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Beth Kaplan worked for a decade as a professional actress before leaving the stage to get an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC in Vancouver. She has taught personal essay and memoir writing for fourteen years at Ryerson University, and now also teaches writing at the University of Toronto. Her own essays have appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines, and she has read many of her own pieces on CBC Radio. Her play, Gordin in America, was co-winner of the 1994 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: the Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, about her great-grandfather’s life and her own search for him, was begun as a thesis in 1982 and published in 2007. website : www.BethKaplan.ca  e-mail: kaplan2721@rogers.com

Chapter Three of the book: "The Golden Age "

I still see him walking along the streets, straight as a palm, his princely beard covering his broad chest, his eyes like two bits of fire, sharp as daggers. In his right hand he carries a cane; in his left, one of his plays. He is going to the theater to read it to the actors. Those who know him say, “That is Jacob Gordin.” Those who do not know him stop and remark, “What a fine man!” ( Leon Kobrin, Erinerungen fun a Yiddishn dramaturg -Reminiscences of a Jewish Playwright.)

One day in 1897, an anxious Keni Lipzin sought out the Gordin family. As Jacob Gordin's most eager and financially secure disciple, she had commissioned another play tailored to her talents, for which she would pay the astronomical sum of $200. When the playwright disappeared, not to be seen at the theater or even in the cafés where he loved to spend hours drinking tea and talking, she became concerned. Finally she went to his house, where she found him unkempt, his hair uncut, so caught up in his new work that he hadn't left the house for six weeks. “What a play – what a role he wrote for me!” she later gloated.
The play, opening in August of 1898, was Mirele Efros, subtitled "The Jewish Queen Lear, a real life drama in four acts," with music by Yarichovsky. With this drama, which fast became one of the best known and most-performed plays of the entire Yiddish repertoire, the Yiddish theater itself came of age. Only two Jewish theatrical works have rivalled Mirele Efros for popularity and frequency of production: S. Anski's The Dybbuk, and the adaptations of Sholem Aleichem's novel Tevye the Dairyman, which metamorphosed into Fiddler on the Roof.

Mirele Efros has never stopped being performed around the world, in Polish, Italian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, Hungarian, Russian, German. Its central role has been a dependable war-horse for legions of actresses, most notably the indomitable Esther Kaminska, "The Mother of the Yiddish Stage." It has been made into two movies, one as early as 1912 in Russia, with Kaminska; the other in 1939, in America, with Bertha Gersten. And the play has continued into our own times. In New York in the 1980’s Mirele Efros was transformed by writer Nathan Gross into an English-language musical called Pearls, and in Yiddish it is regularly in production somewhere in the world, in New York or in Montreal, in Eastern Europe or in Israel.

What has guaranteed the longevity of Mirele Efros when so many other Gordin plays vanished instantly? The writer takes the bones of Shakespeare's Lear – a loving but misguided parent hands the family resources to two ungrateful children, and pays dearly for the mistake – but sets it in the Russian-Jewish merchant class of his own background. Like Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard, Gordin demonstrates the end of an old-fashioned, cultured, privileged way-of-life, and the beginning, for better or worse, of another kind.

Mirele Efros is a rich widow from Grodno, near Poland, a respected and feared businesswoman who, in the eyes of the community, took over her husband's profitable business after his death, and built on its success. She has two sons, the older of whom, Yossele, she wants to marry off not to a sophisticated city girl but to a simple child of the land. She hears tell of such a girl, but after meeting Sheyndele and her parents, sees that instead of the honest village folk of her fantasy, they are embarrassingly vulgar and grasping. Yossele, however, has fallen in love, and against her better judgment, Mirele allows the match to go through.
In the following acts she suffers for her indulgence. Sheyndele devastates Efros family life, insulting and even beating the faithful servant who is like a family member. She needles both young men into bad behavior, helps herself to Mirele's jewels, and insists that Yossele take over the family business, as his due. The matriarch, goaded beyond endurance, tells the young people the truth: her husband died with his business in ruins, leaving nothing but debts, which she has secretly paid off through years of astute management and hard work. The family wealth belongs not to the sons of her bankrupt husband but to her.

Even so, in a moving scene Mirele leaves the house in which she can no longer live. Penniless, she goes to the home of her former financial manager, who is honored to take her in and give her work. All is not lost; Yossele and even Sheyndele feel remorse at her exile, and the occasion of their son's bar mitzvah becomes a time of reconciliation. Mirele's son, daughter-in-law and then her grandson Shloimele beg her to come home. For the boy's sake, she does.
Like The Jewish King Lear, this play’s homilies resonated throughout the Lower East Side: cherish your mother, who gives everything, her very life for you; treat your elders and betters with respect, or your home and heart will be irrevocably damaged. Beware the new values of brash selfishness and greed; uphold the old values of deference and courtesy, family closeness, cleanliness, order, respect. This is one of Gordin's only works in which the author’s urgent message is not delivered by his characters, but is revealed through the action of the play. The writer’s heart is clearly on stage, beating in the upstanding, stubborn, generous and beleaguered person of Madame Efros. As if to emphasize the similarities between creation and creator, Mirele carries a cane that she pounds on the floor to make her point, just as Yakov Gordin did.

This was the greatest role of Lipzin's career; before her death she was reputed to have played Mirele Efros more than fifteen hundred times. The elder son Yossele, in the script a youth of twenty, was played in this first production by David Kessler, who was nearly twice that age and only four years younger than Lipzin as his mother. Jacob Adler's former wife Dinah, now Mrs. Feinman, played Sheyndele; her daughter with Adler, Celia, played the grandson. Celia was nine when she was cast in the play and taken to the Thalia to hear Gordin read it for the first time. “I remember the concentration of the cast members and the respect they showed Gordin,” she wrote six decades later.

I noticed the wonderfully imposing head of Gordin, his beautiful black beard interwoven with steel grey, and felt a bit afraid. I’d heard a lot about his tough attitude toward actors during rehearsals and performances of his plays. I’d noticed the nervousness of the actors – you’d hear, “Watch your lines – Gordin’s in the theater!” At the reading all the actors listened attentively. There was none of the light-hearted joking around at the expense of the author and his work usual at these readings.

At the end of my first scene, when I left the stage, I saw Gordin standing with my mother. He kissed me on the forehead and said, “That was very well played, Celia. You gave my Shloimele a very fine soul. You’ve made me very happy.”

The role of Shloimele would become a famous family tradition. Many a lengthy career was launched with the child role in Mirele Efros, including that of Ida Kaminska, who played Shloimele to her mother Esther's Mirele. In the 1960’s, when a middle-aged Ida toured the world playing Mirele Efros with her own Yiddish troupe, she had taken over the starring role of the matriarch, and her own daughter Ruth played the boy. Gordin’s critics have pointed out, as a major flaw in this play, that the pivotal scene in which Schloimele persuades his grandmother to come back home takes place offstage. Why would Gordin miss the opportunity for such high drama? Perhaps, thinking of the very young actors who would be playing the role, he decided not to burden them with a long emotional scene.

In her memoirs, Ida Kaminska writes that once on tour in Israel, when she was again asked to play Mirele Efros, she remembered her mother’s words to her: “My daughter, you’ll have performed a lifetime and you’ll have presented more than a hundred different plays, but you’ll still have to endlessly repeat ‘Mirele.’” A photograph in the memoir shows her backstage after a performance in Israel in 1968, still in her black Act Four ‘Mirele’ costume, clasping the hand of Golda Meir.
I have my own bond with the play. In November 1994, almost a hundred years after the play’s opening night, the long-lived Yiddish theater company Folksbiene presented Mirele Efros at their theater in Manhattan. I flew to New York to see it, and after much arm-twisting persuaded my reluctant Uncle Edgar to come with me. This was his first time, extraordinarily, watching one of his grandfather’s works on stage. We listened to a simultaneous translation through headphones, along with most younger audience members. The production starred a fine actress called Zypora Spaisman, and had been cleverly adapted so that there was only one set, instead of the several called for in Gordin’s script. Though the old-fashioned well-made play is not my favorite kind of theater, I enjoyed this one, proud of my genetic and emotional bond with the play and its author. My uncle remained as scornful as ever. “The best I can say,” he said as we left, “is that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.”

Audiences in 1898 were not so critical. The play was a huge hit from the outset, and ran for eighteen consecutive weeks, an unprecedented run on the Lower East Side, where impatient fans usually demanded a new play after a few weekends. Even Abraham Cahan, writing about the play years later, was almost full of praise. "In its written form it had the impact of something between shund and literature," he wrote dismissively, but did conclude that, “with all its flaws, Mirele Efros is a play which has earned the brilliant success it has had for so many years.”

According to another contemporary, the young playwright David Pinski, "It was as though 'Mirele Efros' made [Gordin] a new person. Thereafter he grew, he found himself." He was also able to charge a great deal more after Mirele. His price tripled – for Lipzin, at least - to $1800 for three plays in one season. Thanks to this long-awaited box office success, there was now no lack of food and light on 120th Street. 

