New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway

Maurice Schwartz and the Yiddish Art Theater Movement

Edna Nahshon

Any writing about the Yiddish art theatre movement is about Maurice Schwartz, because Yiddish art theatre is Maurice Schwartz and Maurice Schwartz is Yiddish art theatre.1

This statement by Maurice Schwartz, made near the end of his storied career, may seem self–aggrandizing, but it is entirely correct, for the identity of the Yiddish Art Theatre, New York’s most prestigious and longest–lasting Jewish theatrical enterprise (1918 to the mid–1950s) was completely enmeshed with that of Maurice Schwartz, its powerhouse founder, producer, director, and star.

Schwartz (1888/90–1960) was the oldest of six children born into a traditionally religious family in the small Ukrainian town of Sudilkov. Due to a mishap with his ticket during his family’s immigration to America, young Schwartz was stranded in London for two years, finally reuniting with his family in New York in 1901. He began his theatrical career in 1905 at an amateur dramatic club in Brooklyn and worked his way up in Yiddish theaters in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In 1912, he returned to New York at the invitation of David Kessler, a major actor–manager who was starting a new company.

Schwartz, an ambitious young man, had little formal education and learned about the theater from personal experience. He was also a voracious reader endowed with intellectual curiosity and a great interest in new theatrical trends. In 1918, as Kessler’s company was troubled by family and business feuds, the go–getting Schwartz joined forces with Max Wilner, Kessler’s entrepreneurial manager and son–in–law. Schwartz and Wilner leased the Irving Place Theatre on East 15^th Street, formerly a German house, and organized a group of dedicated young actors (among them Celia Adler, Jacob Ben–Ami, Berta Gersten, and Ludwig Satz), proclaiming a commitment to quality repertoire and ensemble acting. The name given to the new enterprise—the Yiddish Art Theatre—was inspired by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s much–admired Moscow Art Theatre.

Cast of the Yiddish Art Theatre production of The Brothers Ashkenazi with poster in the background.

Photomontage by Ivan Busatt, 1937.

Jacob Ben–Ami, Maurice Schwartz, and Berta Gersten, c. 1930.

The idea of an art theater in Yiddish derived largely from Eastern Europe, where it was promoted by Yiddish intellectuals, notably the great writer Y.L. Peretz. In 1908, playwright Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948) founded the Hirschbein Troupe in Odessa, the first Yiddish company devoted to production of literary Yiddish and world drama done in the modern style. This troupe lasted two years. When art theater devotees, including Hirschbein, immigrated to America, they joined forces with the Yiddish intelligentsia and actively propagandized for the creation of an art theater in their new homeland. They gained support from the press, from dramatic amateur clubs, and from a base of more sophisticated post–1905 immigrants, many of whom had become familiar with the new artistic trends of the Russian stage, always regarded by the Yiddish community’s pundits as the epitome of high culture. The idea of an art theater as an outpost of culture was encouraged by various sectors in the immigrant community, who hoped it would counter what they considered the debasing effect of the shund (trash) offerings that catered to a nostalgic and entertainment–craving popular palate.

In conjunction with the opening of the Yiddish Art Theatre, Schwartz, a master of public relations, published impressive declarations in the Yiddish dailies. He criticized the practices of the commercial Yiddish stage and offered a vision of a small theater where actors could devote themselves to their art, not to stardom, with a diverse, high–quality repertoire produced according to the highest artistic standards. Schwartz did not present a clear artistic vision beyond this pledge, however, and it seems that he was still meandering, seeking concrete artistic ground. The new venture was lauded by the intellectual elite, yet it had no external funding, which meant that Schwartz also had to take into account Wilner’s box–office concerns. All this may explain why the Yiddish Art Theatre, which opened on August 30, 1918, with Man and His Shadow, by the popular Zalmen Libin, failed initially to satisfy the high expectations of audiences and critics. Libin’s play was followed by a frantic stream of new productions, none of them providing the desired artistic breakthrough.2 This finally happened when actor Jacob Ben–Ami convinced Schwartz to let him stage Hirschbein’s Farvorfn Vinkel (A Forsaken Nook), a drama that was the very antithesis of the usual Yiddish fare. The budget was minimal, and the opening was scheduled for a Wednesday, a “dead night” in the theater. The modest production premiered on October 16, 1918. It was a resounding success, and the auditorium was filled with an excited feeling that the art theater had found its true voice.

