13

The Tree beside the Theater

For years, my mother complained that Regina Tsunzer had destroyed the business. My mother was actually jealous of the actress. Regina Tsunzer called my father the Caucasus Count because of his trimmed beard and burning black eyes. And if that wasn’t enough, when she spoke to him, she brushed against him like a kitten after her little saucer of milk.

Aside from full-blooded talent, Regina Tsunzer also possessed a full bosom and was generously endowed in her other limbs. It wasn’t surprising that my mother thought the actress was nothing but trouble. She warned my father, “Moyshe, when that woman wiggles her rear end on stage, respectable people turn up their noses.”

Things turned out exactly as my mother had predicted. Not only did Regina Tsunzer show off her assets, she also sang the following song:

              Though you’ve come in such haste,

              And sharpened your knife—’twas a waste.

              The seeds were already well placed,

              And your timing, so badly paced.

Regina Tsunzer also winked lewdly at the audience. The people in the balcony were delighted. They clapped their hands and begged for more. Those in the parterre were, however, not impressed. That’s where Siomke Kagan, the theater critic from the Vilner tog newspaper, sat. He decided the song wasn’t appropriate for Vilna. Immediately after the performance, he went to the editorial offices of the newspaper and wrote a damning review, claiming the performance flirted with debauchery. “The shameless song severs the audience from their social problems. Moreover, the verse about the sharpened knife appeals to people’s basest instincts. The entire performance is a threat to Yiddish culture, which has its organizational center in Vilna.”

If that wasn’t enough, the next morning Siomke went to the Re’al Gymnasium and asked his friend, Mr. Gershteyn, to bring his entire class to the theater and have the children shout in unison, “Down with trashy theater.”

Zeyben the chimney sweep wrote a letter to the editor threatening to bury Siomke in soot. “Regina Tsunzer is a world-class dish. We should kiss every one of her limbs. Because of her, the audience managed to recover after the Yung-teyater Company’s play, Cry Out, China. Who is Siomke anyways to measure the level of people’s instincts?”

Zeyben wasn’t the only one to stand up for Regina Tsunzer, but it made no difference. The actress was driven out of the city. High culture had triumphed. My mother forgot her jealousy. She hoped Siomke would grow a wart on the tip of his pen for ruining the theater season.

The theater had no female lead. My father sat at the edge of the sofa, stroking his beard, rubbing one of his eyebrows, and trying to figure out how to get the theater going again. Unable to think of anything, he went to Velfke’s restaurant on Yiddishe Street, where actors got together and ate on credit.

Kuznietsov, the classical actor who always played a banker dressed in a Shabbes suit, was the first to intercept him. When he saw my father’s forlorn look, Kuznietsov said, “I propose a drink before we try to solve your problems.” The ragtag gang of actors unanimously agreed. They took over one of the tables and told Velfke to bring some spleen and soldier’s kasha from the kitchen.

After the first glass, the actors began suggesting plays to get the box office open again. Khashie the Orphan had already been staged. They couldn’t revive Pauperson and Hungryman because Shtraytman the comic had left Vilna to try his luck in Argentina. Where Are My Children? was certainly a good play, but it needed music and the musicians were refusing to perform until they were paid what they were owed from Regina Tsunzer’s run. Stufel, the conductor and first violin, announced that he would no longer draw his bow simply for the sake of art. Orliek stood up and asked to have his say. He suggested they stage a play with national themes. “Lately there’s been pressure from all sides and no way for people to earn a living. We have to provide people with hope.”

Orliek was a very intelligent actor. He wore glasses, and his word carried weight. People in the theater knew he was a Zionist who dreamt about the state of Israel. Orliek proposed they remount Bar-Kochba. My father agreed immediately. They wouldn’t have to lay out any money. The cardboard mountains were still lying around from the opera, Shulamit. Zakovitsh, the prop manager, would only have to get wooden lances for the Jewish army and they’d be set.

There was one thing bothering my father. Orliek wanted to play the role of Bar-Kochba and he wore glasses. If Siomke Kagan had criticized Regina Tsunzer for a silly little song, what would he do when he saw Bar-Kochba in glasses? He’d heap scorn on the entire theater. But Orliek needed his glasses. Without them, he couldn’t see a centimeter in front of himself. He’d tried removing his glasses during the love scene in The Rose of Istanbul and almost killed himself when he tripped over a set of stairs Mendke the stagehand had left lying around.

