally: A Conference on Interaction between Russian and American Cultures.”, Indiana University, Bloomington, 24 April 1999. Winchevsky, Morris. A tog mit yankev gordin. New York: M. Mayzel, 1909. [Yiddish] Yarmolinsky, Avrahm. A Russian’s American Dream: A Memoir on William Frey. Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1965. Zylbercweig, Zalmen, ed. “Gordin, Yankev.” Leksikon fun yidishn teater. Vol. 1. New York: Farlag “Elisheva”, 1931. 392–461. 6 vols. [Yiddish] ——. Di velt fun yankev gordin. Tel-Aviv: Hadfus “Orli”, 1964. [Yiddish]

ISAAC BASHEVIS-SINGER’S ATTITUDE TO THE YIDDISH THEATER AS SHOWN IN HIS WORKS Nathan Cohen During the last two decades of the 19th century and up to the First World War, Warsaw developed into a large and active Jewish cultural center. The presence of writers such as Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (1852–1915), Dovid Frishman (1860–1922), Hilel Tzeytlin (1872–1942), Nakhum Sokolow (1860–1936) and other Jewish cultural figures attracted young writers and cultural activists. Within a short time, a wide range of Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers began to appear in Warsaw, and the local Jewish publishers and printing houses established global connections. When the theatrical company, the Vilner Trupe (The Vilna Troupe), settled in Warsaw with Ester Rokhl Kaminski (1870–1925) as its leading actor, the city became an important center of Yiddish theater.1 During the inter-war period, Warsaw’s Jewish population increased from 310,334 in 1921 to 368,394 in 1938, now constituting a third of the entire population.2 The city’s position as the largest and most important Yiddish cultural center became firmly established, and served as a Mecca for young Jews with artistic aspirations, many of them arriving from the provinces. They made pilgrimages to the literatn farayn (the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists) at 13 Tlomackie Street to pay homage to their admired writers and to submit their first literary works, dreaming of gaining recognition as writers or perhaps landing a job in one of the daily Yiddish newspapers. Aspiring actors

1 For general information on the beginnings of the Yiddish cultural center in Warsaw, see: Stephen D. Corrsin, Warsaw Before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire 1880 –1914 (New York 1989); Chone Shmeruk, “The Yiddish Press in Eastern Europe,” The Jewish Quarterly XXXIII no. 1/121 (1986): pp. 24–28; idem, “Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Center”, Polin 3 (1988), 140–155; Piotr Wrobel, “Jewish Warsaw Before the First World War”, idem, 156–187. 2 Gabriela Zalewska, Ludnosc zydowska w Warszawie w okresie miedzywojennym [The Jewish People in Interwar Warsaw] (Warsaw: PWN, 1996) 53.

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joined Mikhael Vaykhert’s (1890–1967) Yiddishe dramatishe shul (Yiddish Dramatic School), and later the Yiddishe teater studye (Yiddish Theater Studio) in order to train as actors for the Yiddish art theaters, a formal training that was considered unnecessary for the many popular Yiddish theatrical troupes that functioned alongside the art houses, and were in fact much more popular with the theater-going public.3 Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991)—Nobel prize laureate (1978) in literature, and one of the most prominent Yiddish writers in the 20th century—was among the young men who flocked to the capital. The descendant of rabbis and pious Jews, Bashevis had been initially brought to Warsaw by his parents at the age of four, but some years later, toward the end of the First World War, when hunger and living conditions became unbearable, he and his younger brother were taken back by their mother to Bilgoraj, her home town. In 1923, Bashevis returned to Warsaw as an independent young man, skeptical and doubtful regarding his religious faith and general worldview. By then his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944) had established for himself a reputation as an important Yiddish writer, and Isaac’s access to the Jewish literary milieu was thus relatively easy. Within a short while he gained recognition and status as a writer in his own right.4 In later years, in an effort to preserve the memory of Jewish life in Poland, Bashevis repeatedly described in great detail the Jewish literary life in Warsaw. His two works devoted entirely to the “Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists”,5 and his many autobiographical and works of fiction, offer an accurate portrait of the Jewish literary scene, and familiarize the reader with a variety of writers, journalists and cultural activists.

3 In 1935 there were six popular Jewish stages functioning in Warsaw (Venus, Scala, Centralna, Eldorado, Elizeum, Nowosci).. For detailed descriptions of the Yiddish theater in interwar Poland, see: Yitskhok Turkov-Grudberg, Yiddish teater in poyln [Yiddish Theater in Poland] (Warsaw: Yiddish-bukh, 1951); Mikhl Vaykhert, Zikhroynes—varshe [Memoirs – Warsaw] (Tel Aviv: Menorah, 1961); Yiddish teater in eyrope tsvishn beyde velt milkhomes [Yiddish Theater in Europe Between Two World Wars] 1st Vol. (New York 1969) 53–168; Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars (New York: Harper and Row, 1996) 303–336. 4 More detailed biographical information see: Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer—A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5 Yitskhok Varshavski I. [= Bashevis Singer], “Der shrayber klub” [The Writers’ Club], Forverts 13 Jan. 1956–28 Dec. 1956, and Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger, “Figurn un epizodn fun literatn farayn” [Figures and Episodes from the Writers’ Club], Forverts 28 Jan. 1979–4 Jan. 1980.

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In contrast, the Yiddish theatre—which played a significant role in Warsaw’s cultural life—is hardly mentioned in Bashevis’ works. His work offers scant information on the Yiddish theater, its repertoire and its audience, and when a theatrical reference is given it is usually short, one-sided and reveals the author’s negative attitude toward the Yiddish stage.6 Despite their colorfulness, Jewish plays and players make only small and marginal appearances in his work. For example, in my survey of nine novels and some two hundred and fifty short stories authored by Bashevis Singer, I came across only ten names of Yiddish plays performed in Poland: Khinke pinke, Dos pintele yid (The Spark of Jewishness),7 Onkl sem (Uncle Sam),8 Prints chardash (Prince Chardash),9 Di terkishe khasene (The Turkish Wedding),10 Mirele efros (Mirele Efros), Zayn vaybs man (His Wife’s Husband),11 Khassye di yesoyme (Khassye the Orphan),12 Tzvey kunni leml (Two Kunni-Lemls), and Shulamis (Shulamith).13 Though the Yiddish stage in Poland offered a large range of original and translated plays, some of them of high literary merit, and hosted some of the best Yiddish troupes in the world, nearly all the plays that Bashevis mentions by name are associated with the popular theater, considered by many cultural activists as “Shund”.14 This is not accidental and bespeaks Bashevis’ overall low opinion of the Yiddish stage. Bashevis devoted much attention in his works to a rich gallery of female characters. It does not take much to realize that while he was greatly attracted to the new liberated Jewish woman, he had little respect for her, saving his genuine admiration for the traditional woman, for 6 For easier orientation in the different references, see the bibliography for a list of Bashevis’ works mentioned in this paper, also under I. Varshavski [= I. Bashevis Singer], “Der shrayber klub” (1956), and Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger, “Figurn un epizodn fun literatn farayn” (1979–80). If a reference is to a certain story in a book, only the name of the story will be mentioned. 7 “Der shrayber klub,” 2 Mar. 1956, and Shosha (1979) 62. 8 “Yarme un Keyle,” 17 Dec. 1976. 9 The Certificate (1992) 62. 10 “The Briefcase” (1974) 115. 11 Love and Exile (1985) XVIII; 162. 12 “A Peephole in the Gate” (1990) 98. 13 “Di gest,” 3 May 1972. 14 The source of the term shund, which played a crucial role in Yiddish cultural history, is the abattoir. The term originally designated the stench of an animal carcass after it had been skinned. In 19th-century Germany, shund was used in a literary context for a work of low artistic value that was considered morally harmful to its readers and therefore, it was often argued, ought to be banned. Since the end of the end of the 19th century this term was used in this context also in the Yiddish literary environment.

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which his mother served as prototype. In his memoirs he noted: “They [modern Jewish women] were amazingly like me—just as lecherous, deceitful, egotistical and eager for adventures”.15 A closer look at the actress characters that appear in his literary corpus makes it clear that his opinion of them was even more condescending. Of the ten actresses only one—the most talented—is loyal and devoted to her husband, even though he is treacherous and uncaring.16 All the other actresses are depicted as little-talented amateurs who have no morals and are willing to bed every theater director in order to get a part.17 Take, for example, Lena Stempler, who has come to Warsaw to study in a Polish dramatic studio in order “not to became a hanger-on in the Yiddish theater”.18 She falls in love with a Yiddish stage manager who destroys her life, and is haunted by rumors that she offered her body to a theater critic in exchange for a favourable review.19 Ethel Sirota, a less talented actress, sells herself willingly for a part.20 Although members of the Jewish Writers’ Club differ in regards to the merits of Liza Motzkin’s acting talent (the latter can be easily identified as the well-known actress Clara Segalovitch [1896–1943]); one thing about her is acknowledged by all, that her beauty can get her whatever she desires from the many lovers whom she changes “like gloves”.21 We learn that Mania, who is dreaming of becoming “a cheap operetta singer”,22 had sung lascivious songs in a Jewish night-club in Galicia before she was accepted to the Warsaw Opera choir. Her body, Bashevis tells us, “was nothing more than a piece of flesh for her to give away for the slightest favour, for a bit of flattery or for the mere curiosity of tasting another male”.23 Flora (the main character in Di gest) began her career as a prostitute in her youth,24 and even though she had never learned to read, became an actress on the Yiddish stage. Flora marries a pimp who is unaware of her background. She goes with him to Buenos Aires, where they open

Love and Exile 109. “The Manuscript” (1980). 17 “The Impresario”, “A Peephole in the Gate” (1990), “One night in Brazil” (1980), “The Conference”(1989), “Di Gest” (1972). 18 “One Night in Brazil” (1980) 9. 19 Ibid. 5. 20 “A Peephole in the Gate” (1990). 21 “Der shrayber klub”, 13 Apr. 1956. 22 “The Impresario” (1990). 23 Ibid. 136. 24 Another actress supposed to be a prostitute was Malka Lemer (“Der shrayber klub,” 20 Jul. 1956). 15 16

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a bag-factory and become what seems like a respectable couple. Yet when she goes back to Warsaw for a visit she reunites with the actor who years earlier had taken her out of the brothel, and he convinces her to go on stage again—a destructive step that makes her feel worthless, and brings about the failure and subsequent termination of both her marriage and her relationship with this actor. The most complex of the actress characters is Betty Slonim in Shosha. Unlike the others, she is educated, is an avid reader and we are told that she even played on the Russian stage, a mark of genuine artistry in the Yiddish theatrical world. She is described as a “superb actress”25 who “despises the ‘dance, song and strut’ of the Yiddish theater in America”26 into which she can never fit although she does adopt all its external mannerisms.27 She makes it clear that she cannot stand the company of male actors, whom she regards as bores, and dislikes her female colleagues, who are jealous of her attractiveness to men.28 Still she cannot resist the scheme set by Bashevis and becomes the lover of an elderly and rich theater “angel” (Sam Dreiman). While in Warsaw, she also conducts a passionate love affair with Aron Greidiger—the novel’s narrator, who is the literary stand-in for Bashevis. Betty Slonim is an outsider everywhere, except in Warsaw, which captivates her despite the hardship and dangerous conditions that precede the outbreak of World War II. At times thoughts of suicide cross her mind, but there is always something that stops her. At the end, even her marriage to an American gentile colonel fails to save her from her inner turmoil. She finally kills herself. Male actors are even rarer in Bashevis’s works. We are told that Fritz Bander from Berlin (Shosha) and Jacques Kohn (A Friend of Kafka) had quite successful careers in Central Europe. Bander emigrated to Warsaw with his Christian sweetheart because of growing anti-semitism in Germany, but failed in his attempt to resume his acting career. Jacques Kohn moved to Warsaw when his career was already in decline, but for a while he managed to perform on stage. In the early 1930s, Bander and Kohn spend their time at the Writers’ Club recounting all their love affairs and romantic adventures. These characters are based on real personalities. Jacques Kohn is a replica of the well-known Viennese 25 26 27 28

Shosha 47. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 34–35.

