All About Jewish Theatre - In Lower Manhattan, the Echo of the Yiddish Stage Endures

Stefan Kanfer is the author of The Eighth Sin, A Summer World, The Last Empire, and Serious Business. He was a writer and editor at Time for more than twenty years. A Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and the recipient of numerous writing awards, Kanfer is currently in the Distinguished Writer program at Southampton College, Long Island University. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.

Real estate agents have a knack for investing any Manhattan neighborhood with romance, no matter how harsh or dowdy its past. The bloodstained meatpacking district in recent years has assumed a sudden charm. Then there’s the Lower East Side, which has become a cradle to luxury condos after spending decades as a place where immigrants of all stripes strived to get to, then sought to leave as quickly as possible — a kind of perpetual springboard to a better life.

The Lower East Side of popular memory is often Jewish, but it’s important to recall that the Chinese and Latinos provided their own cultural layers in the 20th century after the Jews (mostly) moved on. Still, it’s the neighborhood’s Jewish culture that speaks strongest to me — more specifically, the Yiddish theater.

Though the people are long gone, ghosts of that vanished world can still be summoned by a stroll through the neighborhood. And for me a walk around the Lower East Side is always a chance to revisit the travels I made as I researched my book “Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater” (Knopf, 2006). More than a score of theaters once flourished in the neighborhood, offering everything from Shakespeare to shund — the Yiddish word for trash.

Any visitor can stir up those greasepaint ghosts, too, if the neighborhood is walked in the right frame of mind. But first, a bit of history.

Around the turn of the 20th century, millions of Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe for New York. Among the throng were Abraham Goldfaden, who began the Yiddish theater in 1876 in Jassy, Romania, and his followers, including the spirited clown Sigmund Mogolesku, who influenced everyone from Eddie Cantor to Jerry Lewis.

Then there came David Kessler, the Yiddish theater’s first naturalistic actor, and Boris Thomashefsky, the quintessential impresario-entertainer, who billed himself as “America’s Darling.” Then the great Jacob Adler, among the few Jewish actors to have played Shylock up to that time.

These outsize personalities were fierce rivals. As Thomashefsky remembered in his diaries, “If Kessler wore a big hat with a long feather, Adler wore a bigger hat with three feathers and a gold scarf.”

But, Thomashefsky continued, “I piled on colored stockings, coats, crowns, swords, shields, bracelets, earrings, turbans. If they rode in on a real horse, I had a golden chariot drawn by two horses. If they killed an enemy, I killed an army.”

Tracing their battles, I had many occasions to walk along Second Avenue, the aorta of the Lower East Side, exploring places that were once as vibrant and tumultuous as Midtown Manhattan. If you, too, plan to walk in the footsteps of the Yiddish theater’s giants (and dwarfs), a good place to start is what the ghetto dwellers called Optown — the southwest corner of 12th Street and Second Avenue. It was there that the last old-style actor-impresario, Maurice Schwartz, held forth. Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater closed up shop in the early 1950s, but show business carries on: the site is now a multiplex.

Across the street, the Cafe Royal was the hangout for Yiddish actors in full makeup. Taken there as a child in the 1920s, the late writer Kate Simon recalled in her book “Bronx Primitive” that “one famous tragedienne wore a tall, blazing-red turban; another, with heavily kohl-circled eyes, sported a yellowed ermine capelet, her hands buried in its matching Anna Karenina muff.” When the Cafe Royal closed in the 1950s, the place became a dry cleaner. These days, reflecting the Lower East Side’s ever-changing character, it’s a sushi restaurant.

Stay on the east side of Second Avenue and walk downtown two blocks. There, beneath your feet, are deteriorating brass plaques that commemorate some 50 stars of the Yiddish theater, including Adler, Kessler, Thomashefsky, and crossover celebrities who left the ghetto for Broadway and, even, Hollywood, including Paul Muni, Molly Picon and Fyvush Finkel. The Yiddish Walk of Fame was the inspiration of the late Abe Lebewohl, owner of the late Second Avenue Deli.

Cross Second Avenue and walk east to 31 East Seventh Street. Smack in the middle of the city’s old Ukrainian enclave, home of St. Stanislaus Church and shops that sell Easter eggs, there is a red-brick building that once housed the Hebrew Actors Union, one of the most feared guilds in New York. Actors had to audition for membership. “That was a barbaric place,” Mr. Finkel once recalled. “They could literally make you or break you.” Alas, the membership has left the building, which is now a respository of old photographs and files and a regular meeting place where old fans reminisce.

A few blocks south and you’re at Second Avenue and Houston Street. Gray stone high-rise buildings now loom at the northeast and southeast corners, once the site of the Yiddish theater’s biggest palaces. These were rival houses: Thomashefsky held forth at the National Theater, where he and his wife, Bessie, staged everything from pageants to Shakespeare. Threatened by Thomashefsky’s ambition, his personal playwright once declared, “I will write you a better play than this ‘Hamlet’!”

The boss played the troubled Prince of Denmark, anyway, and received tumultuous applause from a naïve audience. The ticket-holders called, “Author! Author!” According to the Thomashefsky memoirs, Bessie explained to the audience that “Mr. Shekspir lived far away in England and could not come to see his play.”

Across the street, at the Roumanian Opera House, operettas diverted large audiences. The pieces didn’t start out that way but somehow there was always room to shoehorn in a song or two, even in “King Lear.” Close by was the Oriental Theater at Grand Street and the Bowery. Each place had its fanatical partisans, true believers who would dress in the manner of their favorite performers and buy tickets to productions across the street so they could razz the actors and playwrights.

Who were these fans? Untutored but enthusiastic greenhorns, people who knew there was something better than their long sweatshop hours and their cheek-by-jowl neighborhoods. For a glimpse of how they endured and prevailed, pay a call at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, housed along a hunched row of buildings on Orchard Street. Only a few blocks from what had been the heart of the Yiddish theater, the museum illustrates how a typical Jewish family lived in respectable poverty, relieved by the knowledge that there would be no Cossacks riding into their lives, no laws forbidding them to attend plays in their own tongue and no one to restrict their religious affiliations.

These days their descendants are largely to be found in the suburbs, but a handful of temples have lasted. Wedged among Chinese restaurants, fish markets and hair salons, the Eldridge Street Synagogue at 12 Eldridge Street, with its ornamental wooden carvings, 70-foot vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows, is in the middle of an extensive restoration. Nearby, at 280 Broome Street, you can find Kehila Kedosha Janina, the only Greek Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.

To complete your walk, take a food break and dig into the same sort of meals enjoyed by Yiddish theater audiences long ago. The difference is that they ate in the playhouses, savoring their food along with the dialogue. Try Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street, which opened in 1888. Or grab a bag of bagels and a side order of lox at the pungent Russ & Daughters, also on East Houston, run by the same family since 1914. While relishing a snack, close your eyes, and you’re back in what the late historian Irving Howe called “The World of Our Fathers.”

And even if that world has vanished, you can still see a fascinating remnant a couple of miles to the north. Walk to the West Side subway and take a train to 72nd Street, then stroll to the large stone building at 334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street that is home to the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. There the 92-year-old Folksbiene, the last remaining Yiddish theater in the United States, still thrives.

In a new century, this is where Yiddish theater lives. And why not? The rent is more reasonable, the audiences more sympathetic and the supertitles take care of those who understand only English. Fair enough.

As a Yiddish proverb has it: Badarf men hunik ven tsuker iz zis? Who needs honey when sugar is sweet?

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