Messiahs of 1933: How American Yiddish Theater Survived Adversity Through Satire

Stefan Kanfer

Messiahs of 1933: How American Yiddish Theater Survived Adversity Through Satire By Joel Schechter Temple University Press 2008, $39.50, pp. 295

More than two decades before the Cold War began, the prisoners in the gulags had two horrific problems. The first, of course, was the monster who had put them there. The second was the Old Left, who provided little aid and comfort to Joseph Stalin’s victims. Its members were convinced that the faults of American society—racism, economic inequality, entrenched bureaucracy—provided a balance of evil, with Soviet tyranny on the other side of the scale.

That war is long over (though it might start again in a new form any moment now), but the debate lives on in the minds of the Old Lefties and their young sympathizers. Case in point: Joel Schechter’s lively but naive history of radical Yiddish theater. “By now,” writes the San Francisco State professor, many of the 1930s “ideals about peace, justice and internationalism have been destroyed by Hitler, Stalin and American anti-Communism....” True, Senator Joe McCarthy and the witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee et. al did great damage to the American political fabric with their headline-hunting Red Scares. But there were also honorable American anti-Communists who recognized the threat to liberty that lay behind the U.S.S.R.’s agitprop. Columnist Murray Kempton, New York Post Editor James Wechsler, the entire staff of the New Leader magazine, novelist Richard Wright and many, many other intellectuals had Stalin’s number down to the tenth decimal point, at a time when naifs, fellow-travelers and American Communists were still buying the Party line. Either Schechter can’t tell the difference between the highs and lows of American anti-Communism, or he’s in too much of a hurry to bother with distinctions.

The saddest of those who tried to stay in lockstep with Stalin’s orders was the Russian-Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels. He was capable, as the author indicates, of “superb performance.” He was also capable of acting as the Bolshevik leader’s most abject lackey. Visiting America, Mikhoels spoke at a Soviet-American friendship rally at the old Polo Grounds, pointing to a large photomural of Stalin and blessing it. The blessee rewarded him five years later by arranging to have the actor succumb to a fatal “accident.” Mikhoels’ crime? “Formalism.” Translation: adhering to Jewish principles and supporting Zionism.

“Zionism” does not appear in the index of Messiahs of 1933, though one of its harshest enemies, Edward Said, is cited. And if Schechter is at great pains to rehabilitate the long-neglected writings of the Yiddish satirist Moshe Nadir, he gives only a sidelong glance to the reason why Nadir has remained treyf to the Jewish establishment. He broke with the Party in 1939, but Nadir endorsed the opinions of the Communist Yiddish paper, the Freiheit, 10 years earlier when Jewish settlements in Palestine came under attack by Arabs, killing dozens of unarmed yeshiva students. On orders from Moscow, the Freiheit ran a headline: “ZIONIST-FASCISTS HAVE PROVOKED THE UPRISING.” The paper went on to editorialize, “The roots of the revolt of the Arabian masses are to be found in the economic exploitation of the Arab peasantry, whose land has been appropriated by British imperialism through reactionary Jewish Zionism.”

With this as a back story, the Yiddish radicals seem somewhat less forceful and valorous than they’re portrayed in this latest account of their history. The book’s title is derived from Nadir’s funny but dated play, Messiah in America. Its plot involves rival producers, each of whom announces the arrival of the Messiah at his own theater. Both Messiahs, of course, are false. But in Nadir’s view all Messiahs are bogus—religion, nationalism and, above all, capitalism.

Many other bygone celebrities of the Yiddish stage pass in review. Here is Marc Chagall in his stage designer phase. According to a Soviet journalist, the painter “hated real objects as illegitimate disturbers of his universe and furiously hurled them off the stage.... With his own hands, he painted every costume, turning it into a complex combination of blots, stripes, dots, and scattering over them various muzzles, animals and doodles.”

Here is the former stockbroker Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinowitz) unable to come up with a stage hit in his lifetime. One day his creation, Tevye the Milkman, would animate the musical Fiddler on the Roof. In the 1930s, however, his works were appropriated by the brilliant but manipulative Communist theater group, the Artef (Workers Theater Alliance). Aleichem died in 1916, but that made no difference to the Artef. They edited, cut and improvised from existing Aleichem plays, “and came up with something distinctly their own, suited for a period of revolution and Great Depression.” Traditionalists, adds Schechter drily, “may object to the textual changes, but the alterations kept alive Aleichem’s characters as well as his social consciousness and humor, by presenting them in a new mise en scene.” Joe Stein, author of the book of Fiddler, must be very grateful indeed.

Here are the folks of the Federal Theater Project, the only time the U.S. government subsidized the Yiddish stage—and got persecuted by right-wingers and anti-Semitic congressmen for the favor. Here are the hilariously inventive komikers Yetta Swerling, Leo Fuchs and Menashe Skulnik. Here are writers, designers, producers working against an assimilationist tide that would eventually sweep them all away. The radical Yiddish theater “survived” for little more than a decade and was, in fact, outlived by the rather pompous but energetic productions of Maurice Schwartz, whose Yiddish Art Theater tried to be as apolitical as a B’nai Brith fundraiser.

Messiahs is well worth a perusal; the author writes with vigor and enthusiasm throughout, and his history is accompanied by witty comic strips, photographs and posters. Moreover, we can never have enough books about plays written in a tongue Isaac Bashevis Singer described as “the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.” All the same, Schechter’s hard work could have benefited from a dispassionate overview of these always passionate, but too often wrongheaded, radicals.

Stefan Kanfer is the author of more than a dozen books including Stardust Lost, the Triumph, Tragedy and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America. His latest work, Somebody, a biography of Marlon Brando, will be out in November.