The Golden Age of the Yiddish Theater is also called the Gordin Age, and is generally defined to span Gordin’s life in America, more or less – 1891 to 1910. But now begin its richest years, building to a peak in the first years of the twentieth century. The excitement generated by the Yiddish stage flowed through the Lower East Side like an elixir. Each week found the troupes - the writers, producers, managers, actors, actresses, musicians, prompters, front of house and technical staff – engaged in the work of luring and mesmerizing audiences. The plays ranged still from sentimental costume dramas and operettas to the latest shocking real life drama from the pen, not of Ibsen, but of Gordin.

Or of one of his protégés, for his followers were growing in number; younger men like David Pinski and Leon Kobrin admired and imitated him, some of them joining, temporarily, his circle of intimates. It was a time when to an entire population, theater mattered nearly as much as work or family or food. Those of us who have played on the modern stage can only imagine what it was like, to command the boards at a time when the playhouse was the heart of a worshipful community.

Every well-known writer and actor had a fanatical assortment of fans known as patriyotn, who followed every movement of their chosen artist's career, every footstep and breath. And each group of patriyotn had a café where their proclivities were known and encouraged. The fans who supported the artists of the Windsor Theater gathered at the Campus Café on Delancey Street, under the leadership of a Rumanian theater fanatic nicknamed Yussel Mameliga (mameliga is a Rumanian dish made from cornmeal), while those who most appreciated the People’s Theater went to the Café Essex, ruled by a head patriyot fondly known as Mr. Izzelle Tzailemkop. Supporters of the Thalia Theater, under the Hungarian Moishe Goulash, met at Schwartz’s Hungarian Café on Rivington Street, near Forsythe. Moishe was famous among theater patrons because once, during an altercation at the Thalia, he toppled over the gallery handrails into the orchestra pit and walked ever after with a limp.

These hundreds of obsessives scrutinizing their favorite’s work, the arguments and hysteria, the fistfights even, are reminiscent today in their extremes of sports fanatics, or teenagers in a frenzy about a new band. But in an age before electronic entertainment, the theater had always inflamed its followers. Nearly fifty years before, New York was the scene of such provocative rivalry between Macready and Forrest, two actors opening simultaneously in Macbeth, that hundreds of warring fans had rioted, resulting in twenty-two deaths.

At the theaters of the Lower East Side, however, patriyotn were not simply admiring, and fighting over, the artistry of great actors. A tightly-packed group of citizens all going through the same difficult process – the shedding of the skin of one culture, and the growing of another – sat as an audience for the first time in their lives, to hear the comforting language of childhood, and to watch skilled and talented men and women speak eloquent words about monumental emotions. Heady, thrilling, glorious days of the theater.

When word of this novel theatrical intensity reached out beyond the latticed fire escapes of the ghetto, English-speaking journalists and audiences began to venture downtown. They were keen to see a new kind of theater done in a new way in a language that sounded like German, but wasn’t. John H. James, one of the first American newspapermen to explore the downtown East Side theaters, takes pages to describe the Jewish King Lear - “an uninviting story of greed and turbulence” - and all the locale’s stars and writers. He’s particularly amused by a custom unique to Yiddish theater: if actors wear beards and wigs during the play, their “hirsute appendages” are quickly removed for the curtain call. (Even when Adler later appeared in Merchant of Venice on Broadway, he removed his beard before receiving the audience’s accolades.)

“Owing to the unusual number of parts a Hebrew actor is compelled to learn during a season, letter perfection is out of the question, “ James writes in a piece published on July 4, 1900 in his paper The New York Dramatic Mirror. He notes the importance downstage centre of the prompter, who not only reads every word to the actors, but snaps his fingers to show them their moves. (Actors who had forgotten lines would invent business or gaze thoughtfully into the distance until the prompter came through; Sara Adler called this kind of stalling “pecking corn.”) James also comments on “a great deal of walking to and fro during a scene by those not immediately concerned in the dialogue.” He continues admiringly:

Crowds swarm at the doors a full hour before opening time to such an extent that one is impressed with the idea that it is the height of bad form in Yiddish society to come late to the theater. The Jews are often accused of being penurious but when one remembers that a majority of the patrons of these houses come from the sweat shops and stores of the small tradesmen of the East Side, one can understand that a considerable part of their earnings are spent this way.

The plays often don’t start till 9 p.m., he says, and “the record for late closing is 1.45 a.m.” for an especially elaborate production. And most importantly, he has discovered this: “Jacob Gordin, an exceedingly talented writer, easily stands at the head as a writer of original plays, and as an adaptor.”
Just as the Yiddish theater entered its grandest era, a grand personage made her entrance: Bertha Kalish, an elegant beauty with a lilting voice, formerly the prima donna of the Budapest stage. In 1880 in Lemberg, now the Ukrainian city of Lvov, eight-year old Baylke Kalakh saw a production by Goldfaden's troupe and was lost forever to the theater. In her memoirs she describes the early Jewish stages there. “At that time they had eight-foot lamps which would cause the actor's noses to become full of lampblack,” she wrote.

The scenery was painted on the curtain; if the scenery was a room, the furniture was painted on the backdrop, and the drop would come down on the stage with a bang. We dressed behind partitions, and crossed a bridge to the stage, where there was a little space for about 20 of us waiting to go on, and a space for horses etc. It was all very primitive.

Kalish's husband, Leopold Spachner, was also her director and business manager. In 1899, when the actors Kessler, Mogulescu and Feinman rented the Thalia themselves, they made Spachner their business manager, and his wife their leading lady. Gordin was commissioned to write a play for the troupe and its star Bertha Kalish; for her he produced the shockingly modern Safo (Sappho).

Set as ever in Russia, the play tells the story of a beautiful, fearless young woman called Sofia, who is pregnant by her fiancé Boris, and who discovers that the young man is secretly wooing her sister. (Again, so often repeated, heartless betrayal by a sibling.) She tells a celebratory gathering of friends and family the shocking truth of her pregnancy and, even more shockingly, refuses to marry the baby’s father, insisting that he marry her sister instead. As those in the room react in horror to her confession, she cries, in Nahma Sandrow’s translation:
If I am to be a mother, I can care for my child by myself. Nothing frightens me. I will be free and honorable in my actions, honorable the way I understand it …
(All Sofia’s friends get dressed to leave.)

You’re running away? You’re already ashamed of me too? Ha ha ha. A little pinch in the dark is all right with you, but open love, open, as our true feelings command us – that’s a scandal. Yes, it will be very bitter for me to know that people are ashamed of me. But it would have been much more bitter to feel that I should be ashamed of myself … Only it’s hard for me to feel that all I hoped, all I waited for, all my sweet dreams – Oh, Oh! (Lets her head fall onto the table, and weeps bitterly.) CURTAIN.

In Act Two, she is working as a photographer to support her parents and her fatherless child. Fate throws her a kindred spirit: Apollon, a sensitive musician and poet whose musical education has been paid for by a fishmonger, in return for a promise to marry his patron’s half-witted daughter. He and Sofia commune with talk of Wagner and Chopin, of duty and freedom; the young man, when he renames her Sappho, delivers Gordin’s usual literature lesson, this time about the Greek poetess. The young friends are soul mates, but they cannot be together; Apollon goes through with the marriage, and heartbroken Sappho vows to leave the city and make a fresh start. But Gordin allows a rare conventional ending for his unconventional heroine: Boris returns after his wife’s death, and Sappho accepts his offer of marriage. If she does not have great love, at least her son will have his father.

Gordin was flinging out a number of subversive ideas for his nineteenth century immigrant audience to digest, all at once: unashamed pregnancy out of wedlock, love without marriage, and most difficult of all, female self-determination. His play’s portrayal of love, motherhood and unwedded independence not only challenged Jewish law, but many centuries of Jewish tradition. In the statuesque person of Bertha Kalish, however, the character Sappho became not a revolutionary symbol, but a tortured female soul.

Though this was purportedly the theater of realism, the first entrance of the play’s star was anything but realistic. An English-language review reports that when Kalish made her entrance on opening night, she was greeted by a storm of applause, cut flowers rained down from the balconies, and the orchestra struck up a flourish of trumpets and a roll of drums.

(Kalish) is an artist, emotional to the tips of her slender fingers, sparing of gesture and motion to the point of parsimony – natural to a degree beyond which even Duse does not venture – yet every instant in perfect command of her audiences. She is reputed the most capable and intelligent actress on the Yiddish stage in Europe or America. And as nearly as one could judge, knowing only the most obviously German elements in the jargon she spoke, she would shine forth an artist in whatever comparison. This role was a triumphant milestone for Kalish. Now a star, she began to look uptown, toward Broadway.

Despite the relative success of Sappho and Mme. Kalish’s personal popularity, the play provoked a flurry of scandalized criticism in the Yiddish press. Gordin dealt with his critics in a lengthy essay published in the paper Free Society, in which he responded to a series of negative letters supposedly from outraged audience members. It takes little perspicacity to realize that they were actually written by Gordin himself. The playful writer gives us, for example, a letter from "An educated woman from Hoboken," disappointed with Sappho because of its self-evident theme. “She” writes:
What kind of news are you telling us? That women are also people? That they should also have rights? That they should not be treated badly? And that's enough to entice people to come all the way from Hoboken, to keep them awake the whole night, and in the bargain take 3 quarters from them?