My father had no choice. He had to let Orliek play the lead. The theater was dark and deserted in the middle of the season. The actors were wandering around without a groschen and threatening to dissolve the troupe.

Then Bombe, a longtime member of Father’s troupe and a loyal soul, spoke to Father. He complained that he wasn’t feeling well. Dr. Yedvabnik had told him to take a little holiday and get a change of air. He wanted an advance. My father looked at Bombe with sad black eyes and shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. The cashbox was empty, cleaned out to the last groschen. Then my father had an idea. He said to Bombe, “An advance would rob you of your dignity. You know full well that the season has collapsed. But we’ll take care of your need for a change of air in the best possible way. You’ve been performing in The Yeshiva Student and sitting in a tiny synagogue for four acts. Now you’ll perform in the mountains and fields of Bar-Kochba. You’ll get a change of air and recover quickly.”

Acting the imp, my father got Bombe to tell everybody at Velfke’s the story. They split their sides laughing. For years, the actors would tease Bombe, “You want a change of air? There’s a great play with lots of forests.”

They produced Bar-Kochba. Orliek wiped his glasses on his red cape and dispatched the people, two pale extras wearing short tunics and armed with lances, to save Jerusalem. Siomke Kagan didn’t write anything. After the previous catastrophe, he decided to do nothing, but it didn’t help. Orliek couldn’t carry the play. The audiences just didn’t believe he was Bar-Kochba. They didn’t applaud, not even at the Shabbes matinee performances. Children cried in the middle of the play, frightened by the hullabaloo on stage. By Sunday, everyone in the lumber market knew there was no singing or dancing in Bar-Kochba, just talking.

For years, Orliek had played the elegant seducer who got a girl pregnant by the end of the second act and then walked out on her. Now he was running around on stage with sandals on his hairy legs and a helmet decorated with a little broom. It just wasn’t Orliek. The play didn’t work.

My father sat alone in the theater early one morning. He looked at the empty seats and thought about his situation. A permanent bulb burned on the stage, throwing more shadow than light onto the pile of props. A rare smile lost itself between my father’s beard and mustache. Here was his entire fortune, a few pieces of wood and painted canvas. If he’d stayed in the print shop, he’d be a rich man. My mother reminded him of this every time she couldn’t cover expenses. But everything in the print shop, including the machines and the letters, was black, and everything in the theater was colorful, even the poverty.

My father so loved sunny colors. He created the posters himself—he knew the printing trade better than any of the printers. He’d worked for a number of years in fine art print shops in Frankfurt am Main. Every Friday, he’d stood at the type cases and dreamt up announcements from his imagination. The printers had admired his work, but they’d failed to see the point of a poster that didn’t bring in an audience. Now my father had to maintain a home with a wife, six children, and an entire troupe. In the early mornings, sitting alone in the theater, my father had decided more than once to give it all up.

Even my mother grew weary and stopped complaining. She just sighed from time to time and mumbled, “The theater should burn to the ground.” She didn’t notice that the theater burned despite her sighs. It burned in Father’s eyes with a silent flame. But instead of devouring the theater, the flame nurtured his theatrical dreams that could never be realized.

My mother hated the theater. Not so much the theater as the actors. She maintained that the only people who entered the trade were lazy good-for-nothings who didn’t want to wake up early for work like everyone else in the world. She also said acting wasn’t a real trade because anyone could do it.

When my mother began to bear children, my father sold his print shop. She never forgave him. The print shop had produced steady income, but the income from the theater was unreliable.

To ease his mind, my father went to Velfke’s to discuss theater. Avrom Morevski was there, his chair pushed far back from the table to make room for his belly. Tearing pieces from a duck, he hollered hoarsely, “Velfke, I’m hungry.”

Morevski was the richest actor in Vilna. He owned his own building with four floors, but it wasn’t big enough to satisfy his appetite. For that, he would have needed half the city. Even though Morevski and my father were good friends, it was hard for my father to talk to the actor about mounting a show. To satisfy his appetite, Morevski had to earn a lot. He needed the entire box office take. My father tried anyway. Morevski chewed on the thigh of a duck and grumbled, “Moyshe, it’s difficult. I’ve eaten almost the entire fourth floor.” He was talking about his building that he no longer owned because of his debts to the bank.