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actor Yitskhok Jacques Levi, who had a close relationship with Franz Kafka and corresponded with him for some time. Chatting with his young friend (Bashevis) at the Writers’ Club, Kohn, the actor’s literary simulacrum, mocks Kafka for praising the popular Yiddish theater and for what he described as Kafka’s falling “madly in love with a ham actress”,29 who had nothing to offer “except a body”.30 Thinking about it makes Kohn “ashamed for man and his illusions”.31 Another actor mentioned by Bashevis is the less famous, but equally womanizing, Fayvele Shekhter (Di Gest.) In the first decade of the 20th century, Shekhter played on the Yiddish popular stages of Warsaw and in New York, where he was the consummate comedian, who “after every third word of his the audience used to burst into laughter”.32 He confesses that he never read his role and on the stage just said whatever came into his mind, much to the delight of the audience. Shekhter is ashamed of what he did, but says he could not resist the impulse. He was once offered a part in a better-quality, literary play, but when he read the script—“the scribble,” in his words—he immediately refused to do it, to the amazement of the producers. Fayvl Shekhter claims that there have been no true Yiddish playwrights, and that those who did exist were deficient. Hence, he says, the so-called “literary play” ought to be thrown into the fire.33 In his post-war novel Shadows on the Hudson, Bashevis described in some detail Yasha Kotik, a well-known comedian who for many years had played in Berlin, then fled to the Soviet Union, where he survived untold trouble and finally managed to emigrate to the United States. Kotik looked for parts in Hollywood and on Broadway (and finally got them), but at the same time, was willing to play on the Yiddish stage, though he had little respect for it.34 Before the war, Kotik had married a wealthy Polish Jewish girl, but then destroyed her life. Now in New York, he met her again and wanted to re-marry her. He ws described by one of his acquaintances as “one of the most depraved brutes I’ve ever encountered in my life [. . .] He’s a psychopath. He comes from the “A friend of Kafka” (1970) 6. Ibid. 13. 31 Ibid. 6. For more about Kafka’s affair with the Yiddish actress Manya Tshisik, see: Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971) 12–30, 19–20, 17–20. 32 “Di gest,” 6 May 1972. 33 Ibid. 12 May 1972. 34 Shadows on the Hudson (1998), 250, 341. 29 30

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vilest and meanest, from the lowest dregs of the earth”.35 Elsewhere, Bashevis added to this description: “He was always emotionally drunk [. . .] somehow he had been born drunk”.36 Fayvl Shekhter explains that in America, you win over the women in the Yiddish audience by bringing tears to their eyes with the recitation of the obligatory prayer for the dead, the “Kaddish”, and with the introduction of a young orphan girl who is getting married. In mockery, he says that in one and the same Yiddish play one can find both a cantor (“Khazn”) who becomes an opera singer, and an uncle who is thought to have been killed in a pogrom and turns out to be the owner of a gold-mine in Alaska. The uncle dances in a pair of gold boots and donates a million dollars for a synagogue, dedicated to the memory of his dead mother.37 The evaluation of the Yiddish theatre in America offered by Betty Slonim and Sam Dreiman is not any better. Betty describes the plays as mainly “dance, song and strut”,38 filled with “stale jokes and . . . sixty-year-old yentas [who] play eighteenyear-old girls”. Watching such fare twice a week, she says, caused her “physical pain”.39 Sam Dreiman, a sponsor of this sort of theatrical fare, who according to Slonim “never read anything”,40 stands for the common audience and rejects every attempt to produce materials that might not prove popular with the public, and that are not written in simple everyday language. Dreiman’s ideal was, indeed, the kind of theater that contemporary Jewish common audiences wanted to attend. The story tells us that a rather successful director by the name Margolis failed in convincing a wealthy American Jewish businessman to invest in a serious literary

Ibid. 349 ff. Ibid. 494. 37 “Di gest,” 12 May 1972. According to the lame Max (in “Yarme un keyle,” 24 Dec. 1976), in the same period of time (the beginning of the 20th century) the Jews of New York already mocked this kind of (shund, sentimental) plays, but their counterparts in Warsaw were still delighted to attend them. Bashevis himself did not have any better description of the Yiddish theater of that period in essays he wrote for The New York Times on the history and character of the Yiddish theater (“Once on Second Avenue There Lived a Yiddish Theater [Did it Really Die?]” 17 Apr. 1966; “Yiddish Theater Lives Despite the Past” 20 Jan. 1985), and in a report by Elenore Lester, “At 71 Isaac Bashevis Singer Makes His Broadway Debut”, ibid., 26 Oct. 1975, where it is emphasized that “Singer sees himself as still only on the threshold of playwriting [. . .]”. 38 Shosha 32. 39 Ibid. 122. 40 Ibid. 225. 35 36

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Yiddish theater in Warsaw.41 In his frustration, Margolis proclaimed on another occasion: “A [serious] theater could exist, but the public wants shund (trash). Give them ‘Khinke pinke’”.42 In a story bearing his name, Sam Palka, a wealthy man who supported the Yiddish theater in New York, tells Bashevis that, in the old days when he hardly earned a living, he used to buy popular Yiddish books and go to the theater, where he idolized the actors, for when they spoke “each word had to do with love”.43 Similarly, Sam, the hero of another story, “A Peephole in the Gate,” recalls the “good old days” in New York, when as a young carter, he used to watch like many other young Jewish immigrants “King David, Bathsheba, the Destruction of the Temple—real history!” at the Yiddish theater.44 A similar description of the Yiddish theater in Warsaw in the thirties is given by Khayimke Tshentshiner in Shosha, where he confesses that every time he and Celia go to the Yiddish theater they “vow it’s the last”.45 Morris Feitelzohn, also in Shosha, summarized the content of Yiddish plays in one sentence: “Today’s Jews like three things—sex, Torah, and revolution, all mixed together”.46 In his memoirs, Bashevis claimed that the plays modern Jewish women saw (as well as the novels and magazines they read) “all mocked the husband [. . .] and glorified the lover who got everything for free”.47 In The Penitent, Yoysef Shapiro recites almost the same words and concludes: “Making a joke out of the family has to bring lawlessness and destruction”.48 According to Shapiro, the advertisements for “Shund plays” in Tel Aviv weren’t different from those in “Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Rome”.49 What about the play going public? At the beginning of the 20th century, according to Bashevis, in Argentina Jews of every age and standing attended the Yiddish theater. Bashevis claimed that in America and in Poland it was mainly youngsters: workers, apprentices, shop assistants, salesmen and maids who went to the theater. As they were not religiously

“Der shrayber klub,” 2 Mar. 1956. Ibid. 20 Jul. 1956. 43 “Sam Palka and David Vishkover” (1975) 135. 44 “A Peephole in the Gate” (1990) 107. 45 Shosha 62. 46 Ibid. 36. See also Bashevis’s essays in The New York Times (note 37 above), in which he writes about “dynamite” or “dramatic effects” the audience had to be given in order to keep them quiet and concentrated. 47 Love and Exile 110. 48 This phrase was not translated into English and it appears only in the Yiddish version (Der bal-tshuve, Tel Aviv 1979) 17. 49 The Penitent (1986) 76. 41 42

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observant and did not mind, they often went to the theatre on the Sabbath afternoon, Saturday being their only free day from work.50 For many, this was an opportunity to “widen their horizons”. For example, Maks Barabander, the main hero of Scum, did not have any formal education. He taught himself to write Yiddish by reading newspapers and popular novels. We are told: “He picked up modern expressions from the Yiddish theater and from listening to lecturers”.51 Sonya, a Warsaw acquaintance who had fallen in love with the young Bashevis, was a salesgirl in a women’s underwear shop and a housemaid in the shop owners’ flat. Bashevis described her in his memoirs: “She thought herself as enlightened [. . .] The Yiddish theater, the songs sung there, the comedies and tragedies performed, and the speeches the heroes spoke—this constituted all the culture Sonya had; it was the source of her education”.52 Sonya tried to take Bashevis with her to the theater but he refused.53 He agreed to go to the cinema (for the first time in his life), where he saw The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which did not leave much of an impression on him.54 On the other hand, Edusha, a distant relative of Bashevis (for whom he had more respect) was fond of modern literature. She knew Zusskind Eikhl, (more commonly known now as Peretz Markish), and, unable to afford an opera ticket, she sneaked into the Opera House nevertheless.55 Some young women from traditional homes strove to attend the Yiddish theater as a symbolic act of modernity. Such was the case with Flora in Di Gest, Hinde-Ester Singer (Bashevis’s sister in Love and Exile)56 and Tzirele—her prototype in Scum.57 The more educated Bashevis’s young characters are, the more likely they are to go either to the high-quality Polish theater in Warsaw or to the English theater in New York.58

See for example: The Certificate (1992) 22; Scum (1991) 132; “Sam Palka and David Vishkover” (1975) 135; “A Peephole in the Gate” (1990) 98, 107. 51 Scum 180. 52 The Certificate 22. 53 Ibid. 62. According to Elenore Lester Bashevis kept away from the theater up to the age of 24. 54 Ibid. 93. 55 Ibid. 46, 69–70. 56 Love and Exile XVII–XVIII. 57 Scum 47, 111. 58 See for example: The Family Moskat (1967) 127–128; The Certificate 69–70; “A Peephole in the Gate” 112. 50

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Members of the underworld constituted a different and significant type of audience both in Warsaw and in Buenos Aires. According to Bashevis,59 many were prostitutes and pimps. In Yarme un Keyle there is a detailed description of various criminals attending the theater both for entertainment and social purposes, i.e. meeting friends and enemies.60 We are told that in turn-of-the-20th-century Buenos Aires, pimps “were the bosses in the Yiddish theater. When they didn’t like a play it was immediately taken off the boards”.61 This explains the theatrical partnership of Maks Shpindler (Di Gest) and Maks Barabander (Scum), two shadowy characters who run suspicious businesses. In the light of what has been said up to now, it is not surprising to hear Morris Feitelzohn—a character highly appreciated by Arn Greidiger in Shosha—make the provocative generalization: “Theater is trash by definition”.62 Thus, it is also hardly unexpected that Greidiger fails in his attempt to write a play according to the instructions he got from Betty Slonim and Sam Dreiman, especially after his constant claim: “I’m not a playwright”.63 On various occasions Bashevis reiterated his unflattering view of theater and cinema as corrupters of literary works. Even Maurice Schwartz’s highly praised theatrical production of his brother I. J. Singer’s Yoshe Kalb did not satisfy him, and he labeled Schwartz “a kitsch director.”64 He regarded directors and producers as spoilers of whatever materials fall in their hands,65 and argued that the Yiddish intelligentsia looked upon nearly everything that was created for the Yiddish stage as kitsch.66 It is well known that he himself, though involved in the

59 See also: A. Mukdoni, “Zikhroynes fun a yidishn teater kritiker,” Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teater un drame (Vilne – New York 1930) 367–368. 60 “Yarme un keyle” 23 Dec. 1976, 24 Dec. 1976, 31 Dec. 1976. 61 “Di gest” 13 May 1972; “The Colony” 209. 62 Shosha 36. 63 Ibid., 35, 49. It might be suggested that Graydiger’s failure to write a play in Shosha implies Bashevis’ unfulfilled attempt to dramatize Der sotn in goray (Satan in Goray) (see n. 70 below). 64 “My brother and I: A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Encounter 2/LII (1979): 23. It is noteworthy that four years earlier in a report by Elenore (note 37) Bashevis recalled Yoshe kalb as “the first really good play he saw.” 65 Ibid. See also: Grace Farrell, ed., Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 1992) 178. 66 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Once on Second Avenue There Lived a Yiddish Theater”, The New York Times 17 Apr. 1966.