Gordin replies that the task of every poet, every writer, is to struggle against old dogmas, and to enlighten the people. One of the lessons of the play is that moral laws should apply to everyone equally. We can't have one moral law for whites and another for blacks, he writes; one for women and a different one for men.
A man writes that as he watched, he cried for brave, unlucky Sappho, though "I know that a man doesn't cry." But then he realized that his wife and daughter were also watching, and continues, “Maybe Sappho is right, but if my wife or my daughter, Heaven forbid, behaved that way, I would go mad! Don't you think this play is too radical, it is too early to perform such plays in the Yiddish theater?”

"The quiet, thoughtful, devoted Russian woman is the greatest revolutionary in the world," the playwright responds. (Surely he wasn’t thinking of his wife, the most quietly devoted and least revolutionary of Russian women.) Gordin urges women, for their own sake and for their children, to fight the social hypocrisy crushing them, and then, a New Age man before his time, he continues, “You needn't be ashamed that you, a man, wept in the theater. Those are good tears, my friend. The greater shame would have been if you hadn't wept.”

And at the end of the long series, a "counsellor at law" writes that because of the racy title Sappho he attended the Yiddish theater for the first time, in order to see "some naked Jewish flesh." Instead, "I got Sappho, a naked spirit … unlawful and immoral ideas! Shameful to hear!"
The lawyer contends that Sappho would have been more moral to abort or even murder her baby, rather than to bring up an illegitimate child. Gordin does not even respond to the appalling lawyer. He concludes, simply, "Many of us are radicals in theory, but when it comes to practice, we are all weak and stupid, part of the large blind mass." Surely, despite the first person plural, he was not thinking of himself.

While providing a hit for Kalish, the playwright hadn't neglected loyal Keni Lipzin. In the fall of 1899, he gave her another of her greatest roles in Di shkhite (The Slaughter), a play noted for being Gordin's first without any of the music or vaudeville additions demanded by his audiences; even Sappho had featured songs and piano solos intermingled with poetic recitations. The Slaughter attacked the old country custom of arranged marriages. Lipzin played a young woman forced to marry a wealthy shochet, a ritual butcher, whom she hates because he is crass and insensitive, as the rich, except for Mirele Efros, always are in Gordin’s plays.
Again from Gordin’s pen came a tragedy of unrelenting darkness, apart from a single scene: in one critic’s words, Kessler’s “buoyant, dirty, coarse, black-bearded, deep-voiced, greasy husband” finds out from his father-in-law - a meaty role for Mogulescu - that his wife is pregnant, and there is, briefly, joyful celebration. Toward the finale the writer gave his favorite actress yet another opportunity to demonstrate her skill at fits and hysteria: in a fine histrionic denouement, she staggers onto the stage dazed and maddened, carrying one of the butcher’s own knives, dripping with his blood.

Cahan, who was still writing for The Commercial Advertiser, came to see the play. As his memoirs tell it, he went backstage afterwards and muttered his criticisms to Mogulescu, among them a complaint that the character Rivka, a village girl, “declaims poetical words to a lamp!” On hearing of Cahan’s sarcasm, Gordin apparently began his habit of mimicking and insulting Cahan from the stage, in defence of his plays. The problem with this story, as with so many others, is that it appears only in Cahan’s memoirs, so we have only his word for its veracity.

A Russian writer called Leon Kobrin, nearly twenty years younger than Gordin, was struggling, after stints as a sweatshop worker, a cigar maker and a baker, to emerge as a playwright. Theater managers treated him the way all yolds were treated. Told by one that the theater produced only dramas, Kobrin reworked his comic play into a drama and brought it back, only to be told that the company, in fact, only performed comedies, and never by unknown playwrights. He took his play to Kessler, who wouldn’t read it because he didn’t like either the title or the playwright’s accent. “What kind of play can come from a Litvak?” scoffed Kessler, no doubt in the middle of a meal.

Doggedly, in 1898 Kobrin entered a competition of the Free Yiddish People’s Theater with his play Minna, based loosely, though he denied it, on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. When Minna was read aloud at a meeting, Gordin liked it but thought it had problems. “I knew that without Gordin’s approval,” writes Kobrin, “it would never reach the stage.” When the play received a staged reading, Gordin left during the first act. At a subsequent meeting, he told Kobrin that he had found the play interesting. “Then why did you leave?” asked Kobrin
“It was poorly read,” replied Gordin. “I couldn’t listen.”
“What do you think about putting it on?”
“You know what I think; as it is, it can’t be performed. It has to be completely reworked.”
At that meeting an argument erupted about the play, some members in favor of producing it, Gordin and his followers against. Finally, a woman shouted to Gordin that he was being unfair. “Madame, if you weren’t a lady,” he retorted, furious, “I’d answer your accusation. But Jacob Gordin doesn’t argue with ladies. I’m leaving the organization.” He walked out, and most of the group walked out behind him. Within six months, despite the efforts of Kobrin and others to keep it alive, the Free Yiddish People’s Theater was no more.

But at his next encounter with the younger playwright, Yakov Mikhailovich went out of his way to make peace. The entire Russian community of New York came together every year at a New Year’s Eve ball. The tradition began in 1882, with transplanted Russians shouting and bearhugging during a wildly nostalgic night of Russian music, food, dancing, talk, and drink. Most Russian Jews, like Jews of all nationalities, were usually not heavy drinkers, preferring endless scalding glasses of tea.
At the ball on the night of December 31, 1898, sponsored by the Russian Social-Democrats at Grand Central Palace, Kobrin was laughing with a group of friends when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Gordin, smiling, stretching out his hand to the young writer, who was confused because he was sure Gordin was angry at him. Soon they were drinking a toast together. A few days later Kobrin received a postcard from Gordin inviting him to visit. “You have a good play, why should it lie around?” he wrote.

The two men decided that Kobrin should rework Minna under Gordin’s direction, with both taking credit and sharing the profits. Kobrin wrote:
Gordin works out the scenario of an act. Then I fill in the characters and the action according to the set scenario. I remember how impressed I was when Gordin handed me the scenario of the first act, written in Russian. Each scene, from the beginning to the end, was worked out mathematically, and everything was noted – even the main words the lead actors had to say. We work on the play act by act. When Gordin shows me the scenario for the fourth act, I don’t like it. He wants Minna to dance a tarantella [a frenzied dance also performed by the heroine of Ibsen’s play.] I don’t think it is in character. He says he’ll write the act himself, and he does.

How indicative of the man that even after completing scores of Yiddish plays in his seven years of playwriting, Gordin still did his creative thinking, his plotting and planning, in Russian.
In a meeting at the Windsor Theater, Gordin read the co-authored play to Adler, who bought it for $150, $75 at the time of signing and $75 on the first night. When the contract was signed, Adler’s business partner Edelstein took out a wad of one-dollar bills and counted seventy-five of them out to Gordin, who handed them on to his collaborator. Kobrin asked him why he didn’t take his half, and the older man replied, laughing, “You need it more than I do; your shoes give you away. I’ll get my share when we put on the play. Take, take. When you’re offered a few dollars in the Yiddish theater, take them and run.” Then he took Kobrin by the hand and said, “Come, friend, we’ll wet your first payment from the Yiddish theater with a glass of wine.”
They went to Zeitlin’s, Gordin’s haunt at 126 Canal Street, where a “regular supper” cost twenty cents and a “regular supper with poultry” cost a nickel more, and where Gordin’s friends and patriyotn waited for him in the evenings. Kobrin, anxious to show “the treasure in gold” to his wife, didn’t get home till 3 a.m., “happy, drunk, full of warm feelings about Gordin.”

But the warmth did not last. Not long after, the younger man was distressed to see an announcement that the Windsor Theater would present a new play, Minna, or Nora of the Jewish Quarter, written by Jacob Gordin from an “idea by Leon Kobrin.” When he asked angrily what had happened to their partnership, Kobrin quotes Gordin’s testy reply: “If you’re already running around town shouting that I took over your masterpiece, I’ll take full ownership for it.”
“Politics were involved in this,” writes Kobrin, whose memoirs speak with fondness and respect of his mentor. “Gordin’s friends must have told him that my friends were making a fuss about the way he took over my play. He got fed up, and decided just to take credit for the whole thing.”
The newspapers joined the fray, with the anti-Gordin Daily Page printing an accusation of theft against him. At the premiere, all eyes were on the warring playwrights. Kobrin, excited and nervous, sat with his friends in a box on the right of the theater, and Gordin, with his friends, in a box on the left. As he watched the first act, Gordin kept stroking his beard and glaring at Kobrin’s box. At the end of the act, which was well received, the actors took their bow, and then Gordin appeared in front of the curtain for his author’s bow. Voices on all sides shouted, “Kobrin!” and Adler pushed the younger man onto the boards. Both writers bowed, after each act, from opposite ends of the stage.

“I am sure that Gordin at no time was out to claim ‘Minna’ as his own play,” concludes Kobrin.
Had he meant to, he wouldn’t have hesitated to come in front of the audience at this first performance and tell them it was his play. He wouldn’t have let the article in ‘The Daily Page’ appear without an answer. Gordin was not that kind of person. He [responded to me] in a moment of anger, and I’m sure he was sorry afterwards.