The other actors ate beets and potatoes and glanced respectfully at Morevski’s duck. They took it for granted that Morevski would eat duck. Aside from his quickly disappearing fortune, Morevski was the eternal star, the jewel of every troupe, the intellectual with stage charisma.

My father announced that he’d worked something out with Morevski. The actors cheered. Kuznietsov immediately proposed a toast, but they were a long way from drinking. First Morevski had to hold forth. He’d earned this right when he played the Miropol tsadik in The Dybbuk and shook up the entire theater world. The troupe sat down at the actor’s table and immediately became a family: a theater family with quarrels over roles, jealousy over applause, and love for one another, just like any family.

Morevski discussed various aspects of the play and the different roles, offering theater doctrine. “Goethe said that the one thing demanded from a genius is the love of truth. Rolland said the objective of art is not the dream, but reality. Stanislavsky said. . . .”

The actors hung on Morevski’s every word, treating his utterances like truth from above. Even Bombe, who’d long believed you couldn’t produce theater without dancing and singing, listened closely. My father sat in a corner with his glasses on the tip of his nose, scribbling his calculations on his cigarette package. He listed his estimates for expenses with tiny numbers and saw that even with full houses, he wouldn’t get out of the red. But did that matter? The main thing was, they’d produce theater. Morevski would mount a play. Siomke Kagan would be stunned. So would the audiences.

Siomke Kagan was indeed stunned. He couldn’t believe his eyes. After the fiasco with Regina Tsunzer, Morevski chose The Duke by Alter Kacyzne. The stage was bustling; the boards shook. The director told Ruden, the carpenter, to build an entire castle. Zakovitsh, the prop manager, turned in a requisition long enough for ten plays. Bombe, the assistant director, chose costumes for the Polish nobility, who had to parade around the stage. Efron, the artist, painted a nobleman’s courtyard in gold and silver.

Morevski played the duke, the capricious landowner dressed in bouffant pants with a nobleman’s mustache stuck to his face. In a hoarse voice he demanded that his lease-holding arrendar, played by Shloyme Kutner, dance the bear dance at the great ball he would host for his prominent guests. The bear dance wasn’t in the script, but Morevski’s directorial ambition pushed him to add it. He didn’t realize what his artistic whim would cost him.

My father combed the city for a bearskin. There wasn’t one among Zakovitsh’s props. Father suggested they revise the script. “Why doesn’t Kutner dance wrapped in a sheet? Everyone will laugh and the run’ll go on forever. Kutner can tap-dance like a real Steppe dancer. It’ll be something to see.”

When Morevski heard about Father’s suggestion, he got so upset, he completely lost his voice. He threatened to cancel the play if they didn’t find a bearskin. My father remembered seeing a brown bearskin with a full head, including bared teeth, in Bunimovitsh the banker’s living room on Pohulanke Street. Father went to the bank and explained what he wanted. Everyone in Vilna had a weakness for theater, even bankers. My father didn’t have to say much. Bunimovitsh immediately gave orders for the bearskin to be taken to the theater.

Shloyme Kutner danced the famous bear dance wrapped in the bearskin. He took heavy steps, imitating a bear in a thick forest. Kutner poured the desperation of the Jewish condition into his dancing. Each of his crude steps expressed a helpless protest against humiliation. Kutner, the eternal clown in all the heartbreaking musical melodramas, took his role so seriously that with each step he took, he moaned bitterly. The sound rang out from the stage to the heavens above.

The audience was stunned. People talked of nothing but the bear dance. It was difficult to silence the ovations after the scene.

Morevski was in a rage. Nothing satisfied him. The actors shot each other knowing glances. Kutner was stealing the show. When Siomke Kagan wrote more in his review about Kutner than about Morevski, the theater was in an uproar. Siomke wrote, “Shloyme Kutner has elevated himself from the swamp of lowbrow theater and created a figure who can serve as a symbol of the small shop owner’s protest against the powerful capitalist system. His bear dance brings a salutation from the state that buried the landowners and now brightens the world with proletarian art.” About Morevski, Siomke wrote that his tycoon mustache impressed no one.

