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Moishe Nadir’s Messiah in America at Artef
The
book opens with discussion of Nadir’s play, Messiah in America, and a
speculative discussion of what might have happened if his play, as well as
Yiddish language and culture were more widely known by Americans in the 1930s.
I suggest that Yiddish stage satire was not as far removed from mainstream
American culture as it now appears to be; the language in which it was performed
kept it separate from other political and popular theatre, but it made important
contributions to American culture.
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Moishe
Nadir’s play, Messiah in America, displays messianic impulses toward
social change, and displays satire of traditional religious practices,
tendencies the author shared with other Yiddish theatre artists in the 1930s.
The critique of false messiahs within his play provides a starting point for
discussion of his work and others which caution against unquestioning acceptance
of charismatic leaders and the miracles they promise in time of crisis. The
theatre ensemble Artef (a Yiddish acronym for an alliance of theatrical workers)
staged Nadir’s play in 1933; and Artef’s other endeavors share with Nadir a
commitment to social change, often expressed through satire of excessive wealth
and abusive authority.
photo: Artef Theatre, 106 W. 41st
Street, New York City |
Nadir’s Rivington Street:
The
Lower East Side Arises
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The
discussion of Nadir’s Yiddish stage satire continues with an essay on
Rivington Street, the epic poem which Artef toured as a stage play in New
York from 1932- 34. In the work, Nadir portrays an aged street peddler, a
survivor of Depression era poverty who recalls earlier, more promising times
known to many East European immigrants.
Like others from Europe, he expected
more than unemployment and hunger when he arrived in New York. Through this
play, filled with humorous fragments of song and local history, Nadir practices
what might be called a “politics of memory.” His peddler recalls to the
audience the better times and hope for change they once knew, and the paradise
of local pleasures they might regain again through collective action. No
messiah arrives in this play; but Nadir’s poem ends with imagery of the Lower
East Side public marching to seek social change.
photo: playwright Moshe
Nadir
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Prayer Boxes as Precious as Diamonds:
How
Soviet Yiddish Satire Fared in America
Artef,
introduced earlier as “Nadir’s theatre,” also staged some Soviet satire in
Yiddish; like Nadir’s work, the Soviet play Diamonds portrayed a false
messiah, in this case a diamond smuggler who pretends to be a Soviet government
official who can bring help to a small Yiddish-speaking town. Artef’s strong
interest in this play and others from Moscow suggests that at least culturally,
some Soviet Yiddish writers fared better in New York than in Moscow. The
Soviet government was less favorable toward such satire than were the
“Artefniks” (the artists and their audience in New York).
The
Federal Theatre Project in Yiddish:
We Live and Laugh Twice
Another major source of comic and satiric Yiddish theatre in the 1930s was the
Federal Theatre Project Yiddish unit, to which Nadir contributed along with
other prominent New York theatre artists. The 1936-37 cabaret revue We Live
and Laugh embodied some of the most promising features – and some of the
faults – of the period’s Yiddish political satire. The work has never before
been discussed before at any length, outside of brief newspaper reviews, and in
the context of this study, its achievements become clearer and more
comprehensible. Here too, a messianic concern with social justice surfaces in
some comic sketches responding to Yiddish traditions and politics. Nadir’s own
sketch, about a Yiddish-speaking courtroom judge who makes a mockery of justice,
and another sketch in which Yiddish-speaking gangsters kidnap a Jew on the
street to have a tenth man (the quota needed for a “minion”) at their religious
service, suggest Yiddish language and background do not in themselves guarantee
justice or lawful conduct.
The
Messiah of 1936:
It Can’t Happen Here in Yiddish
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The
Yiddish stage version of the Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can’t Happen Here,
opened under Federal Theatre Project sponsorship in 1936. In his dystopian
novel of the same title, Lewis imagined the emergence of a fascist government in
the United States, at a time when the threat of fascism was increasing in
America and abroad. The Yiddish stage version included a scene in an American
concentration camp which was not shown in the English language, Broadway
version; that Jewish artists would have portrayed a concentration camp on stage
in 1936 remains startling in retrospect, since they anticipated horrors of
fascism and anti-Semitism not fully known until after World War II. Some
Yiddish-speaking immigrants who saw the production fainted on opening night,
because the play reminded them of persecution they had left behind in Europe.
In this production, too, a leader (the President of the United States) turns out
to be a false messiah – a fascist rather than a democratic populist.