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dramatization of some of his works, was unhappy with the results.67 As a gifted and self-sufficient writer, Bashevis rejected any attempt of others to intervene in his works. He declared: “I only feel about a work that it’s mine if I write it . . . I love the creativity which belongs to one man”.68 Through his long and prosperous career as a writer, Bashevis attempted probably only once to write an original play, but the work was never published or staged. Still, Bashevis did try to adapt some of his works for the Yiddish stage, but none of these adaptations was actually performed.69 What was the cause for Bashevis’ hostility toward the theater in general and the Yiddish theater in particular? It is probably goes deeper than his failure at playwriting and dramatization and his dissatisfaction with the results of his works that had been adapted for stage and screen. It seems more likely that Bashevis’ antagonism resulted from traditional concepts he had absorbed in his youth. In the same way that he rejected the theoretical concept of a modern liberated woman although he was very attracted to her, he was also unable to accept the theater, which for many generations was considered alien to traditional Judaism. In his memoirs In My Father’s Court Bashevis recalls an event when a troupe of actors appeared in Bilgoray and his grandfather, the town’s rabbi, “went to the barn where they were performing and

67 Isaac Bashevis Singer and Richard Burgin, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Doubleday, 1985) 143–144. For more details on Bashevis and various dramatizations of his works, including the problematic production of Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, see Hadda, 185–206. 68 Farrell 178. 69 The first attempt to dramatize a work, with the encouragement and participation of Yoel Entin, was Der sotn in goray (Satan in Goray) (sometime between the end of 1933 and the beginning of 1935, and prior to Bashevis’ emmigration) as shown by Chone Shmeruk, “Der proyekt tsu instsenizirn yitskhok bashevises ‘der sotn in goray’” [The Project to Dramatize Isaac Bashevis’ ‘Satan in Goray’], Yerushalaymer almanakh 25 (1996), 264–269. Another early dramatization attempt was that of Bashevis’ first serialised novel in Forverts (5 Oct. 1935–22 Feb. 1936), Der zindiker moshiakh ( yankef frank) [The Sinner/sinful Messiah: Jacob Frank] as shown by Avraham Novershtern, Kesem hadimdumim: apokalipsa umeshikhiyut besifrut yiddish [The Lure of Twilight: Apocalypse and Messianism in Yiddish Literature] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002) 370–371. Apart from these there are some other, later, adaptations in Yiddish of works like: Der roye ve-eyne nire [The One that Can See and Can’t Be Seen]; Di bal [The Ball]; Got un opgot [God and Idol]; Di likvidatsye [The Liquidation]; Sam palka [Sam Palka]; A parti in miami [A Party in Miami]; and Ven shlemiel iz gegangen keyn varshe [When Shlumiel Went to Warsaw]. I wish to thank Dr. Joseph Sherman, who worked on Bashevis’s personal archives for providing me this information, which is still provisional and needs to be verified in the archives themselves.

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drove them out along with the audience”.70 In his autobiography Love and Exile, he tells of an argument between his father and brother in which the father referred to the theater as a place where “charlatans sit all day long, eat pork, play around with loose women, and speak profanities”.71 Elsewhere in this book he writes about his father’s visit to Warsaw, which must have taken place in the early nineteen-thirties. The father asked his son for the meaning of the title, “His Wife’s Husband”, that he had seen on a theatrical street poster. In response to Bashevis’ explanation, the father commented: “Everything the Mishna predicted has come true. High time the redemption came, high time”.72 Reading Bashevis’s few descriptions of the Yiddish theater, its actors and audience, which were written many decades after the events in the above-mentioned anecdotes occurred, one cannot ignore the echoes of the words and deeds of previous generations. Bibliography Bashevis Singer, Isaac. “The Briefcase.” A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1973. 110–134. ——. The Certificate. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992. ——. “The Colony.” A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1970. 205–218. ——. “The Conference.” The Image and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. 204–210. ——. The Family Moskat. New York: Bantam, 1967. ——. “Figurn un epizodn fun literatn farayn.” (Figures and Episodes from the Writers’ Club) Forverts 28 Jun 1979–4 Jan 1980. [Yiddish] ——. “A Friend of Kafka.” A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1970. 3–16. ——. “Di gest” (The Guests). Forverts 17 Apr.–18 Aug. 1972. [Yiddish] ——. “The Impresario.” The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories, London: Penguin, 1990. 131–145. ——. In My Father’s Court. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1966. ——. Love and Exile. London: Cape 1985. ——. “The Manuscript.” Old Love. London: Cape, 1980. 221–231. ——. “My brother and I: A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Encounter 2/LII, (1979). ——. “One Night in Brazil.” Old Love. London: Cape, 1980. 3–20.

In My Father’s Court 46. Love and Exile XVIII. Bashevis needed to mention his father’s idea of the theater also in his essay in The New York Times, 20 Jan. 1985 (see note 37) and in Lester, The New York Times, 26 Oct. 1975. 72 Love and Exile 162. 70 71

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——. “Once on Second Avenue There Lived a Yiddish Theater.” The New York Times 17 Apr. 1966: 21. ——. “A Peephole in the Gate.” The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1990. 93–120. ——. The Penitent. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. ——. “Runners to Nowhere.” The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1990. 164–175. ——. “Sam Palka and David Vishkover.” Passion and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1975. 133–147. ——. Scum. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1991. ——. Shadows on the Hudson. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998. ——. Shosha. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. ——. “Yarme un keyle” (Yarme and Keyle). Forverts 9 Dec.–13 Oct. 1977. [Yiddish] ——. “Yiddish Theater Lives Despite the Past.” New York Times 20 Jan. 1985: Hl. ——. and Richard Burgin. Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Doubleday, 1985. Beck, Evelyn Torton. Kafka and the Yiddish Theater. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Corrsin, Stephen D. Warsaw Before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire 1880–1914. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1989. Farrell, Grace, ed., Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1992. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer—A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lester, Elenore. “At 71 Isaac Bashevis Singer Makes His Broadway Début.” New York Times 26 Oct. 1975: 131. Mukdoni, A[leksander]. “Zikhroynes fun a yidishn teater kritiker.” Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teater un drame, ed. Jacob Shatski. Vilna-New York: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institute, teater-muzey, i.n. Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, 1930. 367–368. [Yiddish] Novershtern, Avraham. Kesem hadimdumim: apokalipsa umeshikhiyut besifrut yiddish (The Lure of Twilight: Apocalypse and Messianism in Yiddish Literature). Jerusalem: Mages, 2002. [Hebrew] Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars. New York: Harper and Row, 1977; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Shmeruk, Chone. “The Yiddish Press in Eastern Europe.” The Jewish Quarterly XXXIII 1/121 (1986): 24–28. ——. “Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Center”, Polin 3 (1988): 140–155. ——. “Der proyekt tsu instsenizirn yitskhok bashevises ‘der sotn in goray.’ ” (The Project to Dramatize Isaac Bashevis’ ‘Satan in Goray’). Yerushalaymer almanakh 25 (1996): 264–269. [Yiddish] Turkov-Grudberg, Yitskhok. Yidish teater inpoyln (Yiddish Theater in Poland). Warsaw: Yidish-bukh, 1951. [Yiddish] Varshavski, I. [I. Bashevis Singer] “Der shrayber klub.” (The Writers’ Club). Forverts 13 Jan. 1956–28 Dec. 1956. [Yiddish] Vaykhert, Mikhl, Zikhroynes—varshe (Memoirs – Warsaw). Tel Aviv: Menorah, 1961. [Yiddish] ——. Yidish teater in eyrope tsvishn beyde velt milkhomes (Yiddish Theater in Europe Between Two World Wars), vol. I, New York 1969. [Yiddish] 2 vols. Wrobel, Piotr, “Jewish Warsaw Before the First World War.” Polin 3 (1988): 156–187. Zalewska, Gabriela. Ludnosc zydowska w Warszawie w okresie miedzywojennym (The Jewish People in Interwar Warsaw). Warsaw: PWN, 1996. [Polish]

SECTION TWO

BETWEEN JEWS AND POLES

JÓZIO GROJSESZYK: A JEWISH CITY SLICKER ON THE WARSAW POPULAR STAGE Michael C. Steinlauf Some fifteen years ago, while writing a dissertation on the Polish-Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn (Andrzej Marek), I came across some tantalizing references to the work of a playwright named Feliks Schober. According to Witold Filler, the historian of the nineteenth-century Warsaw popular stage, Schober (Szober, 1846–79) was the author of several celebrated plays featuring a character named Józio Grojseszyk.1 The first of these, Podróż po Warszawie (A Journey Through Warsaw), was first staged in September 1876, at the Tivoli theatre2 (the same year that Avrom Goldfadn launched the first professional Yiddish theatre in Jassy, Rumania). Józio, whose Yiddish-Polish surname means big chic, is apparently the ultimate urban connoisseur, a high-spirited wheelerdealer who knows all the ins and outs of contemporary Warsaw night life. Józio was paired with his opposite, a country squire named Barnaba Fafuła, a native of the village of Woli Ogon (Ox tail). The premiere of Podróż po Warszawie drew much attention and attracted an audience of 2,000, doubling the theatre’s previous attendance record. While theatre critics railed against Schober’s supposedly message-less entertainment,3 Warsaw horse-cab drivers would ask the actor who played Barnaba, “Where to, Sir Fafuła?” [“Gdzie mam jechać, jaśnie panie Fafuła?”], while Jews would point out “Józio” on the street and exclaim, “Kikste, Józio!” [“Look, Józio!” in Warsaw Yiddish].4 Schober capitalized on his success with a sequel entitled Barnaba Fafuła i Józio Grojseszyk na wystawie paryskiej (Fafuła and Grojseszyk at the Paris

1 Witold Filler, Melpomena i piwo (Warsaw: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1960) 121–28. 2 Podróż po Warszawie: Operetka komiczna w 7-miu obrazach (Warsaw, 1878). 3 Filler 128. 4 Kolce, September 23, 1876, cited from Filler 123.

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[World] Fair), which he supposedly wrote in two days.5 In addition, Schober authored two other works, Ulica Marszałkowska [Marszałkowska Street] and Piekło [Hell],6 but it was Barnaba and Józio who apparently rooted themselves in the public imagination: for several decades after their author’s early death, these characters reappeared on Polish stages in revivals of his plays as well as in numerous sequels and adaptations ( Józio Grojseszyk Across the Ocean, Józio Grojseszyk Gets Married, etc.).7 A photograph from about the turn of the century shows us Józio, played by the famous Ludwik Solski, posing in a plaid suit, holding up a massive walking stick and an enormous cigar.8 In Warsaw, Barnaba and Józio even materialized in the traditional miniature puppet plays known as szopki that were performed in Catholic homes at Christmas time.9 In 1924, the celebrated director Leon Schiller revived Podróż po Warszawie in one of the so-called monumental productions of his Teatr Bogusławskiego in Warsaw. But thereafter Józio Grojseszyk seems to have faded into obscurity. To what extent was Józio a Jewish character, and what can his popularity on the Polish stage teach us about Polish-Jewish relations in the burgeoning metropolis of Warsaw in the second half of the nineteenth century? Such questions had to wait until I was able to obtain copies of Schober’s plays, since the historian Filler, in a manner typical of most Polish scholars under communism, does not directly address the Jewish context of these plays, but rather only hints at it, or rather, winks at it. This is symptomatic. There are great silences about these issues in most of the available historical material, memoirs as well as histories, Jewish as well as Polish. Much of my research, therefore, has consisted of teasing out some sense of the variegated cultural borderlands that accompanied the development of both Polish and Jewish theatre in Poland in modern times.

5 Barnaba Fafuła i Józio Grojseszyk na wystawie paryskiej: Śmiesznostka w 5 aktach (Warsaw, 1878). 6 Ulica Marszałkowska (after a fashionable Warsaw street), a re-working of a play by J. Zapalski, and Piekło: Operetka komiczno-fantastyczna w 5 aktach (Warsaw, 1880) were first staged in 1879. 7 Filler 128. 8 Solski, Wspomnienia, 1855–1893 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1955) 206. And see also Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki, Świat aktorski moich czasów (Warsaw: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1957) 246–47. 9 Jolanta Czubek, “Szopka warszawska w XIX wieku,” Pamietnik Teatralny, 1968, 76.

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Figure 3. The celebrated Polish actor Ludwik Solski (1855–1954) as Józio Grojseszyk (from Solski’s memoirs, Wspomnienia, 1855–1893, Kraków, 1955).

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Before turning to Schober’s plays themselves, let us make use of some of this research as a context for the present discussion. The canonized Polish theatre of the nineteenth century, unlike its western European counterparts, owed little to popular traditions. Created by the last Polish king on the eve of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by the second half of the nineteenth century the State Theatre, housed in a huge building rising above Warsaw’s Theatre Square, performed a repertoire overwhelmingly influenced by French models that primarily attracted Polish high society. This theatre, it must nonetheless be emphasized, was the only Polish institution untouched by russification, and in the aftermath of the failed Polish uprising of 1863, it was only on the stage of the State Theatre that the Polish language was permitted public expression. Paradoxically perhaps, considering its repertoire and audience, this theatre became an object of enormous public preoccupation. Though the European theatre of the nineteenth century was strongly defined by star worship, the fervor surrounding Polish theatre concerned not only its stars, but also something larger. Polish theatre was the incarnation of a national mission; in the words of one writer, it was “a holy inheritance,” “a priestly mission,” “a national pantheon of virtue.”10 Until the late 1860s, the State Theatre was a protected monopoly, but this status could not be maintained as Warsaw transformed itself into a center of new urban culture. In the aftermath of the 1863 uprising, Warsaw began to experience tumultuous economic growth that filled the city with great numbers of emancipated peasants, ruined gentry and Jews from throughout Russia and Poland. In the period from 1865 to 1909, the population of Warsaw rose from 244,000 to 764,000, its Jewish portion from 77,000 to 282,000.11 These masses sought work, but in their free hours sought inexpensive entertainment. Beginning in 1868 and continuing for some forty years thereafter, on warm summer evenings these crowds flooded the streets and frequented a new form of entertainment, the so-called garden theatres [teatrzyki ogródkowe], located in the courtyards of restaurants and cafés.

10 J. Kościelski, “Prolog na otwarcie Teatru Polskiego w Poznaniu,” “Proscenium”— Teatr Polski 1875–1965 (Poznań: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965) 54, as cited in Stanisław Marczak-Oborski, Teatr w Polsce 1918–1939; Wielkie ośrodki (Warsaw: Pańtstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984) 7. 11 Maria Nietyksza, Rozwój miast i aglomeracji miejsko-przemysłowych w Królestwie Polskim, 1865–1914 (Warsaw, 1986) 115, 217.

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By 1876, there were twenty such theatres in Warsaw; in the years following, as many as thirty. At first, their audience consisted primarily of artisans and their families. Soon, however, they began to attract a more upscale audience as well. Seating began to reflect class divisions, with wealthier patrons in armchairs and the poorer clientele standing behind wooden barriers. The repertoire changed somewhat as well. Plays which premiered in the State Theatre were revived in the gardens, and occasionally a popular garden theatre hit made it to the State Theatre. Still, most of the garden theatre repertoire continued to consist of farce, operetta and cancan. As the press decried the “immorality” of the garden theatres,12 its stars, like those of the State Theatre, became the object of public fascination, but in this case, typically of a prurient sort. By the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were a fixture in the audiences of the State Theatre. A new class of Jewish financiers and merchants, often patrons of Polish literature and art, filled the theatre’s front seats and avidly participated in the so-called theatremania of fashionable Warsaw. In the upper balcony, known as “paradise,” Yiddish-speaking Jews sat alongside vociferous contingents of students and artisans. These Jewish audiences found more attractive entertainment in the garden theatres. An excellent description of the ambience of the garden theatres, which at once makes explicit reference to the large-scale presence of Jews, is offered by novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz in a feuilleton written in 1875. His account is worth citing in full: These theatres are peculiarly enticing and seductive to our public. How much freedom there is in all this and how colorful! Theatre and bazaar, drama and cigarettes, scenic enchantment and starry night overhead— what contradictory elements. In the chairs, patrons with hats pushed to the back of their heads; behind the barrier, the public: artless, impetuous, fascinated, constantly calling: “Louder! louder!” at interesting moments not stirring from their places even in a downpour, prone to applause and impatient. Finally, what a mixture! Young gentlemen who have come expressly for the radiant eyes of Miss Czesia [Czapska, a contemporary heart-throb]. They converse of course in French, while Prince Lolo, unrivalled in the realm of chic, wipes his opera classes, and the “divine”

12 See, for example, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s remarks in “Sprawy bieżAce,” Niwa, 8 (1875): 451–58, reprinted in his Sprawy bieżAce (Warsaw: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1950) 215; and in “Chwila obecna,” Gazeta Polska, 1875, no. 198, reprinted in his Chwila obecna (Warsaw: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1950) v. 2, 120–22. And see also Filler’s citations from the contemporary press, 236–37.

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michael c. steinlauf Comte Joujou grasps one leg and crosses it over the other, thereby permitting the rabble to marvel at his genuine fil d’Ecosse stockings; then several gentry of bronzed face and serene glance “my-dear-sir” each other about the price of wool instead of the play, and crops instead of actors. Further a group of counting-house clerks in collars which can only be seen in the Journal Amusant converse softly, and only occasionally can one overhear in the “national langauge” the phrases: “żewu zasiur, Michasz” or “antrnusuadi, Staszu!”13 Behind the barrier one hears the dialect of Franciszkaner Gasse [i.e., Yiddish].14 There too ladies of the demi-monde swish their dresses, and chattering, dart flashing looks from darkly painted eyes. Elsewhere several artisans argue with a Jew [żydek] about a spot near a pillar; overhead the leaves of trees rustle, from the snack bar threatening exhortations; in a word: a mixture of voices, languages, social classes, manners, moods; a veritable Tower of Babel of people linked only by the hope of relaxation, freedom and entertainment.15

The Jewish presence in this description is striking: the sound of Yiddish is the first thing Sienkiewicz mentions when he turns to the area behind the partition, and two of the three elements which make up his description of that scene concern Jews. Moreover, his concluding lines perfectly characterize the special context within which powerful barriers could disappear, and masses of Poles and Jews come into temporary but regular contact. It is noteworthy that this same citation appears in the work of a Polish theatre historian, but with all the references to Jews omitted.16 Jews were also increasingly evident on the stage, at first as musicians, gradually in singing and acting roles as well. The most celebrated Polish actor of the nineteenth century, Bogumił Dawison, was the son of a Warsaw Jewish innkeeper. In the 1880s, after Avrom Goldfaden‘s theatre came to Warsaw, numerous Jewish performers of the garden theatre stage made their way to Yiddish theatre. Above all, however, Polish stages were filled with imaginary Jews of various sorts. Most deeply rooted in theatrical convention was the figure of the comical little Jew (żydek), grimacing, dancing and singing, babbling a stylized Polish-Jewish jargon, and endlessly exclaiming “aj waj!” On garden theatre stages, such “Iceks,” “Bereks” and “Moszeks” were ever

A parody of polonized French: “Je vous assure,” “Entre nous soit dit.” Germanizing, that is, “yiddishizing” the name “Franciszkańska,” the name of a main street in the Jewish quarter, drives home the point. 15 Gazeta Polska, 115 (1875); cited from his Chwila obecna, v. 1, 171–72. 16 Zygmunt Szweykowski, “Teatrzyki ogródkowe w Warszawie,” Pamietnik Teatralny (1958): 438. 13 14

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present. Increasingly they were joined by a more contemporary figure, that of the assimilating Jewish banker or industrialist. While the latter was often also the butt of laughter, his presence served other functions as well, linked to profoundly ambiguous Polish feelings about the nature of modernity. Most often seen as the corrupter of an idyllic feudal past, this Jew also represented, after all, the forces of “progress.” These various stage Jews, be they Iceks or Moneybags, reflected a larger political context. In the period after the 1863 uprising, the Polish intelligentsia began to develop modern notions of national identity, expanding the idea of “Polishness” by turning first of all to the peasants as partners in building a Polish nation. Some sought even greater inclusiveness, mobilizing women, Germans, and Jews as well. Others sought a more exclusionary identity based in Polish ethnicity, Roman Catholicism, and hostility to minorities. By the end of the century, these tendencies developed into political ideologies that would shape Polish national consciousness in the twentieth century. But in the 1870s, antipathy to Jews was chiefly associated with hostility to modernity. Conservative critics, seeking to reform the peasants but little else, argued for turning the garden stages into a “folk theatre” [teatr ludowy] that would function as a “school of life.”17 A genre of plays appeared in which the heroes were landowners and peasants oppressed by loathsome Jewish and German speculators. This development inspired the following “recipe for folk plays” in the Warsaw press: “Take a female boozer and a peasant with bad instincts, add to this a scoundrelous Jewish tavern keeper, mix together with the kindly oldest patriarch in the village, baste with a sauce of pseudo-poetic bucolic idyll, sprinkle everything with spells, prayer, wonders, and you will have a folk play.”18 One of the most popular of such plays, Władysław Ludwik Anczy’s Emigracja chłopska [Peasant Emigration], premiered at the Tivoli just prior to Podróż po Warszawie. Schober’s plays represent a very different world. The plots are minimal; they function primarily as devices on which to hang singing, dancing, tableaus and scenic effects. In Podróż po Warszawie, Barnaba Fafuła, his battle-axe of a wife Kunegunda, daughters Kizia and Kocia, the governess Mademoiselle Chiffon, various servants, and Barnaba’s agent

17 Konstanty Tatarkiewicz, “Kilka słów w sprawie letnich teatrów ogródkowych,” Kłosy, 13 June 1871, cited in Filler 235. 18 Tygodnik Illustrowany, 9 July 1881, cited from Filler 147.

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Szmuł the Jew, set out for Warsaw. They go, according to Kunegunda, in order to “sacrifice for progress”,19 experience the pleasures of Warsaw, and find wealthy husbands for their daughters. The girls have no dowries; indeed, to finance the trip, Barnaba keeps selling pieces of the family forest to the Jew Jankiel. As they arrive at the Warsaw train station, they are immediately spotted by Józio Grojseszyk and his buddies Edward, a Pole, and Wilhelm, a German, who think they have stumbled on the rich brides they have been dreaming of. While Edward and Wilhelm spirit the girls away, Józio keeps Barnaba busy by supplying him with a succession of women. At the end of the play, the Fafuła family is reunited and happily chooses to return to Woli Ogon, the girls to their country boyfriends, but only after they have toured all the major sites of Warsaw street life and night life. The Warsaw locales of the play shift from the train station to the outdoor cafés of Saska Kepa on the banks of the Vistula, then to the huge Dolina Szwajcarska [Swiss valley] establishment (where twenty years later the “father” of modern Yiddish literature, Y. L. Peretz, and his entourage would pass many a night), then to a garden theatre, then to the Old City marketplace, and finally to a fancy dress ball and masquerade. Each of these sites presents a panorama of lavishly costumed Warsaw humanity, group scenes of singing and dancing often climaxing with fireworks and Bengal lights. Such scenes are enhanced by the mechanical marvels of the new world; Józio introduces Barnaba to the carousel (“You’ll get there faster than by train,” Józio counsels Barnaba),20 the phonograph, the bicycle, and the hot air balloon. Interspersed among such spectacles are individual performances by “types” singing of their lives.21 In the garden theatre, for example, the song of the “ladies’ doctor” is followed by those of the pensioner, the spoiled young girl, the old maid, the impoverished gentleman, the brewer, and the demimondaine. In the Old City, cobblers’ apprentices and market women sing, dance, and quarrel. Throughout the play, there are references to actual Warsaw personages, places, and even commercial products. “Brawo, brawo, Sonnenfeld!” sings the crowd as the curtain rises over the Dolina Szwajcarska, referring to Adolf Sonnenfeld, the

Podróż 12. Ibid. 88. 21 The divisions of the play are called obrazy, meaning images or pictures, rather than acts. 19 20

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composer (of Jewish origin) who wrote the play’s music.22 The dress ball in the final act takes place at the Tivoli, the same hall where the audience would have watched the play’s premiere. While Polish theatre historians have been reticent about the Jewish context of Józio and his world, there is no coyness about it in Schober’s texts. The very first song of the play, sung by Szmuł in a stylized JewishPolish jargon as the Fafuła family prepares for the trip, warns them what to expect. Here in the country even a Jew is good, sings Szmuł. When he cheats, everyone knows it. But in Warsaw, when some sucker arrives, he doesn’t even know he’s been had. And Szmuł concludes: DrA tam żydzi oj! oj! oj! A drze wiecej każdy goj! ( Jews there flay you, oy, oy, oy / But even more does every goy).

