Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  The audience was stunned. People talked of nothing but the bear dance. It was difficult to silence the ovations after the scene.

  Morevski was in a rage. Nothing satisfied him. The actors shot each other knowing glances. Kutner was stealing the show. When Siomke Kagan wrote more in his review about Kutner than about Morevski, the theater was in an uproar. Siomke wrote, “Shloyme Kutner has elevated himself from the swamp of lowbrow theater and created a figure who can serve as a symbol of the small shop owner’s protest against the powerful capitalist system. His bear dance brings a salutation from the state that buried the landowners and now brightens the world with proletarian art.” About Morevski, Siomke wrote that his tycoon mustache impressed no one.

  One fine day, Morevski informed my father that he was done with the play. “Kutner’s bear is more like a raccoon. He’s just not used to serious roles.”

  My father understood perfectly well that the actor’s words were simply a cover for his jealousy. So he said to his star actor, “Avrom, the play is going so well. It’s sold out every night. They’re writing about the show in all the newspapers.”

  Morevski looked at my father with the eyes of a Tatar bandit. “Oh sure, they’re writing about the play.” He wanted to add something, probably to mention Siomke’s review, but he just rasped hoarsely. Annoyed, he went off to Velfke’s to polish off a tasty piece of sirloin in gravy.

  Meanwhile Kutner became ill. Each time he finished the bear dance, he went directly into the chilly change room drenched in sweat and ended up catching a cold. They had to interrupt the run. My father asked Morevski to go to Warsaw and find someone in the artists’ union to play the lease-holding arrendar. Getting up from his chair, Morevski said, “No, no one is going anywhere. We’re not getting anybody to replace Kutner. He isn’t, God forbid, dangerously ill. The audience will wait a week for him to recover.”

  Morevski could wait. He still had his building. My father had only debts. He couldn’t wait a single day. People were fighting for tickets. Dovidke the Epileptic, the chief scalper, speculated on the tickets for every hit show, selling them at the closed box office in the evenings for a profit. He begged my father, “Mr. Moyshe, I’ll give you money in advance for ten performances!”

  Of all times for Morevski to refuse to perform. My father reminded him gently, “Avrom, you told me you can’t act with Kutner, that he ruins entire scenes. Now you’re telling me to wait for him to recover.” This conversation took place at Velfke’s restaurant. Morevski moved away from the table to make room for his belly, wiped his mouth, and thought for a moment. Then he coughed, trying to clear his voice, but it didn’t help—he was still hoarse. He stopped coughing and rasped, “Moyshe, I can’t believe you’ve been involved in the theater for so many years and you still don’t understand that as long as Kutner is on stage and people clap for him, he’s my mortal enemy. But when he’s lying in bed sick, he’s my friend, and more than that, a talented friend.”

  My father and Morevski went to visit Kutner on his sickbed.

  A fire broke out in Zalkind’s building where the Palace Theater had made its home. Only a few embers remained from the entire theater. Everything had gone up in smoke. The sets burned like kindling. The chairs didn’t fare any better. Only the tacks that Mendke had used to fasten the curtains survived. They lay scattered around the wet stage like worms after a rainfall.

  My mother raised her eyes to heaven. “Good riddance to the theater. He’ll have to do real work now.” But before very long my father came home with a schmaltz herring, two Spanish onions, and good news. First, he had the herring killed. Then he announced at the table that he was going to take over Tsinizeli’s circus on Ludvizarske Street. He’d already spoken with Krengel, the owner. My mother peeled the onions and said nothing. My father tried to convince himself that her tears were from the onion. He thought she should be happy. They were setting up another theater. When he finished eating, he filled both sides of a cigarette pack with tiny numbers and passed it to my mother so she could see for herself how successful the business would be. My mother pushed the cigarette pack away and groaned, “Oh, Meyshe, you’re getting into a whole new set of problems.”