One fine day, Morevski informed my father that he was done with the play. “Kutner’s bear is more like a raccoon. He’s just not used to serious roles.”

My father understood perfectly well that the actor’s words were simply a cover for his jealousy. So he said to his star actor, “Avrom, the play is going so well. It’s sold out every night. They’re writing about the show in all the newspapers.”

Morevski looked at my father with the eyes of a Tatar bandit. “Oh sure, they’re writing about the play.” He wanted to add something, probably to mention Siomke’s review, but he just rasped hoarsely. Annoyed, he went off to Velfke’s to polish off a tasty piece of sirloin in gravy.

Meanwhile Kutner became ill. Each time he finished the bear dance, he went directly into the chilly change room drenched in sweat and ended up catching a cold. They had to interrupt the run. My father asked Morevski to go to Warsaw and find someone in the artists’ union to play the lease-holding arrendar. Getting up from his chair, Morevski said, “No, no one is going anywhere. We’re not getting anybody to replace Kutner. He isn’t, God forbid, dangerously ill. The audience will wait a week for him to recover.”

Morevski could wait. He still had his building. My father had only debts. He couldn’t wait a single day. People were fighting for tickets. Dovidke the Epileptic, the chief scalper, speculated on the tickets for every hit show, selling them at the closed box office in the evenings for a profit. He begged my father, “Mr. Moyshe, I’ll give you money in advance for ten performances!”

Of all times for Morevski to refuse to perform. My father reminded him gently, “Avrom, you told me you can’t act with Kutner, that he ruins entire scenes. Now you’re telling me to wait for him to recover.” This conversation took place at Velfke’s restaurant. Morevski moved away from the table to make room for his belly, wiped his mouth, and thought for a moment. Then he coughed, trying to clear his voice, but it didn’t help—he was still hoarse. He stopped coughing and rasped, “Moyshe, I can’t believe you’ve been involved in the theater for so many years and you still don’t understand that as long as Kutner is on stage and people clap for him, he’s my mortal enemy. But when he’s lying in bed sick, he’s my friend, and more than that, a talented friend.”

My father and Morevski went to visit Kutner on his sickbed.

A fire broke out in Zalkind’s building where the Palace Theater had made its home. Only a few embers remained from the entire theater. Everything had gone up in smoke. The sets burned like kindling. The chairs didn’t fare any better. Only the tacks that Mendke had used to fasten the curtains survived. They lay scattered around the wet stage like worms after a rainfall.

My mother raised her eyes to heaven. “Good riddance to the theater. He’ll have to do real work now.” But before very long my father came home with a schmaltz herring, two Spanish onions, and good news. First, he had the herring killed. Then he announced at the table that he was going to take over Tsinizeli’s circus on Ludvizarske Street. He’d already spoken with Krengel, the owner. My mother peeled the onions and said nothing. My father tried to convince himself that her tears were from the onion. He thought she should be happy. They were setting up another theater. When he finished eating, he filled both sides of a cigarette pack with tiny numbers and passed it to my mother so she could see for herself how successful the business would be. My mother pushed the cigarette pack away and groaned, “Oh, Meyshe, you’re getting into a whole new set of problems.”

My mother only went to Tsinizeli’s circus once, to watch Zishe Breitbart bend an iron bar over his knee. Her face was flushed when she arrived home. This wasn’t because Breitbart had wrapped the iron bar around his arm like a leather tefillin strap, but because of the way he’d rode into the arena in a chariot, flinging his cape from his shoulders. “If Orliek had looked like that in Bar-Kochba,” she told Father, “the box office would also have looked very different.” Breitbart was a well-built man, and the women in Vilna appreciated masculine beauty.

Once, the handsome Ben-Tsion Vitler played a gentleman bandit. He put on his pajamas and went to bed at the beginning of the first act. All on stage. The women in the theater poked each other with their elbows and whispered, “Oh my, look at that body.” My father also wanted to please the women, his best customers, so he had his beard trimmed every two weeks at Bendel the Barber’s.