And this is how Józio Grojseszyk presents himself when he bursts onto the stage in the play’s final act dressed in top hat and tails: Choć szwiat czasem na to szwista Żem żyd, Jestem sobie kantorzysta, Ganz git. Pryncypała sze ni boje, Z nim gaj Bo mam przecie rozum swoje Aj waj! Pape, co miał pejsy duże Na pisk, Wołał handel na podwórze Dla zysk. Lecz że już nie zacofany Ten kraj, Jestem cybulizowany, Aj waj!23

By way of mispronunciations and bits of pseudo-Yiddish, this approximately means: “Though the world sometimes whispers / I’m a Jew, / I’m a counting-house clerk. / Real good. / The boss he doesn’t scare me, / I’m with him / Cause I’ve got my own sense / Aj waj! / Papa, who had long peyes / On his face / Hawked goods in the courtyard / To make some dough. / But since no longer backward is / This land,

22 23

Ibid. 91. Ibid. 153–54.

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/ I am now civilized, / Aj waj!” The word cybulizowany in the place of cywilyzowany plays on cybułkes [tsiblkes], Yiddish for onions, which was seen as a favorite Jewish food. This song must have been very popular, because in the sequel to the play set in Paris, the curtain rises in Act I to Józio singing the same song with some new lines: Że me serce tam sie zbliża Gdzie raj, Przyjechałem do Paryża, Aj! waj!24 (Because my heart expands / Wherever paradise is found, / Here I am in Paris, / Aj! waj!)

Józio is not rich, but he has access to as much money as it takes to have his way. “O yes, I have money,” he exclaims. “Whatever I want has to happen.” And in the next breath he specifies the inevitable object of his desires: “I’ll give a girl so many pleasures, you won’t believe.”25 In Józio’s world, there is no such thing as true love. Even Barnaba’s daughters, who are made to abandon their country boyfriends at the start of the play, explain that they only loved them because Mama said they should.26 In Warsaw, every woman is either a courtesan or longs to be one. If a man spends enough money on her, shows her a good enough time, it is assumed that she will “love him.” “Are you in love with us yet,” Edward and Wilhelm keep asking the girls as they lead them through the pleasure spots of Warsaw. Every woman that Józio brings to Barnaba makes him forget the previous one; each new face or leg reigns supreme. This is a world of pure appearance; only the surface rules, the pose is all. “Chic and Warsaw youth have become one,” declares Edward. “The biggest trick is not to let anyone unmask you. Ah chic!—chic!—what a great invention!” And Józio, true to his surname, exclaims, “Ah! chic, chic, it’s my beloved property.”27 After he has dressed the servant girl Marysia to look like a lady, she sings: Byłam sługA, dziś sie bawie, Strój na grzbecie modny mam;

24 25 26 27

Wystawa 7. Podróż 51. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 33, 32.

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Przez turniure nikt w Warszawie Nie rozróżni sług od dam. (I was a servant, today I play, / On my back a stylish dress; / Because of the corset no one in Warsaw / Can tell the lady from the maid.)

To which Józio replies: Dziś dziewczyne w modne stroje Może ubrać tylko żid.28 (Today a girl in stylish fashion / Can only be dressed by a Jew.)

The plots of these plays are driven by disguises which regularly transgress both class and gender lines. Most of the action in Paris, for example, is instigated by Barnaba’s jilted Warsaw girlfriend, who, in order to wreak vengeance on him, pretends to be a male Parisian bon vivant. Many of the stage directions for production numbers call for the dancers to cross-dress; this may have been a convention of the garden theatres, but Schober exploits it to the fullest. Language, too, is confused. The speech of Józio and all the other Jews in these plays is, of course, shot through with conventional malapropisms, mispronunciations, and stylized yiddishisms. In Podróż po Warszawie, there is also considerable fun with the French-accented speech of Mademoiselle Chiffon and the German Polish of Wilhelm’s father. But it is when Józio and Barnaba arrive in Paris that language confusion takes center stage. They become “Barnab de Faful” and “Juś de Grosik, un garçon de kantor.”29 Declares Józio to the Warsaw courtesan who is pretending to be a Parisian dandy: “I greet you as my best friend. And perhaps you also speak Yiddish.”30 And this is how Szmuł from Woli Ogon addresses a supposed French couple: “A! . . . git morgen mojsie Francuz i madame jego kobita . . . Cher mojsie, etez vous gesund? Ja parlez français. Voulez-vous zrobić geszeft? Ich vill łarżan.” The response is in perfect Polish: “A niech mnie kule bijA! tóż to żydek z nad Wisły” (I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, if it isn’t a little Jew from the banks of the Vistula).31 Further, there are choruses in pseudo-Spanish, pseudo-Italian, and pseudo-German, but above all encounters with so-called “wild people”

28 29 30 31

Ibid. 74–75. Wystawa 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 40.

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[dzicy ludzie]: Chinese, Japanese, and Africans. Józio explains to Fafuła that speaking these languages isn’t hard: “Whoever has his own good language will manage to communicate with anyone. So to speak Chinese isn’t hard. If you just say: ‘czi, cze, kon, pin, pang, ho, fu, fo’—then every Chinese will understand you. With a Japanese person it’s a little harder, but I can manage too.” Several minutes of nonsense dialogue follows with two Chinese and one Japanese character, until, fatigued by the conversion, Fafuła turns to French, at which the Chinese couple break out in Jewish Polish. It turns out they’re from Fafuła’s village, and recognized him when he began to speak French because “You speak French just as they do in Warsaw.”32 The Japanese man turns out to be Wilhelm’s father from the previous play, and Fafuła concludes, “One could think that Paris is Warsaw!” That, of course, is the point: this is a polono-judaized Paris, for Józio has transformed the world in his image. In a manic climax, having pursued an African woman through several acts, Józio tries to kiss her. She rebels and reveals herself to be Barnaba’s agent Szmuł. “You Jew!” explodes Józio. “How could you dare make fun of Mr. Grojseszyk.” To which Szmuł replies, “You’re a Jew yourself. I’m a Jew, but honest, but Jews like you shame honest Jews, of whom there are very many. You are an outcast of our nation.”33 Scattered throughout the fun in Schober’s plays are such moments of moral unease, expressed in comparisons between the old Jew and the new. This reaches its fullest expression in Schober’s last play Piekło, which features two Jews, the impoverished but honest Chaim from Warsaw, father of a large family, and the corrupt Viennese capitalist Geschefter. Laments Chaim: Dzisiaj goje krzyczA na żyda, Wszyscy jak robaka chcA zgnieść . . . Lecz nie wszyscy żydzi bankierzy, A ja z nedzy wołam aj waj!34 (Today the Gentiles yell at the Jew, / They all want to crush him like a bug . . . / But not all Jews are bankers, / And out of poverty I cry aj waj!)

32 33 34

Ibid. 80, 86. Ibid. 137–38. Piekło 10.

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“Don’t forget that I’m a Warsaw Jew,” Chaim tells Geschefter, “and only want to do clean business.”35 But when Geschefter is invited by Belzebub to bring “European reforms” to Hell, he takes Chaim along as his cover. Given a choice of animals to ride, Chaim insists on a kosher one, while Geschefter says he doesn’t care; they arrive in Hell flying astride a goose and a pig, respectively. Ach to mamy dziś siurpryze Żyd wziAł piekło w antrepryze.36

“We have today a great surprise / A Jew took Hell as an enterprise,” sings a chorus of devils. By the end of the play, Chaim has returned to his family in Warsaw, but Geschefter, who has made a fortune installing faulty railways that have crippled thousands of devils, is the master of Hell. Despite the moral ambiguities of the new world, however, what emerges overwhelmingly in these plays, in the sheer pleasure of spectacle and laughter, is an immensely attractive energy. This energy, in all its ambiguity, is probably best communicated in the following chorus from Podróż po Warszawie: Handel! handel! handel! handel! handel! Handel! handel! handel! Dziś Warszawa ciAgle wzrasta, Jest w niej ruch i szum, Przez ulice tego miasta Wielki płynie tłum. Tutaj złotem, szykiem, sławA, Głupstwo można kryć, Hej Warszawo, hej Warszawo! W tobie słodko żyć.37 (Business! business! business! business! / Business! business! business! / Today Warsaw grows unhindered, / Filled with noise and motion, / Through the streets of this city / Flows a giant crowd. / Here with gold and chic and fame / Stupidity can be concealed, / Hey Warsaw! hey Warsaw! / To live in you is sweet.)

35 36 37

Ibid. 16. Ibid. 66. Podróż 108.

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This is the energy of a new urban society, in which, as Marx’s poetic genius once put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”38 It is a world filled with cultural borderlands, and therefore with mixtures and impurities of many kinds, a world that is first becoming aware of its own potential. Master of this world at this particular moment, Józio Grojseszyk can still represent both old and new. He is the familiar dancing żydek of popular tradition, whose presence signifies that all is right with the world. Indeed, his association with Barnaba recreates in an urban context the traditional Polish symbiosis between landowner and Jew. But Józio emerges on the side of disorder as well. The world of appearances that he represents undermines all the established verities, particularly those of Old Poland. For several decades a figure riding all these tensions proved immensely appealing to urban audiences of Poles and Jews. But as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and alienation overcame familiarity in Polish-Jewish relations, there was less and less use for Józio. Yet as late as 1953 in Stalinist Poland, Leon Schiller, who had revived Podróż po Warszawie thirty years previously, still dreamed of another revival. In a letter to the ŁódΩ director Kazimierz Dejmek, Schiller proposed a version of “this unquestionably best piece of Polish vaudeville” that would be suited to the temper of the times. The play would direct its satire against the bourgeoisie and the declining landowners of its era and evince peasant and plebian sympathies. One major change would have to be made, however. It would be necessary, wrote Schiller, “to eliminate the figure of the Jewish counting-house clerk, the famous Józio Grojseszyk, and turn him into simply an amusing rogue—an ‘Aryan’.”39 Schiller died the following year and his plans for a journey through Warsaw without Józio were never realized.

38 The Communist Manifesto (New York: Bantam, 1992) 21; the phrase has been used by Marshall Berman in the title of his book of cultural criticism, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 39 Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Łodzi, Klub Miłośników Teatru, Suplement trzeci do dziejów teatralnych m. Łodzi: Pamieci Leona Schillera (ŁódΩ, 1974). For this pamphlet I am very grateful to Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska.

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Bibliography Filler, Witold. Melpomena i piwo. Warsaw: Pańtstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1878. ——. Barnaba Fafuła i Józio Grojseszyk na wystawie paryskiej: Śmiesznostka w 5 aktach. Warsaw, 1878. ——. Ulica Marszałkowska. Warsaw, 1880. ——. Piekło: Operetka komiczno-fantastyczna w 5 aktach. Warsaw, 1880. Steinlauf, Michael C. “Polish-Jewish Theater: The Case of Mark Arnshteyn; A Study of the Interplay among Yiddish, Polish and Polish Language Jewish Culture in the Modern Period.” Diss., Brandeis University, 1988. ——. “Mr. Geldhab and Sambo in Peyes: Images of the Jew on the Polish Stage, 1863– 1905.” Polin 4 (1989): 98–128. ——. “Mark Arnshteyn and Polish-Jewish Theater.” The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, eds. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz and Chone Shmeruk. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989: 399–411. ——. “Cul-de-Sac: The ‘Inner Life of Jews’ on the Fin-de-Siècle Polish Stage.” Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, eds. Benjamin Nathans and Gabriela Safran. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008: 119–42. Szweykowski, Zygmunt. “Teatrzyki ogródkowe w Warszawie.” Pamietnik Teatralny 7 (1958): 413–56.