Not all went well in Schwartz’s theater, however. He failed to sustain the egalitarian collectivity he had promised his actors. Some of the best players, headed by Jacob Ben–Ami (1890–1977), left the company in February of 1919 and opened Dos Naye Yidisher Teater (the New Yiddish Theater), known in English as the Jewish Art Theatre, at the Garden Theatre on 27^th Street, part of the old Madison Square Garden.³ They enlisted as artistic director the German–Jewish actor–director Emanuel Reicher (1849–1924), renowned for his roles in works by Henrik Ibsen and Gerhardt Hauptmann. A Galician Jew, Reicher began his career in Yiddish theaters in Galicia and Hungary, and came to Berlin in the 1880s, where he became a leading actor at the Freie Bühne, the Deutsches Theater (under Otto Brahm), and Max Reinhardt’s Das Kleines Theater. He traveled to New York in 1915, performing in German and trying his hand at English–language productions. Reicher joined the young Jewish Art Theatre after the failure of his own venture—the “People’s Theatre”—but stayed with the Yiddish troupe for less than a season, departing when he was invited to direct at the prestigious Theatre Guild.⁴ His impact was nonetheless significant. He provided actors with an experienced directorial hand that allowed them to flourish. The results were spectacular. Carl Van Vechten wrote that Hirschbein’s The Idle Inn, staged as the troupe’s first offering, was the finest theatrical production he had ever seen.⁵ Rebecca Drucker, writing for Theatre Magazine, praised the company’s virtues for ensemble acting and a kind of directing that was subtler and finer than any yet seen in New York. Like many others, she also extolled the acting of Jacob Ben–Ami. Only six years in America, Ben–Ami gained attention as an actor of extraordinary caliber. Drucker rhapsodized, “[he] has fire and imagination, an amazing mimetic power, a dynamic personality…. He has the magnetic center of the organization by virtue of a rare creative power.”⁶ Before long, Ben–Ami was offered a contract to appear on the English–language stage, and he eagerly accepted it. With Ben–Ami gone, the Jewish Art Theatre did not survive for long, and the Irving Place Theatre was taken over by Schwartz, serving as his company’s home until 1926. Over the next four decades, Jacob Ben–Ami would divide his career between English–and Yiddish–speaking stages, and he was admired on both. Over the years, he tried a couple of times to create his own company in Yiddish, but these turned out to be short–lived endeavors. A great and sensitive actor, he was not cut out for the grueling work of leading an art theater in a predominantly commercial environment.⁷

Jacob Ben–Ami and Celia Adler in the Jewish Art Theatre’s production of The Idle Inn by Peretz Hirschbein, 1919.

Poster for Shop by H. Leivick presented at the Irving Place Jewish Art Theatre, 1926.

Shop is situated in New York on the eve of a garment workers’ strike. One of its major themes is the conflict between old world socialist idealism and the realities of capitalist America.

Two new art theaters opened in the 1920s in the Bronx—Unser Teater (Our Theatre) led by playwrights Peretz Hirschbein, H. Leivick, and David Pinski was followed after its demise by the Schildkraut Theatre, led by actor Rudolph Schildkraut. Neither managed to survive for more than a season or two. It is indeed against the background of such repeated efforts that one comes to appreciate the Yiddish Art Theatre’s exceptional longevity, a testment to Schwartz’s stamina and unmatched skill in singlehandedly navigating the fine line between quality drama and economic reality and sustaining for several decades a leading and greatly respected cultural institution.

Scene from a Yiddish Art Theatre production of The Gardener’s Dog by Lope de Vega, 1927.

The play was directed by Boris Glagolin, an émigré Russian, and designed by Serge (Sergei) Soudeikin, noted Russian artist.