My mother didn’t understand how they would be able to put on plays in the circus, but my father had a vivid imagination. The circus had gone bankrupt, and the few remaining animals were given to the zoo for a song. My father decided he would dismantle the arena, build a stage, and put out chairs. That’s exactly what happened.

My father hurried to see Ruden, the theater carpenter. Ruden had dragged wooden stakes around behind the closed curtains during intermission for years. He was angry with God for giving him night work, so he pounded his hammer so hard you could hear it throughout the hall. Like my mother, Ruden hated the theater. He’d left the theater countless times and returned each time. He insisted that someone had cast a spell on him. Even though he hated the theater, an evil force kept dragging him back.

When Ruden heard my father’s plans, he grumbled, “Mr. Meyshe, I refuse to climb on the circus rafters. I want to live out the few gloomy years left to me in the theater with my legs intact. For work like that, look for goyim.”

My father did exactly that. He went to Novishviot where the Starovyern, the Old Believers who’d left the Greek Orthodox Church, lived. They were known throughout the region for their carpentry skills. It wasn’t long before bearded Russians sat astride wooden logs, chopping beams for the theater with axes that were as sharp as razors. My father walked from one to the other, telling them how to do their work.

There was a theater again. Elaborate performances with extras and choruses took place on Ludvizarske Street. A live horse even appeared on the stage once. Rudolf Zoslovski insisted that he come on stage with a horse and wagon, exactly as Sholem Aleichem wrote in Tevye the Dairyman. My father liked the idea, so he went to the lumber market and brought back a horse and wagon. All evening the potato farmer who owned the team of horses sat behind the curtains bent over, waiting for Tevye to have it out with God and leave the stage.

On Saturday evenings, the balcony almost caved in from the crush of people. One woman took the play so much to heart that she fainted when our sister Dveyrke and another girl sang, “We will remember you” after their father was seized for forty years of hard labor. The housewives from Kalvareyske Street left the theater with swollen red eyes, cursing the evil seducer.

The entire city knew the theater. Everyone attended the performances—from young to old, from poor to rich, from the upper crust to the underworld. Sashke the Count had his regular seat for every premiere. He behaved himself in the theater and didn’t try to enrich himself from anyone else’s wallet.

My father only had a problem with Sashke once. A Jew from America complained to my father that someone had stolen his passport with a hundred dollars in it during the performance. He demanded compensation. My father immediately went to see Sashke, ostensibly to ask for advice. Sashke the Count straightened his necktie and returned the passport with great dignity. Then he said, “Mr. Meyshe, here’s the passport. I hope that fool appreciates the city of Vilna and particularly, this theater. And I hope you realize the American is a swindler. He’d steal the whites from your eyes. He bamboozled you. There was only twenty dollars in his passport, not a hundred. You should rake him over the coals for that lie.”

What was a Jew with a beard and a Gemara hoping to find in the theater? What dream did he hope to fulfill among the paper flowers and the green leaves cut from sack linen? A dream of riches? Definitely not. A magnificent performance that would turn the world upside down? He didn’t have the money for that. Then what? The simple truth is that my father loved the theater. He loved the constant talk; the anticipation; the actors, that gang of jokers; the colorful world that shimmered with lights of every color.

Once my mother went to the theater courtyard and saw some goyim putting up a fence around the bare earth in front of the foyer door. When she asked what they were doing, they explained that my father had hired them to create a garden. My mother yelled at him, “You thief! You’re throwing away even more money.”

My father calmly explained that the garden would draw visitors to the theater, especially during the summer, the dead season. He explained his plans. He wanted bushes around the edge of the garden with a tree in the middle. My mother looked at him with glassy eyes, as though he’d just shown up from another planet. She asked him worriedly, “Meyshe, are you all right? For years you’ve run around between trees made from veneer. Have you suddenly remembered that a tree is something you plant, not something you bang together from boards?”

My father sighed, “Whatever I do, it’s never right. You’re always yelling that I should get involved with real work. Now I have.”

The tree bore shiny brown chestnuts. The courtyard children collected them in their little caps and boiled them for ink. Sitting under the tree, the actors bargained with each other for cigarettes that they used as collateral for their card games. My father walked through the garden, searching between the bushes for inspiration for the next hit to keep the theater going.

The theater disappeared into eternity along with my father.

The tree remained.