Once upon a time, in New York’s Lower East Side, girls who slaved over sweatshop sewing machines would spend half their meager wages on tickets to the Yiddish theater.
The Yiddish theater, now an all-but-lost art form, was a major influence on Jewish immigrants to America, brightening their lives and teaching them how to survive in a new country.
Between 1880 and 1920, some 2 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to America, bringing with them their stories, memories and songs. Among them were the actors and playwrights who fled Russian lands, first to Paris and London, when the czar banned performances in Yiddish.
Volunteers with the Judah L. Magnes Museum docent outreach program have documented the history of the Yiddish theater in a slideshow. It is one of 12 slideshows being presented by docents around the Bay Area. Other subjects include Jewish art, folk beliefs, wedding customs and the Gold Rush.
Yiddish theater was an important social and educational tool that helped Jews become Americanized, said Rose Levine of Castro Valley, the longtime docent outreach coordinator at the Magnes.
Levine and husband Hillel were instrumental in putting together the Yiddish theater slideshow.
“We talk about the actors and their lives and the characters they created, and what Yiddish theater gave to the immigrants,” Levine said recently over lunch.
“They saw on the stage, people like themselves,” she continued. “They saw on the stage new concepts, plays that exposed the old ways of matchmaking, dressing and doing business. They were taught, through these plays how not to be ‘green.'”
Levine laughed: “Actually, there are a whole slew of plays with the word ‘green’ in the title.”
The theater was more than an educational tool. It also provided a social outlet where new immigrants could meet and mingle with others like themselves.
Performances often were raucous affairs. A constant exchange between the audience and the actors took place. Music was used, even in serious plays, and often performances morphed into a community sing-along. Sheet music was sold at intermission, and people could buy the score and learn it at home.
The plots ranged from grandiose and operatic versions of Bible stories to tearjerkers, romances and slapstick comedy.
Then more serious playwrights like Jacob Gordin came along. Gordin was disgusted with the frivolous entertainment at Yiddish theaters, so he decided to write Yiddish versions of theatrical classics.
This ushered in the Golden Age of Yiddish theater, with actors and actresses whose popularity was, if limited to a certain population, not unlike that of the Hollywood stars of today.
One of those stars was Jacob Adler, a theater idol of the early 1900s. His performance in “The Yiddishe King Lear” was reputed to have been magnificent. In one performance, when Lear has been turned out by his daughters and is begging in the street, an audience member rose in his seat and declared: “For shame. Come home with me and I’ll take care of you.”
Adler also played Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and, so great was the word-of-mouth that a Broadway producer came to the Lower East Side to see him. Adler was invited to come uptown and play the role on Broadway. “Ah, but I can only do it in Yiddish,” the actor said. And so he did, while the other members of the Broadway cast spoke Shakespeare’s lines in English, as they were written.
Boris Thomashefsky, an accomplished actor himself, is credited with bringing Yiddish theater to America. As a boy of 12, working in a cigarette sweatshop, he heard his fellow workers singing songs from the Yiddish theater in the Old Country and fell in love with them, Levine related.
After convincing a Lower East Side tavern owner to finance some actors to come over from Europe, he formed a troupe and announced the opening play, titled “The Witch.” The “uptown Jews,” who felt themselves thoroughly Americanized and objected to a performance in Yiddish, attempted a little sabotage.
The leading lady was bribed to fake a sore throat and refuse to perform. According to his grandson San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas — young Boris put on a woman’s costume, with padding in all the right places, and went on in her place.
Other stories involve actors who went beyond the Yiddish theater to broader fame: Molly Picon, Paul Muni and a very young Walter Matthau. Not only did the Yiddish theater exert a great influence on the American theater at large, it spawned an entire generation of Jewish comics.
Presentations of the Judah L. Magnes Museum docent outreach program are $60. Discounts are available to school and senior groups. Information: (510) 581-5425 or [email protected].