THE POLISH SHULAMIS: JEWISH DRAMA ON THE POLISH STAGE IN THE LATE 19TH–EARLY 20TH CENTURIES Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska The modern professional Yiddish theatre came into being in 1876, in Jassy, Romania, the brainchild of the multi-talented writer Abraham Goldfaden. Within a short while, this new cultural phenomenon gained immense popularity amongst the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe. However, the growth and relative prosperity it enjoyed in the 1870s were severely impaired in 1883, when the czarist authorities banned theatrical performances in the Yiddish language throughout the Russian Empire.1 While the ban, which lasted until 1905 and which local authorities adhered to with various degrees of stringency, did not succeed in completely shutting down Yiddish theatrical enterprises, the hardship it caused stimulated the search for new ways of satisfying the discrepancy between Jewish craving for theatrical entertainment and the limited supply due to official prohibition. In an effort to outwit the authorities, Jewish companies disguised their linguistic identity under the appellation “Jewish-German”, and using this ruse, performed in various places including Warsaw and Lodz. Another significant outcome of the ban was the growing number of Polish-language productions of popular Yiddish plays, and their successful introduction into the repertory of many Polish theatres in Warsaw and the provinces. This constituted a new artistic and social phenomenon, as polonized Jewish plays attracted both Jewish and Gentile spectators. Consequently, it was in Polish-language theatres that the Jewish minority, which for centuries had been set apart by faith, language and customs, now traversed some of the rigid barriers dividing Jew and Pole. It was this development that led theatre historian Michael C. Steinlauf to speculate that “If the Yiddish theatre had not

1 For detailed discussion of the ban see Barbara Henry, “Jewish Plays on the Russian Stage: St. Petersburg 1905–1917” and John Klier, “ ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Russian Administrators and the Ban on the Yiddish Theatre in Imperial Russia” Yiddish Theatre, New Approaches, ed. Joel Berkowitz (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003).

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Figure 4. Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908).

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been relegalized after 1905, a Jewish theatre in the Polish language would undoubtedly have arisen.”2 This is a valid speculation, as at the beginning of the twentieth century 37 percent of Warsaw’s 500,000 inhabitants were Jews. Thus it would not have been altogether surprising if Warsaw were to offer performances of plays on Jewish themes written by Jewish authors, interpreted by Polish actors (some of them of Jewish origin) for predominantly Jewish audiences. Jewish theatre in Polish came into being a couple of decades earlier than commonly believed, in the immediate wake of performances of a so-called “jargon operetta” directed by Abraham Goldfaden in Warsaw and other Polish cities in the years 1885–1887. Goldfaden’s plays were the first dramatic works to be translated from Yiddish into Polish, acted by Polish actors and viewed by a Jewish and Polish audience. Abraham Goldfaden rejected the notion of Yiddish as a sub-standard German jargon, and as a nationalist Jew opposed the assimilationist view of some of the Jewish intelligentsia that the masses should adopt ambient languages and cultures and not seek entertainment in Yiddish, especially when it was not of the sort that catered to refined tastes. His work gained enormous popularity and had many imitators, among them Moyshe Horowitz, Shomer [Nachum Meir] Shaykewitz, and Joseph Lateiner. Not long after the foundation of Goldfaden’s company, his best actor, Israel Grodner, went his separate way and founded his own theatrical ensemble. Other Yiddish actors followed suit, and in the late 1870s began to tour the towns and townships of Galicia, Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. Yiddish theatre in Poland appears as early as 1876, when a Jewish theatre from Czerniowce under the direction of L. Konderli staged Der Goldonkel aus Amerika (The Rich Uncle from America) in Tarnów, a town where the “German-Jewish” ensemble of Horowitz would perform in 1881. In 1879, Warsaw hosted the company of Jacob Spiwakowski, with whom the young Jacob P. Adler appeared twice in Lodz, in 1880 and 1881, in a repertoire of mostly Goldfaden’s works; in 1881, the troupe of Joseph Weinstock began touring the towns of the Kingdom of Poland, visiting Lublin (1881, 1884) and Lodz (1883); in 1881, a group directed by Bernard Kohn came to Warsaw from Odessa; another ensemble from Odessa directed by two former Goldfaden associates,

2 Michael C. Steinlauf, “Teatr żydowski w Polsce. Stan badań”, Pamietnik Teatralny, z. 1–4 (1992): 16.

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Natan Schwartz and A. Rozenfeld, came to Lublin in 1883, where we also find a Jewish troupe from Vitebsk, whose repertoire included Goldfaden’s The Witch and Shulamis (1884). Finally, in 1885, the theatrical company of Abraham Goldfaden himself performed in the Kingdom of Poland, playing in Lodz and Kalisz in 1885, in Warsaw and Lodz in 1886, and for several months in Warsaw and Lodz in 1887. Apart from Goldfaden, with whom Adler also entered into partnership, other “Jewish-German” ensembles appeared in the second half of the 1880s: Grodner and Shomer Shaykewitz, Schwartz and A. Rozenfeld, Adler and Abraham Isaac Tantsman. The enormous popularity of Yiddish operettas motivated critics to assess the Jewish repertoire and its performances. Overall, the opinions voiced by Jewish orthodoxy, which opposed the secular theatre due to a traditional anti-theatrical stance, of Jewish assimilationists connected with the Polish-language Warsaw weekly Izraelita, and of the Polish press were unfavorable. The Lodz newspaper Dziennik Łódzki, which reviewed the performances of “Jewish operettas” directed by Goldfaden in the city in the mid-1880s, was shocked by their “markedly chansonette character, and lack of [good] taste”. At the same time it remarked on their diversity, noting that in the few years since its inception, the Yiddish theatre “had come to embrace historic drama, tragicomedy, drama, farce, and operetta, in a word all types of dramaturgy”. It also recommended that “[S]ome works of artistic merit such as Goldfaden’s ought to be translated into Polish, so that they reach a wider audience, and are presented to Jews in a more decent form and human language.”3 The condescending tone of the statement hardly requires elaboration. The commentary of Dziennik Łódzki was characteristic of its programme of assimilation for the non-Polish inhabitants of Poland: “For us this issue is no joking matter. The activity of ‘jargon’ operetta is simply pernicious. For this reason we wish it such [great] success that it will never need to return to Lodz.”4 The disparagingingly contemptuous comment regarding Yiddish, the vernacular of most of East European Jews, is rather startling from today’s perspective. It might have been triggered in part by the fact, that in the second half of the nineteenth

3 Dziennik Łódzki 1885, nr 145; 1886, nr 266; cf. Anna Kuligowska, “Pierwsze przedstawienie żydowskie w Łodzi”, Pamietnik Teatralny, z. 1–4 (1992): 391–414. 4 “Kronika łódzka”, Dziennik Łódzki 190 (1887).

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century, Jews constituted a significant sector of the Polish theatre-going public, and thus the rapid development of the professional Jewish theatre began to pose a threat to the already difficult position of Polish theatres in partitioned Poland, most particularly in the provinces. Of Goldfaden’s vast dramatic output, perhaps the most famous was Shulamis, Daughter of Jerusalem (1880). The play was performed and published in 1881 in Odessa, where the Goldfaden troupe went after leaving Romania, and was also the first Yiddish play to be translated into and performed in Polish. Shulamis is a love story based on a Talmudic legend, adapted into a Hebrew novel by Eliyohu Werbel, Goldfaden’s father-in-law. The play reworks the tale of “The Wild Cat and Well” (Khulda u’ve’er or Khulda u’vor) which invokes the all-powerful sacredness of an oath. Set in biblical Israel, the play tells of the beautiful Shulamis, who falls into a well while wandering in the desert. She is rescued by a handsome prince, Avisholom (Absalom). They vow to marry, with the well and a wild cat serving as witnesses. Avisholom then meets the princess Avigael (Abigail) and marries her, forgetting his oath to Shulamis (Shulamit). He is reminded of her only when the two children born of his marriage die (one drowning in a well, the other strangled by a wild cat). He finds Shulamis surrounded by rich suitors, whom she fends off by feigning madness. In the final scene Avisholom and Shulamis are united in marriage under the palm-trees. In addition to the romantic entanglement, the play depicts a sacred pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a solemn procession in the Temple, and numerous Jewish rituals.5 Yiddish theater scholar Nahma Sandrow detects in the biblical scenery a foretaste of nascent Zionism.6 She has also made the case that the compositional principle of Shulamis, like that of a typical melodrama, is the intensification of emotional effects through music and song, especially lyrical song, as in the scene where Shulamis is sitting by the well in the desert near Bethlehem and hears the voice of Avisholom proclaiming his love to her. Professor Chone Shmeruk ascertained that the most famous Yiddish song of all, “Rożinkes mit mandlen” (“Raisins and Almonds”), was sung in performances of Shulamis, and it appears in all available editions

5 In reviewing Shulamis, Izraelita 1887 nr 35 noted: “In one of the older rozcbik of Izraelita is the translation of a novel on this subject written by L. Mendelsburg”. Cf. Mirosława M. Bułat, Krakowski teatr żydowski. Krokower Iidisz Teater. Miedzy szundem a sztukA (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jaqiellońskiego, 2006) 70. 6 Nahma Sandrow, A World History of Yiddish Theater: Vagabond Stars (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 62–65.

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of the drama (Warsaw 1891, 1902, 1905, and New York [no year]). Shmeruk quoted Goldfaden’s own comment: “Though this is not the place for this song, I have put it in, because the public knows it and likes it very much”.7 Goldfaden produced Shulamis during his tour of Poland in 1885–1887, and there are many testimonies that confirm that of all his works, Shulamis aroused the most interest. According to a story related by Zygmunt Turkow-Grundberg in his book Varshe, dos vigele fun yidishn teater (Warsaw, Cradle of Yiddish Theater), Shulamis was performed 150 times in Warsaw alone. Official Polish sources do not corroborate the number, yet do confirm that Shulamis enjoyed a great success. Theater historian Maria Prussak has established that in July and August 1886, Goldfaden shared the use of the Warsaw theatre space with the Russian Teatr Buff, and that Shulamis played in Warsaw eight times in all, drawing large audiences.8 The statement of Izraelita in 1887 that Goldfaden’s melodrama “attracted Jewish crowds over a long period of time” confirms its success.9 Though we cannot establish a detailed performance schedule for Golfaden’s ensemble, it is safe to assume that from 1885 to 1887 Shulamis was performed in Warsaw at least a few dozen times. Zalmen Zylbercweig, author of the Leksikon fun yidishn teater, wrote that after Goldfaden had left Poland his play Shulamis “remained in the memory of tens of thousands of spectators.”10 Zylbercweig was particularly interested in the Polish version of Shulamis, about which he had read in the Hebrew booklet Bamat Yiskhak (Play Stage), published in Warsaw in the 1880s. In 1934, in Warsaw on a visit from New York, he was determined to find the artists who had participated in the Polish premiere. He succeeded in his search, as noted in his Teater mozaik.11 He found “the veteran of Yiddish theatre in Poland”, Yeshaya Rotshayn, who had sung in the knabn-khor (boys’

7 Chone Shmeruk, “PrzeglAd literatury dramatycznej w jezyku jidysz do I wojny światowej”, in Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska and Małgorzata Leyko (eds.) Teatr żydowski w Polsce. Materiały z Miedzynarodowej Konferencji Naukowej. Warszawa 18–21 paΩdziernika 1993 roku (ŁódΩ, 1998) 43. 8 Maria Prussak, “Goldfaden i rosyjski Teatr Buff ”, Pamietnik Teatralny z. 1–4 (1992): 248. 9 Em-Es, “Z życia”, Izraelita 1887, nr 35. 10 Zalmen Zylbercweig, “Goldfaden na polskiej scenie” (translated from Yiddish into Polish by Tomasz Kuberczyk), Pamietnik Teatralny, z. 1–4 (1992): 211. 11 (New York: Biderman, 1941).

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choir) used by Goldfaden, and was among the initiators and performers of the first Polish Shulamis. He explains that when Goldfaden left, the out-of-work, half-starved choirboys (Yeshaya and Adolf Rotshayn, M. Ch. Taytelman and Herman Berman) were hired by the Alhambra, a Polish garden theatre in Warsaw directed by the provincial director and actor Jan Szymborski.12 Deep in debt himself, Szymborski gladly accepted the Jewish singers’ proposal to stage in Polish a play that was “very popular in Warsaw”.13 Shulamis was translated from the original Yiddish into Polish by Israel Bernas, a manufacturer of mirrors, who also published a calendar to which Goldfaden contributed a poem.14 Bernas may have used the Warsaw edition of 1886.15 The Polish premiere of Shulamis took place on September 3, 1887, some two months after Goldfaden left Warsaw.16 The Warsaw press which advertised and reviewed the production, was most interested in the fact that “a Talmudic play [. . .] with music and dances” had been staged in a Polish theatre. They expected “clownery, the sort of overacting, of which the prototype and model was (Offenbach’s) Belle Hélene.”17 The weekly PrzeglAd Tygodniowy noted: . . . The play itself is a serious drama [. . .] and tells of the betrayed love of a Sulamite girl, her despair, and the return of her beloved to her grieving bosom. The story is treated with simplicity and romantic feeling, with earnest naiveté, and is enlivened in an original manner by Oriental music, sets and dances. All you could wish for—yet with what solemn seriousness, rapt attention, and elation, it was received by an audience of many thousands, enthusiastically applauding the scenes that moved it most!18

Zylbercweig erroneously mentioned Smotrycki’s ensemble. Ibid. 212–213. 14 See Jacob Shatsky, “Goldfaden in Varshe”, in Yankev Shatski, ed., Hundert yor Goldfaden, New York 1940, 8–9 (reference courtesy of Michael Steinlauf ). 15 Censor’s permission dated 5/17 VII, no year. During Goldfaden’s stay in Warsaw in 1886–1887, the firm of Baumritter and Gonsior published six of his dramas: Shulamis, The Capricious Bride, Dr Almosado, Bar Kokhba, Two Kuni Lemels, and Babcis and Grandaughter. 16 Zylbercweig’s information has enabled us to reconstruct the cast: (Irena) Sznebelin appeared in the title-role, ( Jan) Recki played Avisholom, ( Józef ?) Rutkowski (or Kościński) acted the part of Manoyekh, Chojnicki that of Cingitang, and Kościński (or Rutkowski) was the Priest Natan. The sung parts were performed by the choir of Jewish boys: Mitelman (Titelman?)—Joew Gigoni, (Yeshaya) Rotshayn—Avindav, and Berman, already mentioned, sang the part of one of the priests. 17 “Z teatru i muzyki”, Kurier Warszawski 1887 nr 240. 18 “Echa warszawskie”, PrzeglAd Tygodniowy 1887 nr 37, quoted from Pamietnik Teatralny, z. 3–4 (1992): 487–488. 12 13

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The mention of “an audience of many thousands” was no exaggeration. PrzeglAd Tygodniowy reported that “on the day of the performance the small theatre and garden at the Alhambra were besieged by unprecedented crowds of Jewish spectators; their number apparently attained three thousand, and many came especially from faraway provinces just to see this renowned work”. It defined the public as “circles of our intelligentsia”, and in keeping with its positivist programme of assimilation declared: This typical characteristic performance has demonstrated to us beyond doubt the civilization of the Jewish masses, their sense of the aesthetic, [which is] naturally different and differently conceived from ours. But this should hardly come as a surprise, being that for five centuries the two nations have been consistently separated. At all events, the performance proved that it is not a ribald farce, a wild cancan, or decaying cynicism that is capable of interesting, attracting and influencing the mass of the Jewish intelligentsia, but rather it is a serious play, healthy in its motives. This is the road our provincial theatre should take, with caution and without haste—and, as best it can, it will draw the Jewish masses into the movement of civilization.19

Shulamis attracted crowds of Jewish and non-Jewish spectators, and the editor of Izraelita voiced his pleasure that the Midrashic heroine had been “shown on a proper (i.e. Polish) stage”. The paper went on as follows: The translation is smooth and fairly correct, which on account of the dialect from which the translator worked and the varied songs interwoven with the action earns Mr Bernas no small recognition. The play of the actors leaves nothing to be desired. Every performance of this play draws thousands of eager folk to the Alhambra, and the headquarters of the garden Melpomene long echoes with the applause bestowed upon the translator and the artists.20

The music journal Echo Muzyczne, Teatralne i Artystyczne was less sympathetic to what it called “this wretched production, which in a wretched performance was not even comprehensible”, and was amazed by the delight expressed by some two thousand “gabardined” (i.e. Jewish) spectators, the endless applause and curtain calls.21

Ibid. Em-Es, “Z życia”, Izraelita 1887 nr 35. 21 R. [Aleksander Rajchman] “Kronika Teatr,” Echo Muzyczne, Teatralne i Artystyczne nr 306 (1887). 19 20

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An important measure of theatrical success is the number of performances and length of each run. Zylbercweig supplies us with conflicting information, namely that Shulamis was played “nine times” and that it was performed “for two months to capacity audiences,” adding, “the Polish actors paid their debts.”22 This is at odds with the facts. Despite the play’s success, director Jan Szymborski could not prolong his stay in Warsaw. He was a private entrepreneur at the Alhambra summer theatre at Miodowa Street 10, and regulations guarding the Warsaw State Theatres ordained the annual closing of the garden season on September 30th. When Szymborski staged Goldfaden’s play in 1887, the summer season ended even earlier, on September 12th. According to press reports, the actors were driven out of Warsaw by the cold and the rain. Nine, perhaps ten, performances of Shulamis seems a more likely number, if we take into account press notices. Clearly the Polish Shulamis was the “workhorse” or, as was also said at the time, the “bombshell” of Szymborski’s repertoire as Goldfaden’s melodrama set out to tour the Polish provinces. For the winter season Szymborski went to Płock (near Warsaw), where he presented Shulamis on November 19 and 20 and on December 3, 1887. Of the original Warsaw cast, Recki was still playing Avisholom. With the possible exception of Bolesław Bolesławski, the other actors all had to learn new roles, yet their performance “by provincial stage standards” was deemed “exemplary”. The local newspaper Korespondent Płocki noted: Mrs [Teofila] Żołopińska and Mr [ Jan] Recki (Avisholom) sang flawlessly, skillfully lavishing their vocal reserves (much appreciated by the audience) and Mrs [Zofia] Bolesławska was an alluring and gracious Abigail, constituting thereby an attenuating circumstance for the sins of the faithless Absalom [Avisholom], and as always performed her vocal and dramatic task in a most pleasant manner. [. . .] Mr [Bolesław] Bolesławski played the role of Monoach with dignity and appropriate demeanor, while Mr [Tadeusz] Pol—an apparently good acquisition for our stage—was humorously entertaining as Cingitang.23

The newspaper also judged the spectacle favorably, noting: “The sets are carefully conceived, the costumes new, appropriate, relatively expensive, the grouping of people on the stage carried out with taste. They bring Zylbercweig, op. cit. 212, 213. “Teatr”, Korespondent Płocki, nr 92 (1887). Cf. B. Konarska-Pabiniak, Repertuar teatru w Płocku 1808–1939 (Warszawa, 1982). 22 23

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credit to the director.” But the Płock journalist had reservations about Goldfaden’s “lyrical work” and its translation: The drama itself is a very weak work and, with its countless flaws and lack of any more distinguished quality, offends by the inappropriate use of words and frequently by its triviality. On the other hand the music based on the songs and psalms of Israel is very beautiful in places and, in spite of its monotonous rhythm, one listens to it with great pleasure.24

The staging of Shulamis and its “box-office success,” created quite a stir in Płock, as Szymborski’s previous directorial works had hitherto been “unjustly stricken by the disfavor of the public,” so much so that when Józef Narzymski’s “beautiful comedy” Epidemia was announced, no one came to the theatre. After the success of Shulamis, however, during which “the public manifested signs of satisfaction”, letters of support were written to the editor of Korespondent Płocki.25 At the third performance on Saturday, December 3, 1887, Shulamis was still a box-office success. A total of three performances in a provincial town of some 50,000 inhabitants, as Płock then was, signified an unquestionable feat. However it did not save Szymborski from financial trouble. Still, in the following years he presented Shulamis many times (e.g. in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, March 23, 1891).26 Jozef Teksel, a provincial director well known for his enterprising initiatives, was next to jump on the Shulamis bandwagon, with a production that concluded the summer season in Radom (30 September 1887), presenting it in Lodz several days later. The local paper Dziennik Łódzki had prepared the way for him. At the news of a play “translated from the jargon” being staged in Warsaw, the Lodz daily wrote on September 11, 1887: “Goldfaden’s repertory includes several works that deserve to be translated—with the additional benefit that German-jargon operetta would then become superfluous.”27 These words were also a reaction to recent performances of Shulamis in Lodz, directed by Goldfaden in July and August 1887. Since the chief concern of Dziennik Łódzki was the polonization of local Germans and Jews, it was upset by the fact that the high rent paid by the Jewish ensemble for the Thalia theatre was, in effect, subsidizing the maintenance of the German theatre. The Ibid. “Z miasta”, Korespondent Płocki, nr 92 (1887). 26 Cf. Emilian Leszczyński, Teatr w Tomaszowie Mazowieckim w latach 1828–1912 (Tomaszów Mazowiecki, 2004) 44. 27 Sarmaticus [Łucjan Kościelecki], “Z tygodnia”, Dziennik Łódzki, nr 201 (1887). 24 25

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following example from an article entitled Polish Theater in Lodz, printed early in 1887, clarifies the tone and flavor of its policy: The local population, especially of late, has so often manifested a friendly desire to come closer to the Jews that it is time the Jews also gave as often as possible tokens of the heroism and solidarity of feelings that should animate all the inhabitants of this country. In Lodz the best way to make friends and tighten social ties is the theatre. So let us all go to the theatre; [. . .] let us wait in the theatre for fellow citizens, of good will, regardless of origin and faith.28

One might say that by presenting Sulamita (Shulamis) Daughter of Jerusalem, advertised as “Melodrama in 4 acts (8 tableaux), with songs and dance” on October 5, 7 and 8, 1887, Jozef Teksel, the director of the Lodz theatre, was complying with this appeal, though he undoubtedly had material gains in mind as well. Dziennik Łódzki devoted a separate report to the Polish Shulamis. Having described in detail “the contents of the melodrama, the backdrop of magnificent processions of knights, pilgrims and maidens dancing,” it decreed in that now-familiar tone of voice: “Somewhat boring as a whole, this play is enlivened by the flat comic antics of the black slave Chingintang in Avisholom’s service. The most interesting part for the spectators is the rituals, which are new to them, and the original music based on Eastern motifs, altogether very pleasing.” It described the acting as “quite decent,” though claimed the sets “offended by decorational anachronisms.” The premiere performance lasted some three and a half hours, ending at half past midnight, which did not prevent the large audience from calling to the stage Israel Bernas, who had come from Warsaw, and rewarding him with applause. The critic offered a lukewarm assessment of Bernas’s literary achievement: “The translation of the play is good, the language pure, but the verse leaves much to be desired from the point of view of measure and choice of rhymes.”29 The fact that Shulamis, which had been acted over a dozen times in the original by various societies of Jewish artists, was presented in Polish in Lodz three times, including on the Jewish Sabbath (October 8, 1887), points to its indubitable theatrical success. No wonder Teksel “Teatr polski w Łodzi”, Dziennik Łódzki, nr 44 (1887); cf. A. Kuligowska-Korzeniewska in Polacy-Niemcy-Żydzi w Łodzi. SAsiedzi dalecy i bliscy, ed. Paweł Samuś (ŁódΩ: Pawel, 1997) 240–259. 29 “Z teatru”, Dziennik Łódzki, nr 223 (1887). 28