  My mother only went to Tsinizeli’s circus once, to watch Zishe Breitbart bend an iron bar over his knee. Her face was flushed when she arrived home. This wasn’t because Breitbart had wrapped the iron bar around his arm like a leather tefillin strap, but because of the way he’d rode into the arena in a chariot, flinging his cape from his shoulders. “If Orliek had looked like that in Bar-Kochba,” she told Father, “the box office would also have looked very different.” Breitbart was a well-built man, and the women in Vilna appreciated masculine beauty.

  Once, the handsome Ben-Tsion Vitler played a gentleman bandit. He put on his pajamas and went to bed at the beginning of the first act. All on stage. The women in the theater poked each other with their elbows and whispered, “Oh my, look at that body.” My father also wanted to please the women, his best customers, so he had his beard trimmed every two weeks at Bendel the Barber’s.

  My mother didn’t understand how they would be able to put on plays in the circus, but my father had a vivid imagination. The circus had gone bankrupt, and the few remaining animals were given to the zoo for a song. My father decided he would dismantle the arena, build a stage, and put out chairs. That’s exactly what happened.

  My father hurried to see Ruden, the theater carpenter. Ruden had dragged wooden stakes around behind the closed curtains during intermission for years. He was angry with God for giving him night work, so he pounded his hammer so hard you could hear it throughout the hall. Like my mother, Ruden hated the theater. He’d left the theater countless times and returned each time. He insisted that someone had cast a spell on him. Even though he hated the theater, an evil force kept dragging him back.

  When Ruden heard my father’s plans, he grumbled, “Mr. Meyshe, I refuse to climb on the circus rafters. I want to live out the few gloomy years left to me in the theater with my legs intact. For work like that, look for goyim.”

  My father did exactly that. He went to Novishviot where the Starovyern, the Old Believers who’d left the Greek Orthodox Church, lived. They were known throughout the region for their carpentry skills. It wasn’t long before bearded Russians sat astride wooden logs, chopping beams for the theater with axes that were as sharp as razors. My father walked from one to the other, telling them how to do their work.

  There was a theater again. Elaborate performances with extras and choruses took place on Ludvizarske Street. A live horse even appeared on the stage once. Rudolf Zoslovski insisted that he come on stage with a horse and wagon, exactly as Sholem Aleichem wrote in Tevye the Dairyman. My father liked the idea, so he went to the lumber market and brought back a horse and wagon. All evening the potato farmer who owned the team of horses sat behind the curtains bent over, waiting for Tevye to have it out with God and leave the stage.

  On Saturday evenings, the balcony almost caved in from the crush of people. One woman took the play so much to heart that she fainted when our sister Dveyrke and another girl sang, “We will remember you” after their father was seized for forty years of hard labor. The housewives from Kalvareyske Street left the theater with swollen red eyes, cursing the evil seducer.

  The entire city knew the theater. Everyone attended the performances—from young to old, from poor to rich, from the upper crust to the underworld. Sashke the Count had his regular seat for every premiere. He behaved himself in the theater and didn’t try to enrich himself from anyone else’s wallet.

  My father only had a problem with Sashke once. A Jew from America complained to my father that someone had stolen his passport with a hundred dollars in it during the performance. He demanded compensation. My father immediately went to see Sashke, ostensibly to ask for advice. Sashke the Count straightened his necktie and returned the passport with great dignity. Then he said, “Mr. Meyshe, here’s the passport. I hope that fool appreciates
the city of Vilna and particularly, this theater. And I hope you realize the American is a swindler. He’d steal the whites from your eyes. He bamboozled you. There was only twenty dollars in his passport, not a hundred. You should rake him over the coals for that lie.”

  What was a Jew with a beard and a Gemara hoping to find in the theater? What dream did he hope to fulfill among the paper flowers and the green leaves cut from sack linen? A dream of riches? Definitely not. A magnificent performance that would turn the world upside down? He didn’t have the money for that. Then what? The simple truth is that my father loved the theater. He loved the constant talk; the anticipation; the actors, that gang of jokers; the colorful world that shimmered with lights of every color.

  Once my mother went to the theater courtyard and saw some goyim putting up a fence around the bare earth in front of the foyer door. When she asked what they were doing, they explained that my father had hired them to create a garden. My mother yelled at him, “You thief! You’re throwing away even more money.”

  My father calmly explained that the garden would draw visitors to the theater, especially during the summer, the dead season. He explained his plans. He wanted bushes around the edge of the garden with a tree in the middle. My mother looked at him with glassy eyes, as though he’d just shown up from another planet. She asked him worriedly, “Meyshe, are you all right? For years you’ve run around between trees made from veneer. Have you suddenly remembered that a tree is something you plant, not something you bang together from boards?”

  My father sighed, “Whatever I do, it’s never right. You’re always yelling that I should get involved with real work. Now I have.”

  The tree bore shiny brown chestnuts. The courtyard children collected them in their little caps and boiled them for ink. Sitting under the tree, the actors bargained with each other for cigarettes that they used as collateral for their card games. My father walked through the garden, searching between the bushes for inspiration for the next hit to keep the theater going.

  The theater disappeared into eternity along with my father.

  The tree remained.

  14

  Memories of a Decimated Theater Home

  When my mother got to the end of her rope because no one was attending the performances in Father’s theater and there was no money coming in, she’d rail at him, “I hope the miserable business burns to the ground.”

  Father would look at her, his smoldering black eyes filled with reproach, and sigh, “Rokhl, Rokhl what are you saying?”

  Out of respect, my mother wouldn’t respond. She’d dismiss his question with a wave of her hand and go into the kitchen to prepare a simple meal. If she’d held my father’s gaze for even an instant, she would have suffered the fate of her own curse. The theater burned in Father’s eyes. It burned, but it didn’t go up in flames.

  My father’s father was a rabbi in a poor neighborhood outside of Minsk, in White Russia. Father left home very young. Two forces drove him away: need and imagination. He studied at the Ramayles Yeshiva in Vilna for a while but was thrown out after a Russian grammar was discovered under his Gemara. After that, he learned the printing trade in the Vilna print shop of Rozenkrantz and Shriftzetser. They printed religious books in Hebrew and the Yiddish storybooks that brought so much joy to Jewish homes.

  There was another apprentice in the print shop who was related to Shriftzetser, one of the owners. The two young men became close friends. Stooped over the printing plates for the Mishnah, they transported each other to brighter and more interesting worlds than the leaden gray print shop. My father’s friend, Leyb Shriftzetser, later became famous for his dramatic interpretations of Sholem Aleichem’s characters.

  When my father and Shriftzetser were well on in years, they were still sharing stories from their youth. Father often described how Shriftzetser disguised himself as a devil and frightened everyone in the print shop half to death. Shriftzetser, in turn, told us that they once found Father hanging upside down from the beams in the attic. He had fainted. My father simply wanted to know how long a person could survive hanging upside down. He hoped to train as a circus acrobat, so he needed this information.

  Shriftzetser’s path to the theater was shorter than my father’s. Shriftzetser was an actor in body and soul, but Father wasn’t. A whole world bubbled up in my father, but he couldn’t bring it to the surface. The quiet upbringing of his rabbinic home weighed on him.

  My father only tested his ability on the stage once, and that was in an emergency. Isaac Samberg, one of the most acclaimed actors on the Yiddish stage between the two world wars, became ill. He was playing the messenger in Ansky’s The Dybbuk. The play was a great success in Poland during the 1930s. It ran in my father’s Vilna theater for an entire season with full houses. Even my mother was happy. But bad luck struck. Isaac Samberg fell ill, and it looked like they’d have to cancel some performances. My father was adamant; they couldn’t cancel any of the performances that were drawing such crowds. He couldn’t afford to lose the income he needed to keep the theater going.

  My father met with the actor’s collective, headed by Avrom Morevski, who was playing the Miropol tsadik in The Dybbuk. My father convinced them that he could replace Isaac Samberg until the actor recovered. “I have a little beard.” (Father started growing a beard when he was a very young man.) “I’ll put on a long coat and recite the few words.”

  My father’s first and last appearance as the messenger took place at a Shabbes matinee. He came on stage dressed in a long coat with his own beard, and quietly whispered the well-known line, “The groom will arrive in good time.”

  Someone from the audience recognized him and yelled, “Karpinowitz, speak louder.”

  My father answered the heckler, “I’m not an actor. I’m just replacing Samberg. I don’t have to speak louder.”

  With that performance, my father bade farewell to the stage forever. He wasn’t willing to replace anyone, not even if it meant continuing a run and keeping the box office open.

  My father came to the theater after a little detour. When his friend Shriftzetser was already traveling through Russia with various theater ensembles, my father was still working in the print shop. He fell in love with a young woman and tried his skill at journalism. His romance lasted longer than his passion for the pen. The young woman became his wife and bore him six children, but the newspaper he founded, the Vilne vokhnblat, bore no fruit. For years, my mother argued that if my father paid more attention to the print shop rather than organizing concerts for the singing duet of Kipnes-Zeligfeld, his business might have a chance. But just a chance.

  World War I broke out. There was nothing but hunger in my mother’s cast iron pot. Father spent his days running around the city in search of food for his family. He benefited from the good deeds of his ancestors. The Shnipishok rabbi, a close friend of my grandfather’s, asked my father to speak to the city commander about starting a soup kitchen for the poor Jews from the neighborhood of Novogorod. My father put on his holiday overcoat, smoothed down his black Herzl beard, and went to see the German general.

  In 1915 and 1916, Vilna was occupied by the Germans. Why did the Shnipishok rabbi choose my father to speak to the commander? Because my father knew German. When he’d worked for Rozenkrantz and Shriftzetser, they’d recognized his ability and sent him to Frankfurt am Main to learn the art of color printing. He’d worked for a few years in a large company that printed books in color. My father returned to Vilna enamored with German culture. He even brought back a few parcels of books that adorned our house until the Nazis arrived in 1941 and obliterated our home along with the admirer of German literature.

  My father managed to convince the German commander to provide food for the kitchen. Father received help from a soldier who worked in the commander’s office. The soldier was Arnold Zweig, who later wrote the famous book The Case of Sergeant Grischa, based on a situation he encountered during his military service in Vilna. Even though Zweig was assimilated
and estranged from Judaism, he felt moved by my father’s request to save Jews from starvation. When I think of the Novogorod kitchen, with its large black cauldrons of potato and oat groats soup, it’s as though I’m still peering through thick steam. Years later, the line of hungry Jews seeking food was transformed into a line of well-fed people wanting theater tickets.

  My father was apparently destined for the theater. A bit of theater whirled around the kitchen cauldrons in the form of a beautiful girl with a dark complexion. She used to rub her body against Father’s legs, like a kitten. Her mother worked in the kitchen peeling potatoes. The girl later appeared on theater posters as Khayele Kushner. She performed in the Yiddish theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia, where she was murdered with all her fans.

  The war ended, and actors gathered in Vilna from the far reaches of Russia. They showed up wearing military boots and cloaks without buttons, smelling like freight trains and moldy bread. Yitzkhok Nozshik, his wife, Shtraytman, and Maksimov were among the first to arrive. At that time, the actress Franye Vinter was singing at the Shtremer Cinema. During the intermission, she came onstage dressed like a young Hasid and performed two songs.

  The kitchen closed. Dr. Yakov Vigodski, one of the leaders of the Vilna Jewish community, said they shouldn’t let a man like my father slip through their fingers. “The community needs people like him.” But my father didn’t go to work for the Vilna Jewish community. As soon as an actor’s union was formed in Vilna, he became the secretary. Yitskhok Nozshik, who later became the director of the Israeli satirical theater Hamatatei (The Broom), got my father involved in the actors’ union.

  My father followed his heart. My mother wept and cursed her bitter fate. Only a month earlier, she’d seen Father in a black top hat and a snow-white shirt at a Jewish community meeting with the finest gentlemen in the city, and now he was running around with a bunch of paupers. My mother didn’t like actors. She didn’t even like her own son-in-law, Leybl Vayner, the son of a successful furrier. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Leybl wanted to become an actor. My mother thought of her children going into the theater as an evil decree from above, dooming them to a life without peace and quiet.