The art theater movement advocated not only changes in acting and repertoire but also a revamping of the visual aspect of the stage. The best representative of the new modernistic stagecraft was Russian–born and–trained set designer Boris Aronson (1898–1980), who after his arrival in New York in 1923, became associated with all the Yiddish art theatrical enterprises in the city. His first stage work was done for Unser Teater where he broke new ground by introducing constructivist–style sets and costumes in his designs for S. Ansky’s Day and Night (1924) and Pinski’s The Final Balance (1925). When Unser Teater folded after just three productions, Aronson then worked with the Schildkraut Theatre, designing Osip Dymow’s Bronx Express (1925), the theater’s biggest success. Aronson also worked for the communist–affiliated Artef, designing its mass pageant Red, Yellow, and Black (Madison Square Garden, 1928), the dance Lag Boimer (1929), and S. Godiner’s futuristic Jim Kooperkop (1930), which featured as its hero a robot created by American capitalism. Aronson’s Kooperkop set garnered much praise for capturing the soul and rhythm of industry, and that of the modern city—themes that had fascinated the Russian avant–garde and would be further developed in Aronson’s later work.

In 1926, Aronson began his association with Maurice Schwartz, and over the next four years he designed nine productions for the Yiddish Art Theatre. The most extraordinary was The Tenth Commandment, which marked the opening of Schwartz’s brand new Yiddish Art Theatre on Second Avenue. A highly stylized adaptation of Abraham Goldfaden’s operetta, this production was the most lavish modernistic extravaganza ever attempted on the American Yiddish stage. Some 70 actors—in addition to the four leads played by Schwartz, Joseph Buloff, Celia Adler, and Berta Gersten—participated. The governing concept was the creation of a stage carnival, free of realistic constraints. Aronson designed a constructivist stage with planes and ladders that generated a sense of enormous dynamism. “Hell” was a metal construction in the shape of a human skull, with red–illuminated workers climbing up and down ladders while engaged in Sisyphean tasks and consumed by the huge cogwheels of industry. “Heaven” looked like a drawing from a children’s picture book and included a horseshoe–shaped theater created on stage. A private house was done in the cubist style, with walls and a ceiling that opened like a house of cards, while another looked like a modernistic deconstruction of a Bavarian hunting lodge. Two hundred and fifty colorful costumes and masks combined sculptural and grotesque elements: some faces had three eyes, two noses, or candles in lieu of a beard, and others looked like a tobacco box or a bunch of radishes. Critics devoted to the old realistic school balked; others hailed the production as the Yiddish theater’s grand entrance into modernity. However, the production did not appeal to the general public and was soon replaced by a conventional play, Semyon Yushkevich's Mendele Spivack.

Poster for Peretz Hirschbein's Grine felder (Green Fields) at the Jewish Art Theatre, c. 1919.

Poster for Tog un nakht (Day and Night) by S. Ansky, produced at Unser Teater, December 9, 1924.

Handbill for an Unser Teater production of The Final Balance by David Pinski. 1925.

The English–language synopsis indicated a significant number of non–native Yiddish speakers.

It is a daunting task to survey in detail the Yiddish Art Theatre’s five–decade career and its vast repertoire of plays, written by every major Yiddish and European playwright: Goldfaden, Gordin, Sholem Aleichem, Dymov, Pinski, Kobrin, Leivick, and Asch, as well as Lope de Vega, Shaw, Ibsen, Schiller, Tolstoy, Gorky, Molière, de Maupassant, Chekhov, and many others. Initially, it was a repertoire that, in addition to Yiddish works, demonstrated a strong European orientation but included practically no translations of American plays. In the 1930s, however, the repertoire became almost entirely Jewish in content and devoted primarily to current communal concerns, historical personalities and events, and depictions of the Old World, with quite a few plays adapted by Schwartz from popular novels. The reasons for this shift were primarily sociological: with the cessation of mass immigration, the Yiddish–speaking world was becoming bicultural and upwardly mobile, and younger American Jews increasingly frequented the English–language stage and movie theaters. When they went to the Yiddish theater, they were not looking for a Shaw play in translation but for authentically Jewish works that they could not see on Broadway. Moreover, the audience was getting older and wanted a theater of ethnic communion that catered to their specifically Jewish interests. This increased ethnocentrism paralleled a steady decline in the number of Yiddish theatergoers, which finally led to the theater’s demise.

