Though Berkowitz thought the reading had made a good enough impression, Adler complained that the play piled up speeches in place of a plot and offered a meager two hundred dollars for it. Berkowitz recounts that he dutifully tried shopping it to Thomashefsky and to the third great actor-manager in the New York triumvirate, David Kessler. Those negotiations did not go anywhere, either.
Back in Geneva, Sholem-Aleichem despaired of his son-in-law’s reports and with no income in sight, set out one more time on a reading tour of the Pale; there, at least, he was still a superstar. He sold out one of the biggest halls in Warsaw for five nights running. As the grueling weeks of one-night stands in towns large and small wore on, Sholem-Aleichem wore out; in August, in a town called Baronovici, he collapsed with acute pulmonary tuberculosis and spent the next several months recuperating.
New York’s Yiddish theater hadn’t been faring much better. In a dismal season, no play was going to gain the attention of the theater managers unless it could promise a treasure calculable in box office receipts. If Sholem-Aleichem had ventured naively into the New York theater scene on the downward side of its peak in 1906–07, he was clueless that by the following year the playhouses were hurtling ever faster down that slope. The stock market crashed in the fall of 1907, kicking off a yearlong depression that threw more than a quarter of the Lower East Side’s labor force out of work. Community organizations such as hometown societies (landsmanshaftn) pitched in to help, thus emptying their coffers of the monies they might have put up for their usual theater benefits: the ticket base collapsed. More and more, cheap and escapist moving pictures—shown in storefront movie houses that were sprouting up all over the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods—siphoned spectators away from theaters and even supplanted most music halls; a seat at the movies cost only one-fifth the price of a gallery seat in the theater and they quickly became the preferred amusement of the strapped Yiddish masses.
In the fall of 1908, when Sholem-Aleichem had hoped The Treasure would premiere on Adler’s stage, the impresario leased the Grand Theater to an English-language producer who brought in American blood-and-thunder melodramas during the week (with ten-cent seats in the gallery). Reserving only Sundays for himself, Adler presented “serious” plays in afternoon and evening performances, but by March he gave up and set out on a tour of the provinces.
The two other Yiddish theaters in the neighborhood tried to outdo their newfangled competitors with spectacle and shmaltz. They mounted mawkish musical melodramas that took up the same dilemmas as Sholem-Aleichem’s Treasure, but from an entirely opposite point of view: they assured audiences, in song and with lavish staging, of their Jewish integrity. Joseph Lateiner’s Dos yidishe harts (The Jewish Heart)—whose convoluted plot involves a Jewish man finding his long-lost mother and feuding with her antisemitic Christian son—broke box office records at Kessler’s Thalia Theater, running thirty-two weeks in 1908–09. Thomashefsky took the cue and quickly put on Di yidishe neshome (The Jewish Soul), whose young heroes also stand up against antisemitism and assimilation—and also announce they will be moving to America.
Thomashefsky kept a good thing going by opening the fall 1909 season with another nationalistic melodrama, Dos pintele yid, typically translated with the far less pithy or pungent phrase The Quintessence of Jewishness or The Essential Spark of Jewishness (a pintele being a tiny point or speck). It, too, features the repentance of a parent—this time, an antisemitic father—confronted by his proud (and illegitimate) Jewish son.
These runaway hits allayed the anxieties of their audiences—while The Treasure would have stoked them—at a time when the children of the first big wave of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were coming of age. In these plays, the young heroes not only lay claim to their quintessential spark and reignite it in a fallen elder; they also extol America as the place it will have enough oxygen to stay lit. Sholem-Aleichem would never succeed on the American stage until his work acknowledged that point.