Though the two men renewed their friendship, a rivalry had been established. Overnight, Kobrin had become so well known that Kessler commissioned a play from him. In response to Kessler’s great success in the new playwright’s The East Side Ghetto, the Thomashefskys commissioned a rival “ghetto play” from Gordin. He delivered it to them forty-eight hours later, changing and adding to the script as they rehearsed. But his play was an utter failure, writes Bessie. “We then performed Kobrin’s play ‘Lost Paradise’ which was a success. In our theater world one heard rumblings that Kobrin was overtaking Gordin.”
On December 31, 1899, as the old century spilled into the new, the atmostphere was particularly festive at the Russian community’s New Year’s Eve ball. The Gordins, too, had reason to be joyful: their first grandson, William, had just been born to their daughter Sophie Greenspoon. Almost ready for production was God, Man and Devil, destined to become one of Gordin’s most durable and far-reaching plays. His war with Cahan was in a state of truce; although they weren’t speaking to each other, Gordin sat at his table loudly praising a series of articles recently written by his former friend, who was sitting within earshot, nearby. In his memoirs Cahan paints Gordin at this time with some sympathy:

His pride and explosive sensitivity caused him to make a few enemies in the Russian colony. But he also had many good friends and staunch supporters - a group of intelligent doctors, lawyers, dentists and business people. When he attended a dinner party or the annual New Year’s Eve Ball, his tall, broad-shouldered figure, proud face and long beard were the center of a group of followers.

But even as he laughed and told jokes that night, Yakov Gordin was in no way a contented or settled man. As uncomfortable as ever in America, a land he would always consider rapacious and shallow, he was still dubious about his life in the theater. Not long before, he had written without pleasure about his profession. The Yiddish theater may have an audience of hundreds of thousands, he wrote, but “the majority of its authors are people like me, who have become dramatic authors only by chance, who write plays only by force of circumstance, and who remain isolated and see about them only ignorance, envy, enmity and spite.”
Did he really spend eighteen years writing for the theater only because he had no choice? How sad if it is true, and if it isn’t, how sad that he saw his life that way. Because paradoxically, here in America, in the theater, he had found his calling. With Gordin as leader and guide, the Yiddish stage, its workers and its writers were now enjoying enormous power and prestige. Around two million audience members had begun to fill the Lower East Side theaters each year, at hundreds of performances - an astounding rate of growth for a theater that had not existed at all just over twenty years before. In 1904, sounding not unlike a satisfied capitalist, Gordin would boast to a reporter that the four Yiddish theaters, with a fifth being built, gave about 1500 performances yearly with a combined attendance of three million people, bringing in an annual income of half a million dollars.

As the theaters grew, actors enjoyed the rewards. At the turn of the century, Adler and Thomashefsky lived in the same Lower East Side tenement at 85 E. 10th Street, where every morning, Adler would shout affectionate abuse up the dumb waiter to his rival. In 1900, in a time of general economic prosperity, the two popular stars moved to the bigger People’s Theater, with a guarantee of increased revenues and, before long, much more luxurious living quarters. But Jacob Gordin had no guarantee of anything. The company at the People’s Theater opened with Sonya of East Broadway, by his young friend and rival Leon Kobrin.
Though Gordin didn’t realize it, other competitors had launched an invasion from which the theater would never recover: five and ten-cent movie houses – nickelodeons - and vaudeville houses were springing up throughout the city. A few years hence, fourteen-year old Izzy Baline, soon to be known as Eddie Cantor, would win an amateur night competition at a Bowery Theater, followed not long after by an assortment of madcap brothers by the name of Marx. In 1905 Adler would complain, “There is a variety theater on every corner in the Yiddish district.”

And this year came another change with unforeseen negative consequences: in 1900 the Hebrew Actors Union of New York was founded and made part of the American Federation of Labor, twenty years before the formation of Actors’ Equity. Established Yiddish actors immediately created a closed shop that was almost impossible for new members to pry open, thus granting themselves stability and security. Little of either, however, was accorded to playwrights. Because of new regulations guaranteeing cast sizes, large cast shows like Gordin’s became increasingly expensive, and thus even more risky, to mount. The ironclad rules of the union worked against the man who had helped put them into place. His plays, however, continued to feature large casts. Despite the onerous union regulations, he always remained loyal to the chorus and the bit-players.

In 1899 Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, put out a learned tome entitled The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century. There’s a copy in my library. On both inside covers are stamped the words “Jacob Gordin’s Library,” the same stamp that appears in fifty or so leather-bound books that I inherited from Great-aunt Helen. Inside the back cover of Weiner’s book is written in Gordin’s hand, in pencil, “Mar. 20/99.” So my great-grandfather had read what the author, who admired Yiddish writers but feared for their future, concluded about the Yiddish theater. “It is very doubtful,” Weiner wrote, “whether the Jewish theater can subsist in America another ten years.”
He was wrong. The Jewish theater would go on. It was that theater’s most famous playwright who would endure barely a decade more.

Gordin’s turn-of-the-century play, Got, mentsh, un tayvl (God, Man and Devil), is one of his most formidable works and his own favorite. The plot echoes both Goethe’s Faust and the Bible’s tale of Job, a point Gordin clarifies in the Prologue, where God and Satan argue over the corruptibility of man. God singles out as exemplary His beloved servant Hershele Dubrovner, a pious scribe and a pauper; Satan offers to attempt to corrupt the man, to prove that all men are venal. Gordin’s literature lesson of the day (in Nahma Sandrow’s translation):
God: What do you think you will use on him?
Satan: You permitted me to test your loyal servant Job by means of sorrows. Nowadays a Jew is used to sorrows. The learned Dr. Faust sold me his soul for an instant of pleasure. But such deals work only with Gentiles; no Jew would pay a high price for pleasure. Almighty Lord, permit me to try him with money; yes, with money, with coins … Just let me at him with a bag of gold, and you’ll see what becomes of his piety, goodness, righteousness, family life, friendship, and all the other virtues you brag about.

Satan, disguised as a lottery ticket seller, arrives in Dubrovner’s serene home, where the scribe, his wife and two nieces lead simple lives devoted to God and to each other; as Dubrovner’s wife says, “In poverty people are closer to each other.” The righteous man is persuaded against his better judgment to buy a ticket, and when he wins, the selfish concerns of profit and power quickly corrode him. Not only does he become the greedy owner of a factory making prayer shawls, but he stops playing the violin, the sweet voice of his soul, and divorces his loving but barren wife to marry Fredenyu, his beautiful young niece.
Fredenyu, at the start, is a pure unspoiled girl who loves music and spurns finery, always the sign of an exalted spirit in Gordin’s plays. “Clothing is silly,” she says. “It is a very great sin for Jewish girls to get so many dresses when they marry. Expensive beautiful clothes are unnecessary.” (I hear, behind this homily, the concern of a father who has four unmarried daughters at home.) As Hershele’s rich and indolent wife, however, Fredenyu deteriorates to the point of near-madness. “Looking in the mirror has become a habit of mine lately,” she muses distractedly. “I have nothing else to do. I am totally preoccupied with myself.” Her sister Tsipenyu, on the other hand, marries a poor man for love; though they have no money, they have children.
Children are our only comfort, our joy, our contentment. There is no greater happiness than children – according to us paupers. The baby hums in her little cradle like a pigeon. Now that is wealth, that is holy wealth. You get it from God, and you give it back to God’s world. Yes - children, that is a true fortune.

The devil continues to spout his poisonous credo, which sounds strangely like Gordin’s damning view of capitalism. “The richer you are,” croons Satan, with his forked tongue, “the freer and stronger and smarter you’ll be. You’ll have more honor, more pleasure. You’ll be able to make yourself happy, and your children after you.”
At the denouement an accident in Dubrovner’s poorly maintained factory kills Tsipenyu’s husband. Realizing, at last, that he has lost his soul, Dubrovner plays a haunting melody on his long-neglected violin, picks up a bloodstained prayer shawl, and hangs himself. Satan is forced to concede defeat.
So much money in the strongbox, and all the same he didn’t want to live any more. What, then even the power of gold has its limits? You can seduce a man with money, corrupt him, deform him, but you can never utterly destroy his soul? In that case, I seem to have lost my bet.

Man has redeemed himself. After a battle with the Devil of greed and venality, the God in the Man – conscience and goodness - is triumphant.
Directed by Kessler, the play opened at the Thalia, starring Kessler himself as Dubrovner and Bertha Kalish as his niece. Morris Moscovitz, who later found renown as a Shakespearean actor on the English stage, made of the smooth-talking devil one of the greatest role of his career. The last minutes of the play are Gordin’s gift to his actors. Kessler had a magnificent monologue as he prepared to die, but the other actors, too, had their moment in the tear-soaked spotlight.
The play had limited success at first. During its first week, Gordin lectured his audience between the acts, informing them, with his unique logic, that it is harder to write a play like this that audiences don’t like, than one they do. “Hurwitz’s plays please,” he intoned. “My plays, and those of my colleague Ibsen, do not please.” Audiences only want to be amused and aren’t ready for serious subjects, he went on. They haven’t realized that the theater is a place not for amusement, but for teaching. “Truth is the teacher, and therefore,” he announced with a smile, “I will continue to provide serious plays until you acquire a taste for them.” Surely never before had an audience been admonished directly by a playwright, even a smiling one, to change its taste for shallow entertainment and gravitate to him. Gordin’s speech worked. The play went on to become a success.

Not unqualified, however. Louis Miller, one of the most important agitators on the Lower East Side, a lawyer described by Hapgood as “a witty and energetic socialist and writer,” had criticized Gordin before and did so again with this play, complaining that it was not adapted but stolen from the Book of Job and Faust. Wounding accusations of plagiarism such as Miller’s sliced at Gordin throughout his career, though he made no attempt to conceal his sources and in fact highlighted them in the dialogue of the plays. The playwright responded by pointing out that most writers, including Shakespeare, lift their ideas from elsewhere. On this occasion, he and Miller quarreled, and it was a few years before they made peace. Later still, they became the best of friends.
In Europe, impresarios didn’t care if Gordin had stolen his ideas; they were too busy stealing his work. His plays, in productions based on smuggled or copied manuscripts, were now being mounted regularly by the growing number of touring Yiddish troupes. God, Man and Devil, making its clandestine way over the sea, was eventually played in Russian, Polish, German, Hebrew, and English. No royalties were forthcoming.

As if to test his own phenomenal energy, Gordin now embarked on one of his most time-consuming and admirable enterprises. Determined to counter what he felt was the pernicious influence of the Educational Alliance, the school started by the Yahudim for immigrants and their children, he founded an institution called the Educational League, targeting the same constituency. Gordin and his co-founders, a group of “physician-philosophers” who had been his friends in Russia, felt that the extremely successful Alliance was designed simply to turn immigrant Jews into American conformists and consumers, whereas their League would provide the broad education required of well-read world citizens. Gordin’s school was an enormous undertaking, teaching up to five hundred people during its busiest years, in a style and a range of subjects approved by the founders. He himself devoted countless hours to teaching, fundraising, and recruiting teachers. The school survived at least a decade, though it did not long outlive its founder.

My great-grandfather also chose this time to start another ambitious newspaper, The Theater Journal and Family Paper, which in its premier issue deplored the low cultural level of Jewish audiences and undertook once more to educate the theater-going public. Gordin’s friend Alexander Harkavy, the well-known lexicographer and author of the first Yiddish-English dictionary, wrote a typical article titled, in Yiddish, “Teater – a shul.” Shul could mean either ‘school’ or ‘synagogue;’ to the Jews of New York, the theater was both.

An early edition of the paper noted that “the new theater season opened in the two largest Yiddish theaters with the best pieces of the Yiddish repertoire: The Jewish King Lear at the People’s and God, Man and Devil at the Thalia.” It announced that both theaters had achieved a new dignity by forbidding the sale of selzer, apples and bananas.

Though this paper lasted only about a year, Gordin continued as always to write voluminously for other newspapers, including a lengthy series of scholarly articles about the great plays of the world, which he would later come to regret. He produced a few not-so-great plays himself this year, including Der mamzer (The Bastard or Lucretia Borgia), called by one critic “a sensationalist, foolish play”, and his only operetta, Die sheyne miryem (Beautiful Myriam) with music by Mogulescu.

His next play, a more abiding work called Di shvue (The Oath), taken from Hauptmann’s Fuhrmann Henschel, was written for Keni Lipzin as star and Thomashefsky as director. In this play, a man on his deathbed makes his wife swear she will never marry again, but she has been consorting with his steward whom she marries one year later. When her grieving son drowns, and she discovers that the brutal man is having an affair with the maid, she goes mad and burns down the house with herself and her new husband inside. “Crude in form as these plays are,” concluded American critic Hutchins Hapgood, “and unpleasant as they often are in subject and in the life portrayed, they are yet refreshing to persons who have been bored by the empty farce and inane cheerfulness of the uptown theaters.”

Hutchins Hapgood wrote his drama reviews for The Commercial Advertiser, where toiled his brother Norman, a respected theater critic, and Abraham Cahan. The paper’s urbane editor was Lincoln Steffens, who considered himself almost a Jew, “as infatuated with the Ghetto as eastern boys were with the wilds of the west,” with a mezuza – a sacred container that consecrates Jewish homes - nailed to his door. He liked to put reviews of the Yiddish theater front and centre in his paper, where he felt they belonged. “The Yiddish stage,” he once said, “was about the best in New York at that time both in stuff [plays and productions] and in acting.”

His employee Hapgood – Hutch, as he’s called by Steffens – did the research in 1901 for his estimable book Spirit of the Ghetto, which came out the following year. Hutch is a clear-eyed but affectionate and enthusiastic reporter who, like his brother and his boss, is enamored of Lower East Side life in all its forms, yet aware of its excesses and deficits. Fascinated by the intellectual and artistic life in this dense, dark, bustling quarter of the city, Hutch actually moved in; he lived in the University Settlement at the corner of Eldridge and Rivington, listening, watching, and reporting. He especially liked to hang around the little Canal Street cafes, admiring “the sombre and earnest qualities” of the actors, socialists, musicians, journalists, playwrights and poets of the quarter, who talk for hours “over their coffee and cake, about politics and society, poetry and ethics, literature and life.”

Hapgood goes to the Gordins’ rented home in Brooklyn, to interview a well-known playwright “of uncommon intelligence and strength of character. He is Russian in appearance,” he wrote, “a large broad-headed man with thick black hair and beard. As he told me, in his little home in Brooklyn, the history of his life, he omitted all picturesque details, and emphasized only his intellectual development.”

O great-grandfather, couldn’t you have let slip a picturesque detail or two? Imagine what he could have told or even shown Hutch, there in the tiny house at 365 14th Street, crammed with nine children (Lizzie, 27, was now married): Sam, 24, who would never leave home; petulant Alex and sweet Vera, quiet Jim and easy-going Mike doing their best to blend into the Brooklyn high schools; my future grandmother the imperious Jeanette, 12, her mild-mannered younger brother George, and the two American babies, Leon who even at 6 took nothing seriously, and Helen, 5, who was serious about everything. Oldest daughter Sophie Greenspoon’s marriage was in trouble, and she was considering a move home with her children. Where would she put them?

Aneuta, who never made demands on the time of her preoccupied husband, was in the kitchen, feeding and raising this hungry gang. Gordin’s producers paid him in cash at the theater, and he was always reaching into his pocket to peel off dollars for groceries and doctor’s bills, counting them out in Russian. Aneuta was working, too, to educate herself and to learn English. One night, awakened late with an earache, Helen went in search of her mother, whom she found at the kitchen table poring over The New York Times with a dictionary, looking up the words she didn’t understand. “I’m married to a brilliant man, darling,” she told her daughter, “and I have to keep up with him.” “And then,” said Helen, “she took care of my ear.”

Some outside the family saw Anna differently than did her devoted children. A sharp-tongued writer of the time opined that she was “a buxom woman, somewhat dull, who would mutter behind [her husband’s] back, despairing of ever having him think of domestic affairs.” Gordin’s wife, said another, “was a short, stout, typical daughter of Israel, always ready to receive guests, at no time showing any interest in intellectual questions.” She was, he said, “a woman with mournful eyes.”

But no, no picturesque details. Hapgood was able to pry loose that though Gordin was “in comfortable circumstances,” making “a good income from his plays, which grow in popularity in the quarter,” still he felt great contempt for America, particularly American politics, and intended someday to return to Russia. And yet, wrote the American, he “longs to have his plays translated and produced on the English stage.”

When Hapgood interviewed Gordin in his comfortable circumstances in 1901, neither could know that these very years – 1900 to 1903 - were the zenith of the playwright’s career and life. As proof of his professional and personal success, Gordin was about to be inundated, in two huge celebrations, with the gratitude and love of his public. Would these temper his “great contempt” for the land where he now lived?

The first celebration took place in November 1901, the tenth anniversary of Siberia, his first play for the Yiddish stage. A full week was dedicated to honoring the playwright, organized by “The Committee of One Hundred,” one hundred – one hundred! - of the East Side’s artists, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and intellectuals. The festivities began on Sunday November 10th in the auditorium of the Educational Alliance, the institution Gordin was doing his best to undermine. Professor Felix Adler of the Hebrew Institute had organized a “Literary Evening tendered to Mr. Jacob Gordin by Literary Societies of the East Side and other Friends,” with fifty prominent men (and, strangely for these socialist feminists, it seems not a single woman) in attendance. The audience enjoyed a violin and piano duet, a piano solo, a violin solo, and songs. The Hebrew Orphan Asylum Military Band played eight numbers.
When it was time for speeches, the toastmaster announced that each of the speakers could use the tongue that came most easily to him, as it was assumed that everyone present would be able to understand any language. The result was that the after-dinner speeches were delivered in English, Russian, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Among the speakers were Winchevsky, the Director of the Educational Alliance David Blaustein, and the doctors H. Solotaroff and Abram Caspe, two of the socialist medical men closest to Gordin.

The following two nights, Monday and Tuesday, were given over to the performance of Gordin’s greatest plays to date: at the Windsor, Mirele Efros starring Lipzin, and at the Thalia, God, Man and Devil. Gordin, presiding from his box, was the guest of honor at each. Winchevsky provided a special prologue for Mirele Efros, intoned by Keni Lipzin, in honor of “our author, who has shown us powerful images, faces, hearts and souls … his dark world full of wonder; he who in countless plays/ has shown us our community changing, growing…”

At the end of the second evening, a parade of Gordin’s best-known characters marched onto the stage, stopping to make a humorous speech to their creator, or to banter with the audience as if their lives had continued, uninterrupted, after the end of the play in which they appeared. One character for example, a notorious sponger, tried to borrow money from the onlookers. The speeches, of course, were written by Gordin himself.

On Wednesday November 13th, Keni Lipzin offered “an informal banquet,” on Thursday a banquet was given by the Thalia Theater Company, and on Friday the devoted Lipzin delivered “an elaborate banquet.” The final celebration was held on Saturday November 16th, an event sponsored by “Mr. Gordin’s non-professional friends,” presumably everyone on the Lower East Side who hadn’t been at the other six. The feast was held in the Reception Room of the Terrace Gardens at 145 E. 58th near Third. The menu was elaborate and extensive, from Blue Point Oyster Cocktail with Amontill Sherry, through Kennebec Salmon and Fresh Beef Tongue with St. Julien, on to Roast Tenderloin of Beef, followed by Sorbet Punch with Neirsteiner. Then the lucky guests enjoyed Philadelphia Roast Capon and Roast Young Duck with Compot and Salad, followed by “Ice Cream Fantasie, Mottoes, Bon-Bons, Tartlettes, Assorted Cakes, Raisins, Nuts, Almonds, Café Noir.” The cost of a ticket to this banquet was $2.00, which included the wine.

One article about the festivities is headed “Lion of the Jewish Stage; Jubilee Honors Lavished on Playwright Gordin.” Another reports that “the program is, beyond a doubt, the most elaborate that has ever been arranged in this country to do honor to a noted person of the theater.”
In a warning of things to come, however, another paper ran an article entitled “Did He Deserve a Celebration?” The answer was the negative, because Gordin’s pen is “enlisted in the service of anarchist propaganda … replete with denunciation of Judaism and Jewish morality … With Jacob Gordin in their ranks, the anarchists conspire to capture the Yiddish stage.”

Though it scarcely seems credible, Gordin was writing his next hit play in the midst of all this celebratory activity. His son Alex, quoted on this matter because of a lawsuit about royalties, says that his father began writing “during the first week of November, and finished the 17th of December.”
According to Bessie Thomashefsky, Gordin was sitting one night in the women’s dressing room, watching the actresses make up before a show, when he remarked on Bertha Kalish’s long, dark hair. Turning to him, she said teasingly, “Yakov Mikhailovich, have you heard of the writer Tolstoy? He wrote a book with a heroine who had beautiful hair like mine. Why don’t you write a play for my hair?” Stroking his beard, Gordin growled, “Yes, madam, I’ve heard of Tolstoy.” And he wrote Kreytser sonata (The Kreutzer Sonata) for her.

The title of the new play caused some confusion, as it is the same as a composition by Beethoven and a subsequent novella by Tolstoy. In the novella, two characters are suspected of having an affair because they play the tempestuous Sonata; tragedy ensues. In Gordin’s play, the Sonata is again played by an adulterous pair and the heroine reads Tolstoy’s book, which was particularly admired by the Russian intelligentsia for its dark portrayal of the abyss of marriage. Many in the audience would have known that the book was originally banned by the Tsar. Gordin’s characters, as usual, deliver a lesson in art and literature as they discuss Beethoven and Tolstoy, his favorite composer and writer.

The first act of the play is set where almost all first acts were, for Gordin’s audience as well as his characters: in Russia. Miriam Friedlander – Kalish - is the heroine, thoughtful and good; we know this immediately because she enters “very plainly dressed, with a book in her hand.” She has committed several unpardonable sins, however, the first being that not long ago she agreed to baptism in order to marry a gentile, a Russian army officer at that. Convinced, however, that he and his Jewish lover would never find happiness, the wretched officer has just killed himself, without knowing that his lover was carrying his child. To contain this double scandal, Miriam’s distraught father Raphael has arranged for her to marry Gregor, a poor musician to whom Miriam tells the truth. Raphael gives Gregor a large dowry and sends the barely acquainted couple off to America.

When the second act curtain rises, Gregor, Miriam and her sensitive young son David now live in New York. Gregor, who has become a violin teacher, mistreats both his long-suffering wife and his hated stepson, and is pursuing a long-standing affair with Miriam’s conniving sister Celia. The rest of Miriam’s family, her father, mother, brother and faithful old nanny, have followed the couple to America and are living on a farm in the country. There Raphael, Gordin’s spokesman, struggles vainly to assert the honest rural values of the old country, as around him his loved ones are corrupted by America. The old man and his grandson David are especially close (as the playwright was close to his Greenspoon grandson William, now three, and later to David, born this very year.) After years of torment Miriam is driven mad by the crassness of America and by her callous husband’s affair with her sister. In a blazing denouement, she shoots them both and ends the play in madness and grief, calling for her nanny, who holds her close as the curtain falls.

On first reading, I thought Gordin’s tale of lover’s suicides and murder absurdly overheated, but then I learned of a few tormented love affairs of the time. A well-known anarchist called Aaron Lieberman so adored a cousin of Winchevsky’s that he followed her to America and shot himself when she reunited there with her husband. Chaim Zhitlowsky, critic, commentator and a future debating partner of Gordin’s, left his wife, the mother of his six children, when she became pregnant with a young student’s child. Though the youth then shot himself, Zhitlowsky did not go back.

At the age of seventeen, Boris Thomashefsky’s sister Emma eloped with the director Finkel. When Emma then left him for a younger man, Finkel shot her, her lover, and himself. Emma survived, but was left paralyzed; she made concert appearances singing from her wheelchair. Her nephew, Boris Thomashefsky’s son Teddy, once remarked that the denizens of the Yiddish theater “made the Left Bank of Paris look like a convent. There was every form of degeneration you can imagine: murder, suicide, drugs, sex deviations of all kinds.” He knew from firsthand experience.
Besides graphically illuminating the violent end of unfaithful spouses, Gordin’s latest melodrama moralized, as usual, about what happens to Russian Jews when they land in the country of conscienceless greed. Whenever Miriam’s foolish brother Samuel opens his mouth, dark-edged Americanisms pour forth:
What you want to learn is the American commandments: First, father, respect your sons. And the second one is, everybody do as he pleases. And the third is, whatever you learned in Russia ain’t so.

Miriam’s mother Rebecca, as she sweeps from the farm to the glittering city, spits at her husband, “And as for you, you’ll learn that in America the father of a family is nobody!” This theme of daughters, and especially sons, pushing away the wisdom of unjustly spurned fathers is so prevalent in the play that I’m sure it was not just a general concern of Gordin’s, but one he was living daily. His own sons Alex, Jim, Mike and George were 22, 18, 15 and 11 now, shooting into American manhood, the natural tensions of their adolescence exacerbated as their father tried to pull them back toward the profound truths of his own past. Paradoxically, a man who had spent his youth in Russia battling the intransigence of traditional ways was now battling his own sons, and his own people, in an effort to transplant some of those ways into the resistant soil of America.

His play aches with nostalgia for Russia. Over and over, Gordin mourns his lost land, his lost youth. Looking out at American snow, the nanny says:
Do you remember Christmas in Krementschug, child dear? Snow – just like this! – but more, and whiter – yes, the snow in Russia is whiter, it falls quietly, too – it takes its time to fall. This American snow is just like everything else in America. Hurrying and flurrying!

Even if this overwrought reflection and others in the play were meant satirically, the underlying thrust was Gordin’s. In his rosy memories, even the Russian snow was better.
From this play, as from Sappho, issues a staunchly modern, pro-female view of women’s lack of rights in conventional marriage. In the play’s climactic scene, as admirable, brave Miriam furiously confronts Gregor and Celia with their faithlessness, her husband attempts to calm her with an affectionate, “You are mine.” She snarls in response:
Yours? Yours? Yes, I’m your chattel. My body belongs to you and must belong to you till I die. When you want my body, you say you love me; and when you say you love me, you want my body. I have lived with you ten years as your servant, and no day of that ten years but you have trampled and derided me, deceived and betrayed me. Yes, and you have struck me. I was silent, and I endured, for his sake, poor little child whom I brought into this vile world. Enough! I’ll no longer be humiliated, deceived, betrayed. No – no more!

And she shoots. This was an extreme feminist manifesto for a Jewish immigrant audience. Yet the play did very well; Winchevsky wrote happily in the Forward that the theater was selling standing room only with extra seats at the sides, and the author and actors were called out three or four times after every act. An article by writer Louis Lipsky reports that it has been playing to crowded houses for eleven weeks, three performances each week, “a run unprecedented in the history of the Yiddish stage.” The play ran, eventually, for four months, until the season ended.
Louis Lipsky is an interesting player in the saga of the Lower East Side, a critic and writer in his early life, and later a Zionist leader. In 1962, an old man, he published a fascinatingly snide book called Tales of the Yiddish Rialto, which presents censorious, semifictive stories about the Yiddish theater world in the early 1900’s. Lulla Rosenfeld thought he exposed more of his own unpleasantness than the theater’s and spoke of him with loathing; understandably, when you read his particularly nasty portrait of her grandfather Jacob Adler, whom he paints as stingy, self-centred and philandering, an actor who merges with the persona of his one Broadway role, Shylock.

But then, Lipsky’s portraits of all the players of the time are ungenerous; his portrayal of my great-grandfather as a theater-loving thug is relatively mild. Gordin, Lipsky writes, was “the first man of intellect and education to intrude into the Yiddish theater … the first writer who had the will and the physical strength to break the bones of any actor or manager who interfered with the text of his plays. If God had not given him this strength and courage, the new drama would never have found a place in the Yiddish theater.”

A more empathetic writer of the time, Morris R. Finkelstein (later known as M.R. Fink,) reported for The Echo from Mr. Gordin’s “cozy little library filled with the choicest works of many languages.” Writing in the spring of 1902, he marvels not at Mr. Gordin’s ability to break bones, but at his output: in only eleven years, the playwright has brought out 63 plays, some 517 sketches, and innumerable articles. “In the opinion of critics of the first rank, like Norman Hapgood,” reports Finkelstein, “the plays of Mr. Gordin rank easily with the best produced in America.”

The two men chat in the cozy library about good and bad theater, Gordin lamenting that instead of performing Shakespeare, “the student of human nature,” theaters are opting for Alexander Dumas, ”the student of the sensational.” Worse, Gordin says – reflecting not only on his own time, but on ours - the theater is in the hands of businessmen, whose maxim is always, “Art is uncertain, but sensation is sure.”
According to my idealistic great-grandfather, every American city should have publicly-owned and run municipal theaters, students should be admitted cheaply to all theatrical events, and schools should include modern plays on the curriculum. He considers the Germans and the Norwegians to be “the only nations which have today a true drama,” ignoring Russia where, he says, plays are so much more easily censored than novels. Where, though Gordin could not know it, his countryman Chekhov had recently finished writing The Three Sisters. “Our interviewer tried to persuade Mr. Gordin to speak of his own work,” writes Mr. Finkelstein, “but Mr. Gordin’s modesty could not be overcome.”
“Not that he was humble,” wrote Mr. Lipsky, in his Rialto. “On the contrary, he was one of the rudest and most arrogant of all the intellectuals.”

1902 was a slow year for Jacob Gordin; after the gratifying success of Kreutzer Sonata, he did not have another hit for some time. He and Adler fought bitterly after the actor’s rejection of a subsequent work; “a lawsuit, the question of royalties, hot insults exchanged,” says Lipsky. All of the plays traced to this year disappeared instantly. Another of Gordin’s projects, though, has endured. On the ashes of the “Free Yiddish People’s Theater” arose “The Progressive Dramatic Club,” begun in a basement on East Broadway and designed “to develop a public for the theater and a theater for the public.” The club, about a decade hence, turned into the Yiddish theater troupe Folksbeine, which produces to this day in a theater on East 55th , which produced, in fact, the Mirele Efros that once so entertained me and not my uncle.

Perhaps Gordin’s life was actually calm, for a moment or two, and so needed to be jarred once more into battle. In January 1903 the lead article in the Future, which had just begun publishing again after a hiatus of six years, was a war cry by my great-grandfather, revving up his campaign against the Educational Alliance. He compared the bourgeois uptown Jews to “mixologists,” the fancy new name for bartenders, because the jumble of courses at the Alliance was comprised of a bit of this and a bit of that: gymnastics, English and Hebrew classes shaken together in an effervescent brew, nothing taught effectively or in depth. He charged the Alliance with bureaucratic bungling, amateurishness, and avoidance of any progressive teaching on the East Side, “lest the Jews become too radical.”
Gordin’s attack went much further this time than last. At a benefit in support of his Educational League, before a delighted audience of two thousand, he ridiculed the Yahudim in a playlet called “The Benefactors of the East Side.” A rich philanthropist invites to his mansion others concerned about the downtown east side. Among the characters are “Mr. Hutchins Fish Lobster, a Gentile who belongs to the smart set; Mr. Morris Goldberg, celebrated agitator and friend of labor; Mr. Moses Herring, a prominent divorce lawyer; the Rev. Dr. Knobel, who came from Germany by way of Schnipeschoch, Russia; Mrs. Zoken, a rich widow interested in reform and cookbooks; Mrs. Spriggl, an esthete who would save the hungry, needy and ignorant by classical music; and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Joske, the philanthropic hosts.”

As remedies for downtown vices, Gordin’s uptown characters propose everything from “legislation to compel every downtown Jew to use the punching bag,” to “the performance of the music of Also Spake Zarathustra in all the halls of the district.” My great-grandfather was having fun with this set-to. All of the characters were based on real people immediately known to the audience: Joske, for example, was clearly the wealthy Jacob Schiff. Hutchins Fish Lobster the gentile was perhaps based on Hutchins Hapgood. The composite character Morris Goldberg, Gordin’s representative in the play, was played at the benefit by Joseph Barondess, one of the best-known Lower East Side agitators, not an actor though he had once wanted to be one, but a labor organizer who had recently been refused permission to speak at a meeting on the Upper East Side. He and his friend Gordin relished their theatrical revenge.

The important spring of 1903 brought joy to the Gordins. The patriarch’s May Day birthday was always feted royally with a large crowd of family and friends. In a note at the YIVO, Edwin Markham, a famous American poet of social protest, lets his host know that of course he will be attending the dinner in May, as he did every birthday. This year, as Gordin turned fifty, the event was even more widely acknowledged. Again, telegrams flooded the Gordin house.
“Shakespeare Ibsen and Hauptmann Commission me to Congratulate their Colleague and wish him fifty More. J.E. Eron.”
“Accept my cordial good wishes on your growing power for increasing the heart-life and mind-life of the people. Edwin Markham.”
“Best congratulations from the depth of my heart for your life already past and the one you now start. Philip Zeitlen. [of Zeitlen’s Café]”
“You should always brighten the stage with the light of truth, with the light of knowledge, and not forget the one who was the first to offer his hand in welcome in this country, and who will always remain your friend. Jacob P. Adler.”

And a mass of others - “The Social Democratic Educational Club,” “The Principals of the Manhattan Preparatory School,” “The Voice of Labor,” “The Shakespeare Young Men’s Benevolent Association,” “The Peoples’ Culture Club,” “The Pupil’s Society of the Educational League.”
In time for this convivial event, Gordin had at last amassed the resources to buy his own house. He confided in an interview that he was earning $5000 a year, a respectable but modest figure given his large family and the constant outflow of charitable donations. For about $4000, the pater familias was able to acquire a pretty four-story brownstone at 256 Madison Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where some of his family remained for nearly twenty years. There was urgent need of the additional space. As Helen told it, her sister Sophie’s husband was “a no-goodnik, a womanizer who used to come to Papa for money all the time. One day Papa hit him, and Sophie and her three babies came home to Mama.”
Sophie and her babies would remain with her parents for the next five or six years. Many articles about Gordin mention that he had fourteen children. During these years, he did.

More than eighty years later, in 1986, I sought out the childhood home that both Helen and Anna Greenspoon Richmond spoke of with a nostalgic warmth bordering on reverence. Though 256 has been torn down, the row of which it was an end unit is still there, an unbroken façade of well-built, compact brownstones. I laughed when facing it; it is located right next to The Boy’s High-school of Brooklyn, which in the early 1900’s was one of the best high schools in New York. With five educable sons under his roof, not including Sam, and now two grandsons as well, Gordin made sure that even at home, his boys could hear the school bells ring. The girls went to the Girl’s High-school of Brooklyn, also close by, “a very fine school, like a private school,” said Anna.
The neighborhood in 1986 was primarily African-American; in place of one large family in a thirteen-room house, several families lived in apartments. In 1903, according to Helen, their street was populated not with fellow Jews, but with gentiles.

Oh yes, we celebrated Christmas, not Chanukah. We didn’t keep kosher, ate ham, all those things. Mama used to say, ‘My parents must be turning in their graves.’ She and Papa both came from very Orthodox homes so they were glad to break away, they’d had it up to here. There was a reason for those kosher laws. What use were all those rules once the Jews got iceboxes?

Aneuta once told her youngest daughter that she and Yakov Mikhailovich had gone to the other extreme because their parents had been so religious. When Helen asked to be allowed to go to temple, or to church with her Christian friends, her mother replied, “You can be a lovely, well-rounded person and not go to church. You abide by the Ten Commandments, and by the Golden Rule, and that is the most beautiful religion you can live by. You don’t have to go to church. Let your home be your church.”

This house and its garden were Aneuta’s place of worship; she loved to garden. In front was her flowerbed; the backyard was sweet with rose bushes, lush honeysuckle and white and purple lilac trees. Lilac was Gordin’s favorite flower, and on his May 1st birthday every year, he was sated with the smell, not only of his favorite Russian foods - borscht, kulebiaka, piroshkis - but of thick masses of purple and white blossoms. Enjoying the lilac was as close as Gordin came now to farming.
Helen had indelible stories about her mother. “We were never hit, we were never spanked,” she said.
The only time Mama threatened to hit me – we had Russian or Finnish or Polish girls helping in the kitchen. I was sitting on the stoop with my buddies and when the Polish girl came out with a sweater I didn’t see Mama standing there. One of my little friends said, ‘Who was that, Helen?’ and I said, ‘Oh, that was my servant.’ A child, you know, what did I know about servants? Mama walked down the steps, and her face was as red as a beet, and she said sternly, ‘Don’t you ever say that again, Helen, we have no servants in our home. She is our friend.’ I never forgot it, and I’ve never treated a servant like a servant. They sat at the table with us. I eat with my girls now, always fix lunch for the both of us.