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kept Shulamis in his repertory and presented it on March 24, 1889, in Kalisz, where he attracted the public with “music based on melancholy Hebrew melodies” which “make a pleasant impression on the listeners”. The Kaliszanin declared: “The entire play is sustained by the acting of Miss M. Teksel in the role of the unhappy Sulamite.”30 The third director to tour the provinces with Shulamis was Lucjan Dobrzański, who in conjunction with Jan Recki showed this play in Radom (September 22, 1888). They appeared in the summer season in Lublin, where Shulamis was played on June 15, 1889, with a cast including Sznebelin (Idziakowska), the first Polish Shulamis; Jan Recki, the first Polish Avisholom; and Tadeusz Pol, the Cingitang from Płock. Gazeta Lubelska gave advance notice of the performance, but unfortunately carried no review, so we have no idea how the Polish-Jewish community of Lublin received Goldfaden’s operetta.31 The other director who included Shulamis in his repertoire was Maurycy Kisielnicki. On October 20, 1888, his troupe had performed the play in Kielce. The local newspaper then wrote the symptomatic comments: It is highly characteristic of the way things are in Kielce, where the Jewish population evinced next to no familiarity with the Polish theatre, yet flocked in vast numbers to the performance of Shulamis, the story of which is based on the Biblical history of the people of Israel. The entire amphitheatre was literally taken over by the daughters and sons of Israel, amounting to some 400 in all. What a pity that Shulamis alone possesses the magnet to attract Jews to the theatre, as by attending it more frequently they would stand to gain much, in the first place learning correct pronunciation.32

A couple of months later (March 18, 1889) Kisielnicki brought the Polish Shulamis to the public of Radom (near Kielce). The play’s subsequent stage career is connected with the performance of the Jewish actor Adolf Szliferstein in the role of Cingitang. His name was the chief attraction of the performance on Saturday, 15 September, 1894 in Sellin’s garden in Lodz. The extant poster on which director Czesław Janowski announced “the last appearance of this actor”, leads 30 Ibid.; “Wiadomości miejscowe i okoliczne”, Kaliszanin, nr 26 (1889); cf. Stanisław Kaszyński, Teatralia kaliskie. Materiały do dziejów sceny kaliskiej (1800–1970), (ŁódΩ, 1972) 451. 31 Cf. Stefan Kruk, Repertuar teatru lubelskiego 1864–1890 (Warszawa, 1979) 199–200. 32 Gazeta Kielecka, nr 85 (1888). I wish to thank Dr Marta Kowalska for giving me information concerning Shulamis in Kielce.

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one to assume that the “operetta in 4 acts (8 tableaux)” had already been presented in this realization in Lodz.33 The “star” of the Lodz performance, Adolf Szliferstein played Cingitang in many other cities and with a number of Polish provincial ensembles. Theatre scholar Mirosława M. Bułat suggested that Szliferstein, as an actor who had so far appeared exclusively in the Yiddish theatre, could by playing in Shulamis the role of a “wild man” freely “murder the Polish language”, which was an unfailing source of comic effect.34 Szliferstein in the role of Cingitang appeared mainly with the ensemble of the Czystogorski Brothers, “about whom it was whispered”—to quote Zylbercweig again—“that they are Lodz Jews [. . .]. That troupe also toured the Polish provinces, doing a good trade everywhere.”35 The Czystogorski Brothers, or rather Feliks (Feliksiewicz) and Benedykt (Remy) Reinberg, formed their own troupe in September 1891, and managed it with a few brief interludes until October 1900. Over this decade they visited at the very least several dozen cities.36 I am unable to establish fully in which towns Shulamis was staged. It is, however, worth recalling that Ludwik Czystogorski was a member of Szymborski’s ensemble when the latter staged the Polish Shulamis at the Warsaw Alhambra in 1887, serving as a model for him to emulate. Czystogorski was also an actor in Kisielnicki’s troupe in Kielce in 1888, and may well have appeared in Shulamis there. Many of the actors in Czystogorski’s group in the 1890s (Tadeusz Gorzkowski, Stanisław Modzelewski, Henryk Morozowicz, Izabela Nowicka) had previously acted in this play. According to Zylbercweig, Czystogorski’s success became proverbial, duly encapsulated in the saying: “We owe it to the beautiful Shulamis that we are not bankrupt”. Zylbercweig further mentions that Shulamis was played again in later years, but soon disappeared from the repertory of operetta ensembles.37 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Shulamis was played in Sosnowiec (Teatr Miejski, directed by Feliks Feliński, December 27, 1902), and in Płock (Lublin troupe under Henryk Morozowicz, November 28,

Museum of History of the City of Lodz. Dr. Mirosława M. Bułat of the Jagiellonian University made this very interesting suggestion to me at a research meeting in Cracow in 2002. 35 Zylbercweig, op. cit. 213. 36 Słownik biograficzny teatru polskiego 1765–1965 (Warszawa, 1973) 113. 37 Zylbercweig, op. cit. 213. 33 34

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1903).38 It is not to be found in the repertory of Polish ensembles after 1905. Once the ban on Jewish theatres was lifted, there was no longer any need for Jewish theatrical fare to be performed in Polish. At least two other plays by Abraham Goldfaden were translated in the late nineteenth century: Di kishefmakherin (The Witch) and Bar Kokhba. The Witch was translated by Israel Bernas and was intended for the Eldorado, the garden stage in Warsaw at Długa Street 23, which Goldfaden’s ensemble had previously used, and for the summer of 1889 it was taken up by provincial directors Kazimierz and Stanisław Sarnowski. The Polish premiere of The Witch took place on July 6, 1889. Zylbercweig, quoting a “longer note” by A. R. Malachi, wrote: “The success of the play was enormous. Jews and Christians alike came to the performances. Every time the play was on, the auditorium was packed to the seams. From the commercial point of view it was also a success.” Zylbercweig points out that all the actors in The Witch were Poles, and that it broke with the tradition that the role of Bobe Yakhe be played by a male actor when actress Maria Osmolska appeared as the witch. The street merchant Hotzmakh was played by Bremer (Brenner).39 The Sarnecki brothers kept the production in repertory and presented it again in the summer of 1890 ( July 5 and August 2) in Kalisz. The local newspaper gave it a short, but caustic notice: “Written for the eye more than for the ear of a certain part of the public that looks for coarse effects, its existence could be justified by suitable sets.” The Sarneckis could clearly not afford rich, colorful decorations and costumes for this “operetta from the German in 8 tableaux”, that includes a scene in a bazaar in Istanbul, where sixteen-year-old Mirele has been sold to a coffee-shop proprietor by her cruel stepmother.40 We know from Moyshe Zayfert’s Geshikhte fun yidishn teater41 that Goldfaden’s Bar Kokhba was also performed in Polish in the 1890s, but even Zylbercweig was unable to confirm this fact. In spite of an unusual career, not a single version of the nineteenthcentury translations of Goldfaden’s plays into Polish has been preserved, 38 Cf. Dramat obcy w Polsce 1765–1965. Premiery, druki, egzemplarze. A–K. Praca zespołowa pod kierunkiem Jana Michalika. Redaktor tomu: Stanisław Hałabuda (Kraków, 2001) 280. 39 Zylbercweig, op. cit. 213. 40 “Wiadomości miejscowe i okoliczne”, Kaliszanin, nr 52, 54 (1890); cf. Kaszyński (1972): 455. 41 Di yidishe bine (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1897).

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although numerous theatre copies of Shulamis must have been in use, especially in the provinces. Israel Bernas, the translator of Shulamis and The Witch, scored many a success both in Warsaw and the provinces, but his work had a purely utilitarian character. Manuscript copies travelled in the luggage of touring actors and directors. Fate treated their luggage with exceptional harshness—to the great regret of historians of Polish and Jewish theatres. The absence of a Polish copy of Shulamis does not however prevent one formulating remarks of a more general nature: • At the end of the 1880s, the ban on performances in Yiddish resulted in the birth of a new phenomenon: Jewish theatre in the Polish language. • The creators of this theatre were Polish entrepreneurs and actors, whom Shulamis more than once saved from bankruptcy. • Polish ensembles decided to include a Jewish play in their repertory, in particular the “jargon operetta” directed by Abraham Goldfaden, because of its triumphant success when performed by Jewish ensembles. • The Polish language Shulamis was seen mainly by Jewish audiences, both by members of the Jewish intelligentsia who favoured assimilation and by large numbers of the lower classes who longed for theatrical entertainment. • Shulamis and The Witch in Polish were viewed in Warsaw by the audiences of the garden theatres, which were run by provincial directors. At the end of the summer season, new performances that had been acclaimed in the capital, such as Goldfaden’s plays, went on tour to provincial towns, where they inaugurated the winter season. • Shulamis was in the permanent repertory of several provincial touring companies ( Jan Szymborski, Jozef Teksel, Lucjan Dobrzański, Jan Recki, Maurycy Kisielnicki, Feliks and Benedykt Czystogorski, Feliks Feliński, Henryk Morozowicz et al.). • The Polish Shulamis was seen by spectators in the following towns and cities of the Kingdom of Poland (Russian-dominated Poland): Warsaw, Płock, Radom, Lodz, Kielce, Lublin, Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Sosnowiec et al. • No precise figure for the number of Polish-language performances of Shulamis can be established. They were certainly fewer than the number of performances in Yiddish, but may have attained several dozen repeats with different casts, which in the circumstances was an indubitable success.

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• The scant references suggest that Polish actors performing in Shulamis imitated the Jewish actors, especially those from Goldfaden’s ensemble. As the action takes place in Biblical times, Shulamis did not necessitate the creation of “Polish-Jewish types”, which for several decades had been the emploi of character actors. • Shulamis was translated into verse by Israel Bernas, whose Polish rendering of this poetic melodrama appears to have passed muster. As the only character part was that of the black-skinned servant Cingitang, the actor performing this role did not have to replicate the stereotype of Jewish peddlers and innkeepers, familiar from the Polish landscape. • Produced in 8 or 10 tableaux, the main attractions of Shulamis were its picturesque quality, the exoticism of its images, the arrangement of group scenes, the songs (over a dozen solo and choral numbers), the dances, and the “Eastern” music. This music was performed by Jews who had lived in Polish territory for several hundred years. Jewish bands traditionally played the accompaniment to dancing in the manors of the nobility and in peasant inns. Engaging Jewish musicians to perform in Shulamis was thus in no way problematic. • Shulamis confirmed for Jewish spectators their biblical connection and national identity. • Through Shulamis Polish spectators discovered the culture of the Jews, about which they knew nothing, even though they often lived next door or in the same street. Goldfaden’s Shulamis satisfied the emotional and aesthetic needs of Poles and Jews alike. It may thus be seen as an ideal example of popular theatre at the end of the nineteenth century. Bibliography Bułat, Mirosława M. Krakowski teatr żydowski = Krokower Iidisz Teater: miedzy szundem a sztukA. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2006. Dramat obcy w Polsce 1765–1965. Premiery, druki, egzemplarze. A–K. Praca zespołowa pod kierunkiem Jana Michalika. Redaktor tomu: Stanisław Hałabuda, Kraków: Ksieg, 2001. Henry, Barbara. “Jewish Plays on the Russian Stage: St. Petersburg 1905–1917.” Yiddish Theatre, New Approaches. Ed. Joel Berkowitz. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003. 61–75. Kaszyński, Stanisław. Teatralia kaliskie. Materiały do dziejów sceny kaliskiej (1800–1970). ŁódΩ: Wydawn. Łódzkie, 1972. Klier, John. “‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Russian Administrators and the Ban on the Yiddish Theatre in Imperial Russia.” Yiddish Theatre, New Approaches. Ed. Joel Berkowitz. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003. 159–174.

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Konarska-Pabiniak, Barbara. Repertuar teatru w Płocku 1808–1939. Warszawa [Warsaw], 1982. Kruk, Stefan. Repertuar teatru lubelskiego 1864–1890, Warszawa 1979. Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Anna. “Pierwsze przedstawienie żydowskie w Łodzi.” Pamietnik Teatralny z. 1–4. 391–414. ——. “Łód< teatralna: polska, niemiecka i żydowska. Współpraca i rywalizacja.” Polacy-Niemcy-Żydzi w Łodzi. SAsiedzi dalecy i bliscy, ed. Paweł Samuś. Łód