photo:
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) |
Pinski’s Prelude to a Golden Age:
The
Tailor Becomes a Storekeeper
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photo:
From a production of Pinski's
"The Tailor Becomes a Storekeeper" |
In
1938, the Federal Theatre Project staged the American premiere of an inventive
satire written by one of Yiddish theatre’s most accomplished authors. David
Pinski welcomed the production, which provided him with more resources than
commercial Yiddish theatres would. In the play, a Yiddish American tailor opens
his own business, and then finds himself broke and out on the street, like many
other Depression era Americans; his illusions about prosperity through private
ownership end, and a new union formed by Jewish tailors welcomes him into its
shop in the last scene. The play was controversial - the only new Yiddish play
denounced when the “un-American” activities of the Federal Theatre Project were
investigated by Congress. (Accusers found the play’s favorable depiction of a
union to be subversive.) Pinski’s play also represents a continuation of the
genre of messianic satire Nadir developed. The tailors’ union appears to offer
at least a few men salvation; but its promises of a golden age for labor are not
wholly fulfilled when the play ends. |
Menasha Skulnik Becomes a
Bridegroom:
Popular Yiddish Theatre Reconsidered
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Another comic play which portrays Depression era union activity, Getzel
Becomes a Bridegroom featured the popular Yiddish actor Menasha
Skulnik. As the title character, Skulnik humorously led a union of kosher
chicken-cutters to victory in a strike against their boss. Skulnik’s
character is more a schlemiel (or fool) than a messiah; but the two
types are not entirely separate, as they both demand acts of faith
and tolerance from the community. Here the schlemiel’s own faith is
placed in a union rather than a deity.
photo: Menasha Skulnik, date unknown |
Prosperity’s Crisis on Stage:
The
Yiddish Puppetry of Maud and Cutler
Zuni Maud |
Yosl Cutler |
The
Yiddish puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler created political satires with
puppets, including a parody of the famous Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. At
one point in their parody of a Jewish exorcism ritual, a rabbi resembling FDR
appears and promises to keep alive a woman named Prosperity by invoking the
NRA. The puppeteers suggest that traditional Jewish religious practices have a
counterpart in the New Deal’s efforts to heal the ailing American economy; and
they are not pleased with either realm’s solutions. From their perspective,
Federal relief programs benefited factory owners more than they advanced
unions. Some characters in the play refuse to cooperate with FDR and other
“wonder rabbis” whose reverence for excessive power and wealth they do not
share.
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Leo
Fuchs, Yiddish Vaudevillian in “Trouble”
A
popular comic actor and singer, Leo Fuchs is not remembered as a cultural
activist or social satirist. But one of his best song and dance numbers,
“Trouble,” directly responds to Depression poverty and unemployment. Fuchs
with his satiric song lyrics and wild dance steps brought some political and
social criticism onto the stage through popular forms of entertainment – in this
case through Yiddish vaudeville.
Yetta Zwerling’s Zetz
Zwerling, often the female partner of Fuchs in his stage and screen comedy,
displayed an antic disposition once attributed to her being possessed by a
“comic dybbuk” - a spirit of humor which possesses her entirely. But the
dybbuk within her is more mischievous than evil, more a comic assertion of her
life as an independent woman in a world not always pleased by such
self-assertion. Her witty use of a language (Yiddish, that is) once derided as
a “jargon good only for women” turns the phrase and Yiddish language itself into
an advantage rather than a deficit for women.
Menachem Mendel’s False Profits:
Sholom Aleichem and the Communists
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Sholom
Aleichem, Yiddish literature’s most celebrated comic author, did not live to
see his plays and stories staged to acclaim in the 1930s. But his interest in
the struggles of poor Jews who survive economic crises and persecution resonated
in the Thirties with the Yiddish theatre artists who revived his work onstage.
Aleichem can be regarded as a collaborator, or initiator of satiric plays which
were as effective as any written by Nadir. In fact, his satires were adapted
for the stage by Nadir’s circle. Some of Aleichem’s references to messianism
took on new and different meanings in the 1930s productions, as a
class-conscious and messianic Marxism influenced interpretations of his work
staged by Artef and the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre.
photo: playwright Sholom
Aleichem
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The
“Anti-Milhome Zamlung” of 1937:
The
Yiddish Anti-War Catalogue Reconsidered
The
messianic longing for a world at peace prompted an interest in some Yiddish
anti-war plays during the 1930s. As nations built arsenals and prepared for new
wars late in the Thirties, the Federal Theatre Project published a catalogue of
Yiddish anti-war plays. The catalogue survives as the artifact of a now
forgotten movement against militarism within Yiddish culture. This chapter also
considers whether the movement might be kept alive through new play productions.
Conclusion: Still Waiting for the Messiah
At the risk of giving away the book’s ending, I
have to say that the messiah does not arrive in any of the plays discussed. But
a messianic impulse to repair the world and make it whole again survives in
texts of the plays considered. The impulse might be renewed and result in new
theatre productions if Yiddish plays such as those discussed would be translated
into English and be seen by a wider audience.
One conclusion offered after surveying plays of Nadir, Cutler, Pinski
and their peers, is that new interest in the period could arise if
English-language audiences had greater access to the memories and emotions of a
comic, socially engaged culture which was interrupted by war at the end of the
Thirties. Yiddish radicalism’s advance, including its satiric movement, was
interrupted, not willingly abandoned, when many of its supporters fell victim to
Europe’s false messiahs: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. (Nadir’s career, with
its Communist affiliations, can be seen as one such casualty.) If new
translations and adaptations of the plays became available, the radicality and
comic imagination of Yiddish culture might now be welcomed by a post-Stalinist,
American generation of English-language theatre goers, for whom the messiah
still has not arrived.
Summary prepared by Joel Schechter
Copyright © 2008 by Joel Schechter
Photographs courtesy of the New York Public Library
The book can be purchased from Temple University Press. To contact
the press online go to:
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/contact.html
For a color copy of the book cover go to:
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~jschech/
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