Schwartz’s greatest victory came in 1932. After five years of drifting from pillar to post, including an unsuccessful English–language interlude on Broadway, the filming of Uncle Moses, various guest appearances, and an overseas tour, Schwartz returned to his theater on 12^th Street and Second Avenue, and produced, directed, and starred in his greatest success, Yoshe Kalb, a dramatization of a novel of the same name by I.J. Singer. Opening on October 1, 1932, the play chronicled the odyssey of Nachum, a delicate youth who is forced into a loveless marriage with the homely young daughter of a lustful Hasidic rabbi, played by Schwartz. The rabbi must marry off his daughter before he can take his fourth wife, a sexy and wild teenager, but his young wife, in turn, falls for the son–in–law, Nachum, and seduces him into a sexual encounter. The distraught Nachum leaves home, a tormented soul, to roam the earth. He barely responds to those around him and, refusing to divulge his identity (he lives under the assumed name Yoshe), is taken for an idiot by an ignorant mob that deridingly call him “Yoshe calf.” Yoshe Kalb presented a semi–pagan Hasidic world filled with superstition, ignorance, sexual appetites, greed, and petty fights over succession.

Maurice Schwartz (left), in costume after a performance of Yoshe Kalb, with Albert Einstein, 1934.

Einstein was greatly impressed with the production.

Maurice Schwartz (left) and Charlie Chaplin, c. 1932.

Jim Kooperkop by S. Godiner at the Artef Theatre, 1930.

Directed by Benno Schneider, set design by Boris Aronson, and music by Lahn Adohmyan.

Postcards with etchings by Saul Ruskin of characters from the stage production of Yoshe Kalb, 1932.

Clockwise from top right: Saraleh (Judith Abarbanel) and Gitele (Anna Appel); The Rabbi of Dinaburg (Anatole Winogradoff); Melech (Maurice Schwartz) and Zivye (Helen Zelinska); The Judge (Gustav Shacht), Mikhele (Noah Nachbush), The Redheaded Beggar (Pinchas Sherman), and the Rabbi of Dinaburg; Nachumtche (Lazar Freed). Top left: The Wedding at the Cemetery scene, photograph by M. Goldberg.

Vitrine with sculpted character heads from the Yiddish Art Theatre’s production of Yoshe Kalb, sculpted by Morris Strassberg, c. 1933.

Strassberg played the role of the Rabbi of Lizhan in Yoshe Kalb.

The production was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times was fascinated by its unabashed theatricality. He reported that it offered a genuine story and that the acting was done in bold strokes and primary colors. “Mr. Schwartz,” he wrote, “being an actor in the theatrical tradition, knows how to stage a show and enliven the theatre.”8 One of the important observations of non–Yiddish critics was the profound connection between stage and audience, which showed, according to Burns Mantle, “that an audience of one people is a vast help in the theater,” an unattainable goal on the English–language stage.

The phenomenal success of Yoshe Kalb led to tours across America and overseas. The Yiddish Art Theatre fully resumed its activities in New York only at the beginning of the 1936–37 theater season, when Schwartz had another major hit with the dramatized version of I.J. Singer’s Brothers Ashkenazi. In 1943, marking the silver jubilee of his theater, Schwartz produced The Family Carnovsky, yet another dramatization of an I.J. Singer novel, the first major play about Jewish life under Hitler. At this point it became clear that, despite artistic renown and communal valorization, the Yiddish Art Theatre was struggling to survive as the number of Yiddish speakers was decreasing. In the program of the play, Schwartz lamented that “The masses have become linguistically assimilated…estranged from our Yiddish language, our literature, and our theatre.” It was a process that would intensify after the war.

In 1947, Schwartz toured the DP (displaced persons) camps in Europe and adopted two sibling child survivors. He was approaching the age of 60 and had been devastated by the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. With Yiddish audiences declining at home and the promise of the establishment of a new Jewish state, he must have been taking stock of his life, pondering the future and his legacy. He made his last grand stand with the production of Shylock and His Daughter, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice from an entirely Jewish perspective, based on the Hebrew novel by Ari Ibn–Zahav. It was a lavish production, with Schwartz playing a proud Shylock, a Jewish banker who assists his brethren to escape the Inquisition. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Shylock’s daughter commits suicide, regretting her betrayal of her father and community and her choice to assimilate and convert to Christianity. The importance Schwartz attached to this project was highlighted by his decision to publish the English translation in book form. In an introductory essay that appeared in the playbill, the Holocaust reference was made clear: