All About Jewish Theatre - Yiddish Theatre stages Asch’s controversial play

A play set in a shtetl brothel that once landed its producer and entire cast in court on obscenity charges and made the American Jewish community very uncomfortable is being brought out of the closet by the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre.

The company is presenting Sholem Asch’s century-old drama God of Vengeance, which may lay claim to the first onstage lesbian kiss, from June 4 to 22, as the season closer for the Saidye Bronfman Centre Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre.

Director Bryna Wasserman said the production will be faithful to Asch’s script, with only minor editing; the infamous canoodling between the brothel keeper’s innocent teenaged daughter and a (Jewish) prostitute remains.

“I’m not watering down or softening any of the language or sensual scenes,” she said.

Although the community today might be surprised that prostitution was a fact of eastern European Jewish life, Wasserman is sure the play will not provoke the outrage it did in 1922 when an English-language version premièred on Broadway. Critics panned it as sordid, the vice squad promptly shut it down and the producer and lead actor were convicted and fined.

They were exonerated only after a lengthy appeals process and a contentious public debate on artistic freedom. Theatre heavyweights Eugene O’Neill and Constantin Stanislavsky were among those who defended the play.

While she doubts anyone will be offended by the sexual content, Wasserman does hope audiences will be a little unsettled by the moral and religious questions raised, namely should the sins of the father be visited on the children, can respectability be bought, who deserves a second chance, and what is the nature of God.

God of Vengeance, which established Asch’s standing as a playwright, was first performed in 1906 or 1907 (there is some dispute) in Europe and played on that continent in several languages, without causing the furor that it did in New York. Yiddish literary icon I.L. Peretz is supposed to have exhorted: “Burn it, Asch, burn it!” upon reading the work-in-progress.

The American Jewish community, nervous about anti-Semitism, was not keen on a play – in English – about a scheming low-life brothel keeper and his ex-prostitute wife.

The complaint against God of Vengeance was laid by Rabbi Joseph Silverman, retired from the prestigious Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. Not only was it indecent, it defamed Jews, he charged. Letters complaining that the play was anti-Semitic appeared in the New York Times.

But there were influential dissenting Jewish voices, among them Rabbi Stephen Wise and Abraham Cahan, founding editor of the Forward.

Wasserman feels the discomfort among Jews was a reflection of a time when the United States was starting to restrict Jewish immigration and they were very conscious of how they were perceived, especially the more rooted American Jews. She doubts anyone today will be concerned about the play’s portrayal of a Jewish demimonde. (The production will have English and French supertitles).

Set in a Polish village, the play centres on Yankel Chapchovich and his wife, Soreh, who have managed to shield their only child from the fact that they have been running a house of ill repute downstairs from where they live. Their goal is to marry off the virginal 17-year-old Rivkele to a rabbinical student.

Her marriageability is Yankele’s ticket to respectability, he hopes, and he commissions the writing of a Torah scroll to try to improve his status in the community and maybe in God’s eyes as well. It’s all too little, too late.

Instead, Rivkele falls in love with a prostitute and a rival pimp lures her to his bordello.

Wasserman believes the depiction of the Almighty as having the same foibles or flaws as human beings may be the most audacious aspect of the play. Yankele is, after all, bargaining with God over his and his descendants’ salvation, she points out. “If he is striving for a better life for himself and others, should he be given a second chance – is it possible that someone from this underworld could change?”

But why did Asch, a hundred years ago, dabble in the taboo of homosexuality? Wouldn’t Rivkele’s falling for an unacceptable boy has worked as well? “An answer I heard recently is that if the daughter is a lesbian it implies that there will be no future generations to save.” A double tragedy.

While the play did become a classic of the Yiddish theatre, God of Vengeance was dormant for many years. Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in the United States, where the play has been presented in at least three different English adaptations. Notable among them is Pulitzer Prize-winning Donald Margulies’ 2002 version, which placed the story in the Lower East Side in the 1920s.

Wasserman, who has been studying as much material as she can about the play including the transcript of the 1922 trial, said she believes it is important for the Yiddish Theatre, founded by her late mother, to present the spectrum of the Yiddish canon and not only the musicals, comedies and sentimental tales. Besides, she says, it’s cracking good theatre.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to present it as part of the English theatre season,” she said

In November, the Yiddish Theatre will tour God of Vengeance, as well as the light-hearted contemporary musical Those Were the Days by Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld, in Vienna.

Someone watching this production with interest is Asch’s grandson, Michael, a New York native who has been living in Canada since 1969. He is an expert in aboriginal rights and has worked with the First Nations on treaty disputes and land claims. Since retiring from the University of Alberta, he has become a visiting professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria.

The younger Asch, who was 14 when his grandfather died in 1957, never learned Yiddish, but has read much of his work in translation and tries to see his plays, although he has never seen God of Vengeance. (He was not certain if he could make it to Montreal).

“I’m quite surprised at how avant-garde my grandfather was for his time,” said Asch.

Asch remembers his grandfather as almost doting toward him, yet highly disciplined in his writing habits. “I realized he was a celebrity of some sort because people would stop and say hello to him on the street,” but their conversations were rarely literary, and the obscenity trial was never a subject around the dinner table.

The family’s “unofficial historian” is the elder Asch’s great-grandson and Michael’s second cousin, David Mazower, in London, a senior journalist with the BBC World Service Radio.

The lead actors in the 19-member cast are Stanley Unger (Yankel), Keila Finkelstein (Soreh), Adina Katz (Rivkele), Maia Cooper (Manke, her lover) and Pinchas Blitt (Reb Elye).

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Source: The Canadian Jewish News