Where The Treasure laments Benny’s neglect of Judaism and his loss of connection, the shund sensations reflect and celebrate a new, still vibrant Jewish identity, commensurate with American success. For the young adults attending movies and popular English-language entertainments that played cheek by jowl with the Yiddish theaters, the harts, neshome, and pintele plays presented no rebuke. And for their parents, the plays offered reassurance that the age-old question gaining new urgency in America—what does it mean to be Jewish here?—could find a satisfactory answer. (Outside the cultural realm, this question was being taken up by Jewish activists building a communal political muscle: they were pressing to have “Hebrew” removed as a racial category from the upcoming 1910 U.S. Census.) The notion of a Jewish ethnicity was beginning to emerge in the streets, sweatshops, and schoolrooms of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Brownsville. The Yiddish theater was giving it form—and, thanks to Thomashefsky (and the playwright Moyshe Zeifert), who revivified an old phrase, a name: the pintele—that inexplicable, irrepressible nugget of identity.
At the same moment, on the English-language stage some three and a half miles away, a popular melodrama posed an audacious new question: Why should that nugget last? The play was Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot—the title popularized the phrase for decades to come—and it made its New York debut at the Comedy Theater on West Forty-first Street on September 6, 1909, just two weeks before Dos pintele yid opened. The plot hinges on the romance between David, a Russian Jewish émigré, and Vera, a non-Jewish social worker, also from Russia, and on David’s grand plans for composing a musical work that will exalt America as the “great new continent that could melt up all race differences and vendettas, that could purge and re-create.” All his hopes nearly crumble when he learns that Vera’s father was the czarist officer back home who ordered the pogrom in which David lost his family and was forever traumatized. But the couple overcomes this contrived catastrophe through faith in their new country, where they can create a baggage-free future. Making heavy use of alchemy metaphors, the play suggests, happily, that ethnic identities—including, presumably, a Jew’s defining pintele—can dissolve into “the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!” The play had premiered in Washington, D.C., a year earlier (with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance) and then moved to Chicago, where it unleashed a national debate on the question of intermarriage (which occurred at the negligible rate of a few percent at the time). In New York, it enjoyed a modest success, running for about four months.
If English-speaking audiences (many Jews among them) were applauding David’s curtain speech in midtown, heartened perhaps by the ideal of harmonious homogeneity in which they all could participate regardless of background, the mass Yiddish-speaking audience streaming in to see Dos pintele yid downtown were cheering for a different vision of Americanization: one that did not cost their distinctiveness.
Despite the record ticket sales—the Forverts estimated that some 55,000 people saw Dos pintele yid—the show could not pull Thomashefsky’s theater out of the red. As for Adler, with no similar extravaganza to offer he didn’t have a chance of surviving the 1909 season. That fall, he infamously sold his lease for the Grand Theater to the budding movie moguls Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. (Thomashefsky and Kessler participated behind the scenes, each paying Adler $5,000 to abandon New York for the year and ease up the competition.)
Back in Europe, Sholem-Aleichem remained thoroughly ignorant of the economic distress of New York’s Yiddish theater, and almost as ignorant of the mind-set of its audience. But for a time, at least, he could stop chasing after Adler and Thomashefsky. If he still dreamed of conquering the American stage, his survival no longer depended on it: a Russian-language edition of his works, as well as a settlement on proper royalties for his Yiddish publications (secured by Olga), finally provided a comfortable income. For the next several years, Sholem-Aleichem and his family moved according to the climate best for his health: winters
on the northwest coast of Italy, springs on a Swiss lake, summers in the Black Forest resorts of Germany. While Adler and Thomashefsky were scrambling in New York, Sholem-Aleichem, despite weakness from the TB and other ailments, was entering one of the most productive periods of his writing life.
In addition to work on Wandering Stars, 1909–10 saw the publication of his Railroad Stories, a series of twenty dark monologues—tales told to a traveling salesman (who in turn tells them to the reader) by a wide range of Jews riding in a third-class train car as it trundles through Russia. Both contained by the train’s compartment and set loose into the modern world by its speed and reach, the passengers occupy a spate of contradictions: a father with a gravely ill son is the happiest in his town because he persuades a renowned medical professor to examine the child; a husband goes along with his wife’s strenuous efforts to get their son into a Russian high school only to see the son join a student strike; a pimp from Argentina makes a rare trip back to his shtetl to grab himself, so he claims, a “hometown girl” for a wife.
A chief accomplishment of this period was the completion of the Tevye cycle—though Sholem-Aleichem added a new ending later—with the seventh story, “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel” (1909). The daughter at the center this time, Beylke, attaches herself to a man her father approves. Golde, his wife, has died, sending Tevye into a fit of nihilism—“What’s the point of the whole circus, this whole big yackety racket of a world on wheels? Why, it’s nothing but vanity, one big zero with a hole in it!” Hoping to prevent further troubles for her father, Beylke weds the nouveau riche boor suggested by the local matchmaker, even though Tevye sees she cannot bear him. The new son-in-law schemes to send the embarrassingly low-class Tevye away, if not to America (which does not interest Tevye), then to Palestine, “where all the old Jews like you go to die.” The story ends with Tevye recognizing his part in obedient Beylke’s unhappiness—“To tell you the truth, when I think the matter over, the real guilty party may be me”—and selling off his belongings, even his horse, as he prepares to leave for the Land of Israel. Two years later, in 1911, Sholem-Aleichem published the entire series of stories, written over seventeen tumultuous years, in a single volume, Tevye der milkhiker. It seemed he was shutting the book on his voluble hero, as if, remarkably, there were nothing more he could say, as if just when Tevye stood on the brink of “going up” (the literal translation of the verb for moving to the Land of Israel), there was no lower point to which Sholem-Aleichem could bring him.
But things got worse for the people Tevye had come to embody. In March 1911, as Sholem-Aleichem was publishing the complete Tevye cycle, a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy disappeared on his way to school in Kiev. When his mutilated body was found a week later, the local right-wing movement seized the misfortune to inflame opposition to liberals in the Duma who had considered abolishing the Pale—elections were coming up—by distributing leaflets at the boy’s funeral claiming he’d been slain by Jews who needed his blood to bake matza and calling for pogroms to avenge the death of the “martyr.” Though local police linked the murder to a criminal gang, the Kiev district attorney dismissed their findings and prosecuted the case as a ritual murder. In July, authorities arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, an unassuming clerk in a brick factory located near the scene of the crime. He languished in prison for two years as the case ground forward.
When the trial finally came to pass in the fall of 1913, it riveted the worldwide press as well as Sholem-Aleichem, who eventually linked Beilis’s fate to Tevye’s. High-profile writers and intellectuals, Jewish and Gentile, spoke out against the obvious scapegoating. In New York and in other cities around the globe where Yiddish theater scraped by, a spate of Beilis plays rushed onto local stages, provoking denunciations of the theaters’ shameless exploitation of a national tragedy for commercial ends—in newspapers that did not fail to advertise the plays. In New York, even Jacob Adler threw a tsaytbild—or “picture of the times”—onto the boards. And soon so did Kessler and Thomashefsky.
Sholem-Aleichem, too, could not help but respond to the trouble riling up the city where he once lived and cowered as pogromists rampaged through the streets. He wrote a novel called Der blutiger shpas (The Bloody Hoax), whose plot centers on a high-stakes prince-and-the-pauper reversal (perhaps influenced by his association with Mark Twain): as they graduate from high school, two friends, Hersh Rabinowitz and Grigori Popov, agree secretly to trade places for a year so Popov, a wealthy Gentile, can learn what life is like for the Jews in czarist Russia. Starting out as a standard comedy of inversion, the novel takes a bitter turn when Popov is accused of a blood libel. (Sholem-Aleichem adapted the novel into a play a few years later, giving it a more comic twist and a new title, Shver tzu zayn a yid—Hard to Be a Jew.)
Sholem-Aleichem followed the Beilis case obsessively and as he pondered the deadly farce onstage in the Russian courtroom, Tevye marched back into his imagination. He pulled from his drawer a dramatic adaptation he had tinkered with some years earlier at the suggestion of a friend, and, predicting that the new medium of cinema would supplant the stage, and even literature, he wrote two screenplays based on his Tevye cycle. One, drawn from the first story, in which Tevye returns the lost ladies to their dacha, uses film’s unique capacity to show fantasy sequences—Tevye could imagine his passengers as witches with a dissolve; spectators could visually enter his dreams of becoming a miller, a store owner, even a banker doing business with Rothschild as he contemplated his reward. The adaptation of “Khave” relies on flashbacks—Tevye visibly recalling his daughter’s image as he bewails her shattering choice. (In this version, she drowns herself in a well at the end.)
Visiting Berkowitz and his family in Berlin in the fall of 1913, Sholem-Aleichem tried to peddle these screenplays to local filmmakers, along with one adapted from The Bloody Hoax. But the directors passed on the material—they didn’t want to show Russia in a bad light at a time when German-Russian relations were strained—and, according to Berkowitz, his father-in-law stashed the scripts for better times, perhaps in America. At least there was the good news of Beilis’s acquittal, which made Sholem-Aleichem break into “a hysterical shaking.” He sent Beilis a congratulatory gift: a set of his collected works.
When Sholem-Aleichem returned to his family in Lausanne, Tevye was still tugging on his psyche. He went back to work on the dramatization, and he kept revising it when—unable to bear the cold winter—he moved on by himself to the Italian Riviera. He didn’t seem to worry that a change from the original genre would alter the way his protagonist frames his own experiences as stories—onstage, Tevye would speak directly to spectators instead of to the unseen yet mediating Sholem-Aleichem persona. Rather, he was thrilled with the outcome, as he told his wife in a letter the day he finished a completely new dramatic version, in four acts with seven scenes. In the last scene—the most touching, he told her—Tevye takes leave of his home, kissing the naked walls and bidding a sad farewell to the cat that is about to be abandoned.
The story he put at the center was Khave’s—the daughter who marries a Ukrainian man and is mourned as though dead—but this time he gave it a happy ending: in the play, Khave leaves her husband and returns to the family fold when she hears that Jews are to be expelled from their homes. Sholem-Aleichem was responding directly to edicts that followed the Beilis affair (and, in an early draft of the play, he even had Khave’s husband believing the blood libel). Writing the play forced him to revisit the set of stories he thought he’d completed in 1911: if Tevye was going to be kicked out by czarist edict, he couldn’t already have left for the Land of Israel. So he opened the new story, “Lekh Lekho” (“Get Thee Out”), with Tevye telling the author, who must be surprised to see him still clamoring around the village, that just as he was getting ready to leave, his son-in-law Motl suddenly died and he had to stay behind to take care of his daughter Tzaytl and her children. That set up the plot possibility (which would prove crucial to Fiddler) for the local offic
er to come and throw him out. And in the story, as in the play, Khave returns to accompany her father and sister into the wilderness.
The title—recognizable to Sholem-Aleichem’s readers—hints ironically at some possibility of redemption: it quotes God’s words to Avram in Genesis, telling him to leave his home for a land where God would make of him a great nation. Tevye’s prospects may be more humble and uncertain. Nevertheless, he tells Tsaytl, “We ought to be counting our blessings. Even if we didn’t have a penny to our names, we’d still be better off than Mendel Beilis.”
When Sholem-Aleichem first thought about dramatizing the Tevye stories, he knew that the role—“the crown of my creation,” as he called him—would require an extraordinary actor, one who could combine grandeur and humbleness, draw equal measures of tears (but not too sentimental) and laughter (but without ridicule). It would take an artist of great skill, sensitivity, and charisma. As the play progresses, he predicted, “the audience loves him all the more.” He’d thought originally of Rudolph Schildkraut, when the legendary actor was still in his heyday, but now he had that grand old shark Jacob Adler in mind. “Although a hard man to do business with,” Sholem-Aleichem admitted in a letter to a friend in New York whose help he was requesting, Adler was “truly an artist, and I realized that Tevye was made for him.”
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 4