The heart of the house lay in the basement where Aneuta, with her ‘friend,’ spent her days at the two stoves in the kitchen, one gas and one coal, preparing vats of soup not only for her family but for the many friends and admirers her husband brought home every day. She never knew how many would appear. Next to the kitchen was the pantry, and then the dining room with the samovar and the big oak table. When the boards were put in, there could be as many as forty people for supper, artists and intellectuals, politicos, actors, Jew and gentile alike. At the end of the meal the Tiffany lamps were turned down and the guitars were brought out. Family and guests would pour brandy into spoons, set them alight, and sing Russian songs in the glow of the burning spoons. Gordin loved music and had an acute ear for a man who didn’t sing or play an instrument. According to Morris Winchevsky, all his friend’s senses were exceptionally sharp.
Anna told me, “Anna Pavlova, Nazimova, they were guests at the house. Pavlova was not a very good-looking woman but she could dance. Stalichnikoff, one of the architects of Carnegie Hall, he was a friend of Papa’s, and a professor from Columbia, Dr. Hamilton, and Butensky the sculptor of Papa’s statue. When he was making his statue at the house we were all fussing around with clay.” Jules Butensky was an old friend who had known the Gordins in Russia.
On the second floor was Gordin’s library, where he worked in front of the fireplace. He wrote erratically; when an order for a play came in, he sometimes did nothing for weeks and then would write for eighteen hours at a stretch, stopping only for meals. He smoked cigarettes constantly while at work and drank glasses of tea. The walls of the library were lined with wreaths given him by admirers and his famed collection of ten thousand books.

Among the ones left me by Helen, I found not one novel, but there are a disproportionate number of tomes about the French Revolution. (In 1905 the Lower East Side Public Library on Chatham Square was the busiest in New York, ranking first in the city for circulation of works on history, science, and sociology, and last for novels.) There are collections of poetry including Browning, Shelley, Tennyson and Edgar Allen Poe, many volumes of social history such as The History of the Commune of 1871, translated by Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling, and the complete works of Lermontov in Russian. There are books about Balzac, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Dante, Aristotle and Victor Hugo, books by Darwin, William Morris, and Maeterlinck, and a seven volume Complete Works of William Shakespeare. These last are leather bound, beautifully preserved except for one volume that is falling apart: the one containing the tragedies, including Hamlet and King Lear.

“He was reading all the time. He didn’t believe in children having too many toys, but lots of books,” Helen said, and Anna reiterated, “Even if there was no money for presents at birthdays and Christmas, there was always a book for each child. Papa would tell us to wash our hands before we started to read.” There’s a well-known story that Gordin took one of his friends into his library to point out his many books of plays, from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Wilde, Shaw, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Chekhov and Gorky. “These are my masters,” he said. “From them I take my themes, subjects and actions,” though his characters, he said, lived their own lives while they propagandized his ideas.

His big desk sat in the center of the library, bracketed by Morris chairs, and in a little adjoining room sat the human Xerox machine, the person who was copying his manuscripts. Children who were being punished were made to sit quietly in that room with a book, monitored by Gordin who also kept an ear on the children’s piano practice next door. He had a “whistling tube” in his study, so that he could talk downstairs to the kitchen. Once when Anna Greenspoon cut short her practice and crept downstairs, she was startled by his voice over the whistling tube, telling her to come back and start again.
Through beautiful folding glass doors embossed with flowers was the living room. Against the door was a Hardman concert grand on which my grandmother, her sisters and her niece had their all-important lessons. Two green velvet couches faced each other, and velvet and mahogany chairs; there were art works, statuary, and a chess set, hand-carved on a wooden table, sent by an admirer. Helen recounted, “After Papa died Leon asked for the chess set, and he sold it! I could have murdered him. And there was Papa’s bust – your grandmother took that.” “Upstairs there were bedrooms, lots of simple rooms,” she went on.

I shared a room with Leon for many years. I remember one Christmas Eve when I was six or seven, I couldn’t sleep for excitement, waiting for Santa Claus. Late at night our door was pushed open and in came Papa in his pyjama’s, with Mama outside the door, watching. I pretended to be asleep. Papa put a toy at the foot of Leon’s bed, and then a doll at the foot of mine. Then he picked it up again and put it gently in my arms.

Anna Richmond told me that her Gordin aunts and uncles loved “amateur theatricals,” which meant they made up plays and performed them. One day a group of actors gathered at the house to hear Gordin read a new work. When the reading was over, they climbed up to the attic where the children had prepared a full-blown performance. “They had such a good time, the actors and actresses, watching us children perform. To us, Papa was a playmate,” she said. “He used to sneak outside and ring the front door bell, and we’d say, ‘Oh, there’s someone for Papa,’ and we’d go upstairs, and there he was, large as life.”
It is not surprising that Anna called her grandparents Papa and Mama; for some years, they were her parents. “Papa was fascinating to us,” she said. “We thought of him as a king.”

When her grandfather came down in the evening for supper, he would sit on the big leather sofa or in a rocking chair in the dining room, and the younger children would swarm and tumble around him. They’d sit in his lap, and he would tell them stories in English. Helen told me that her mother and father spoke to each other in Russian, switching to Yiddish only when they didn’t want the children to understand “or when actors were in the house.” Aneuta spoke to the children in Russian, but their father practiced, and made the young Gordins practice, speaking English. How difficult he made communication with his children, by his insistence on speaking a language that was foreign not only to him but to most of them.
After the evening meal the patriarch dressed for the theater. Occasionally, his wife went with him, and more occasionally still, his children, who went rarely to the theater because they didn’t speak Yiddish. Helen and her older brother Leon, aged only three and five, were once brought to see God, Man and Devil. Terrified by the flash effects at the devil’s entrance, Leon screamed and had to be taken home. “Papa was annoyed. He said we shouldn’t come back till it made sense,” Helen remembered.

Under his beard when he was in evening clothes there was a silk tie. He was very tall, Mama very short. There was an evening ritual, every night – he’d have his dinner and take his bath and then get into his evening clothes – and he’d come down for her to tie the black bow tie. He’d say, ‘I’m here, Neuta,’ and bend to her height. She’d look at him with such love, raise her arms and hug him and kiss him and then make his tie. She’d tell him to bundle up, don’t stay out too late. He always came home late, she had the evenings to herself, she was alone. She always waited for him, with a glass of tea, a cup of milk, to talk.

In our many hours of conversation, Helen didn’t utter a single criticism of her father or offer a hint of any family trouble. “I never heard an argument between my mother and father,” she said once, adding, “They quarrelled only about the children.” I thought it wise to take everything she said under advisement, though Anna, whose frankness made her more trustworthy than her aunt, was also filled with praise for him. It is difficult to see Gordin as the genial prankster and gentle husband their stories portray, when we’re so aware of his critical self-righteousness. It seems he could be a playful grandfather and father, to the girls at least.
With his sons, however, he was aloof and exacting. Leo or Leon, aged nine, spent all one winter day shovelling snow for the neighbors, and was proud of the money he had earned. Gordin called his only American-born son to his study and scolded, “You took money from our neighbors for helping them? If you do a favor for a friend, you don’t accept money!” There were pushkes – tin charity boxes – by the front door, one for the Jews and a Salvation Army one for gentiles; Gordin made Leon divide the money and put it in the boxes. Then he asked his daughter, “Yelenychka, why did he want the money?” She told him Leon wanted a new cannon for his lead soldier set, and Gordin sent someone to buy a whole new set of soldiers, with a cannon.

The same rigor was applied even to his youngest. One day the daughter of a visiting acquaintance admired Helen’s favorite doll. Gordin overheard and on the spot, asked his child to give the doll to her guest. Helen complied, weeping. She told me that many years later, she learned that the little girl had never been able to enjoy the gift, unable to forget the tears of its original owner. But my great-aunt recounted the tales of the doll and the pushkes as praise, not criticism. “He wanted us to be kind, to share,” she said.

Gordin sounds like a father who may be operating from the best of motives and with the most well meaning of theories, but who isn’t dealing with the flesh and blood child standing in front of him. It was easier to be a playwright, moving his characters around as he saw fit, than a father, faced with all these personalities who refused to conform to his Olympian ideal of moral perfection. Or simply to be just like him.


On May 1st 1903, in their own home for the first time, Aneuta and her children were determined to make the patriarch’s fiftieth birthday party unforgettable, and they did. “It was the happiest birthday,” reported Winchevsky.
The front page of the newspaper, however, cast a shadow on the day. That very evening, the Forward’s headlines were blaring out the latest horror, the most devastating pogrom so far in Russia. It was an event that would have far-reaching negative consequences, even for the Gordins in New York.
The masthead of the Forward showed that the job of editor had recently been bestowed on a man who had returned to take permanent hold of the Lower East Side. Abraham Cahan was back, for good. This also was bad news for my great-grandfather. Luckily, as he ate and drank and listened to Russian music on this happy day, he did not know it yet.

(3187)

Source: Finding the Jewish Shakespeare; The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin by Beth Kaplan
Publisher: Syracuse University Press (March 30, 2007) 288 pages
Website: http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/spring-2007/finding-jewish.html

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