Eddy Portnoy
The Yiddish Modicut Puppet Theatre—the creation of immigrant artist–cartoonists Zuni Maud (1891–1956) and Yosl Cutler (1896–1935)—was one of several hand–puppet theaters that were part of New York’s theater scene of the 1920s and early 1930s. “Modicut” (a variation on the combination of “Maud” and “Cutler”) enjoyed great success in Yiddish–speaking communities in the United States and Europe. It appealed both to the general public and to intellectuals, merging Yiddish with avant–garde art and popular culture to produce humor as well as political and cultural criticism.
Modicut was established by chance. After creating puppets for a Yiddish Art Theatre production, Maud and Cutler began bringing their puppets to the cafés and social gatherings they frequented. Many in the Yiddish literary community loved the skits they put on and suggested they create a real Yiddish puppet theater. Soon thereafter, in December of 1925, advertisements began to appear in New York’s four Yiddish dailies announcing the opening of a Yiddish puppet theater on 12th Street near Second Avenue.
Modicut’s first venue was a children’s clothing factory. The space was furnished with a small stage, simple wooden benches, and surreal–looking faces painted on the gas meters; Maud and Cutler left the cutting tables and sewing machines around for effect, an indication that theirs was to be a proletarian–oriented theater. During their first few seasons, they played nine shows every week to packed houses. The left–wing periodical Theatre Arts Monthly took notice, and Modicut was featured in a spread on puppetry in New York City.
Maud and Cutler took immense care in fabricating their puppets. Many critics commented on how human the puppets seemed to be and, despite their exaggerated and sometimes grotesque features, how authentically Jewish they looked, from the silk kaftonim and taleysim (prayer robes and shawls) of traditional Jews to the clothes worn by working–class Jews on the Lower East Side. One of their unique innovations was the ability to perform physical gesticulations—for example, the rotating thumb of a traditional rabbi, a typical gesture made by Jews when discussing the Talmud. Maud and Cutler would sometimes spend months working on a particular aspect, trying to perfect a wrinkled brow, a smile, or a raised eyebrow. These technical innovations were usually executed by strings attached to the back of a puppet, which, when pulled, would cause the puppet’s eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth to move.
Sketches by Zuni Maud, c. 1930.
In addition to their creation of puppets and plays, both Maud and Cutler produced paintings, drawings, sculpture, and poems. Maud also contributed articles and cartoons to publications like the Jewish Daily Forward and the Freiheit, and illustrated a number of children’s books.
Unfortunately, very few Modicut playtexts survive, though one can get some idea of them from excerpts, programs, and press reports. The first plays fused satire, Jewish tradition, and modern life and culture to create humorous, mostly folksy comedies. For example, Akhashveyresh, a full–length Purim shpil (play) written by Maud, is a traditional telling of the story with parallels to medieval Purim plays—written almost entirely in rhyming couplets with a loyfer (master of ceremonies) introducing the characters and offering commentary. The text follows the basic story of Purim, in which the evil Haman schemes to convince the Persian King to destroy the Jewish community. The plot is foiled by Mordecai and his niece Esther, and Haman is finally hanged on his own gallows. Since both Maud and Cutler were left–wing secularists, the fact that they chose to parody a traditional Purim play reveals an irony: in rejecting tradition, they relied upon it.
There are a number of creative innovations in Akhashveyresh. Emphasis is placed on the Persian king’s drunkenness, and his consumption of shlivovitz in particular. In a satire of the Yiddish theater, the king’s two servants speak daytshmerish, a Germanized form of Yiddish often used in the popular Yiddish theater to indicate high–level language. And in order to associate the hero of the story, Mordecai, with common, workaday Jews, Maud refers to him as “Motl,” a Yiddish diminutive of Mordkhe. The freewheeling comedy and satire in the story emerge in the unusual ways in which Maud and Cutler approached their traditional theme. The play includes typical scenes from the Lower East Side, such as the sudden appearance of an Italian pushcart peddler selling everything from eyeglasses and galoshes to bananas. Other unlikely elements in this Purim play include an “African Dance,” in which two black hand puppets dance to the “St. Louis Blues.”
One of Modicut’s best–known pieces is a parody of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, satirizing its numerous productions then being performed in English and Yiddish on the New York stage. In Maud’s version, Leah and her dybbuk (the soul of Khonen, the boy who pined after her, which has inhabited her body) live on Delancey Street, and various theater troupes—including the Yiddish Art Theatre, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Vilna Troupe (all of which were performing the play that season)—arrive and unsuccessfully attempt to drive it out. After these efforts, the “rabbis,” or, in this case, the directors of each respective theater group, decide to summon Khonen’s late father, the mes toer (immaculate corpse), in a final attempt to exorcise Khonen from Leah. But the father doesn’t understand his son’s English and is upset that Khonen has fallen in with “goyim” (a joking reference to the Neighborhood Playhouse’s English–language version of the play). This was Maud and Cutler’s most brazen satire on popular Yiddish culture to date and the first unambiguous indication that theirs was becoming a theater that would accurately satirize Yiddish popular culture. For a number of critics and theatergoers who had tired of the many productions of The Dybbuk that season, Modicut’s parody was a welcome comic relief.
Mural in the dining hall of Maud’s Zumeray Hotel in North Branch, New York, painted by Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, c. 1928.
Maud and Cutler spent their summers at The Zumeray, a summer resort in the Catskills run by Maud’s brother and sister–in law. In addition to practicing and putting on regular performances with Cutler, Maud served as the resort’s tummler, or M.C. The two artists also painted the dining hall with giant surrealist murals, which fit with the resort’s liberal atmosphere.
Modicut puppets in a scene from The Dybbuk, 1926.
All Modicut plays were accompanied by music, much of it composed by Mikhl Gelbart and Moyshe Rappaport. In addition, they often included parodies of popular Yiddish theater songs, such as Cutler’s Di blekherne kale (The Tin Bride), an adaptation of the song “Yome, Yome” (“Bennie, Bennie”). Maud’s play Biznes (Business) contained a parody of the Yiddish theater song “Ikh bin a border bay mayn vayb” (“I’m a Boarder at My Wife’s”) called “Ikh bin bay mir der boss in shop” (“I’m the Boss of My Own Shop”). Maud and Cutler wrote a number of other original plays that have not survived, including Der laytisher mentsh (The Respectable Man), Shleyme mit der beheyme (Shleyme with the Beast), Farn shpil un nokhn shpil (Before the Play and after the Play), and Der betler (The Beggar).
In 1928, Maud and Cutler took their show on the road and played in dozens of cities across America. From the fall of 1929 through the spring of 1930, they toured a number of countries in Western Europe, followed by a large tour of Poland, where they were a massive hit. Poland’s Jewish audiences were amazed that an American Yiddish production could be so rich in folklore and tradition and at the same time be so modern. Modicut played 200 sold–out shows at the Warsaw Literary Union and 75 sold–out performances in Vilna before going on a provincial tour.
The pair returned to an America in the throes of economic disaster. Their subsequent shows reflected this crisis, and they crafted puppet caricatures of numerous politicians, who they mocked bitterly. In an updated version of their Dybbuk parody, the puppet rabbis were modeled on Abraham Cahan, the domineering editor of the Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, and another on President Herbert Hoover, whose head was represented as a rotten apple. In yet another incarnation of the show, Leah was portrayed as Mae West and one of the rabbis was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who chanted “WPA, NRA, CCC,” (Works Progress Administration, National Recovery Association, and Civilian Conservation Corps) while waving the NRA eagle over Leah in order to exorcize the dybbuk. One scene that remained a mainstay of the parody depicted rabbis attempting to yank the dybbuk out from under Leah, lined up with their hands around each other’s waists and pulling to the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” Among the items they extracted, instead of the concealed dybbuk, was a large herring.
Scrapbook with photograph of Modicut performance, c. 1930.
The photo shows puppets in Maud and Cutler’s play Tshing Tang Po, in which characters had Chinese–Jewish hybrid names such as Ting–ling–schmul and Ling–ting–scmultshik.
Yosl Cutler, Bessie Maud, and Zuni Maud during their tour of the USSR, 1931–32.
Two Hasidic puppets used in a skit by puppeteer Nat Norbert, c. 1955.
REMINISCENCE
DAVID BUCHHOLZ
on his father
NAT NORBERT
My dad, Nat Norbert (professional name of Norbert Buchholz), was the last of the “old–country” Yiddish–speaking puppeteers. After a 70–year career, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 102! At 99, he appeared on “Antiques Roadshow” (a long–running television program featuring local owners of antiques who bring in items to be appraised by experts) with his celebrity puppets. As one of their producers noted, in the entire history of the show, Dad was “the only antique to present his own antiques.” On his 100th birthday, an interviewer asked him the secret of his longevity, to which he replied, “The puppets and the children, they kept me young.” And they did.
My father came to America from Austria–Poland as a 17–year–old “greenhorn,” barely able to speak English. He found his calling watching his first puppet show at the Prater in Vienna and learned the art of puppetry under the WPA (Works Progress Administration), President Roosevelt’s massive Depression–era jobs program.
He learned how to make, manipulate, and costume hand puppets including Punch and Judy, swazzel and all! He decided that he wanted to make a Yiddish puppet and was introduced to Zuni Maud who, with his partner Yosl Cutler, had created the famous Modicut Yiddish puppet theatre. My dad asked Zuni to help him make a Yiddish puppet, and Zuni was from then on my father’s mentor and dearest friend. When Zuni passed away, his Modicut puppets were given to my dad by the Maud family.
My dad married my mom, Sylvia Gold, in 1940. He began his professional career as a puppeteer in 1941, doing a variety show for soldiers at Fort Jay on Governor’s Island. He also did magic and puppet shows for children, as well as some political satires.
It was in the late 1940s that he started playing the hotels and bungalow colonies in the Catskills during the summer and the hotels of Miami Beach in the winter. It took some time before hotel owners got used to the idea that a variety show with puppets was “real” entertainment for adults.
People loved his winning personality, charming skits, and appealing puppets. He was soon much in demand. Hotels would book him again and again. He was sometimes the headliner; other times he was the opening act for such performers as Joan Rivers, Molly Picon, and Frank Sinatra Jr. He referred to himself as “The Best of the Cheaper Acts.”
He performed at first only in Yiddish, by the late 1950s in “Yinglish,” and by the mid–1960s almost entirely in English. He wrote his own scripts, and his shows were always packed with yiddishkayt, which could be risqué and filled with double entendre. His Yiddish routines included “A Pushcart Peddler on Orchard Street,” “A Grocery Store on Delancey Street,” “A Hotelkeeper in the Mountains,” and “A Psychiatrist,” couch and all. Of all his Yiddish routines, the one that was a personal favorite of mine was his “Two Rabbis.” The two rabbis meet on the street. The first says to the second, “I hear that during the year you’re a shames at a shul and during the holidays a Santa Claus at Macy’s. So what’s going on?” The second rabbi replies, “From one god you can’t make a living.”
It wasn’t easy growing up the son of a puppeteer. I remember my mother having to hold my hand when I went to the bathroom because I was afraid of the little people hanging from hooks.
I was always fascinated watching my dad create the puppets. He first sculpted them in clay, then cast them in plaster of Paris, lined the molds with plastic wood, and finally sanded, painted, animated, and costumed them. With just an occasional touch–up with paint, my dad used some of the children’s puppets he had fashioned in the 1940s for the next 70 years!
At first, he worked alone and would schlep everything up to the “mountains” by himself. He would strap his stage on the top of our station wagon and load the inside with suitcases full of puppets, a dolly, curtain, props, and scenery. He carefully secured everything in anticipation of having to drive up the infamous “Wurtsboro Hill,” which he, like many others of his generation, always went up backwards. My mom became his partner at shows but was extremely shy and always worked behind the scenes. She prepared magic tricks and props, synchronized music for skits, made puppet clothes, designed publicity mailers, managed bookings, collected the fees, and ran the family.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my dad introduced satirical celebrity puppets to his shows (in English) to attract a broader audience (teens, younger adults, and non–Jews). Among the characters were Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Durante, and Liberace. A favorite photograph of his was of the “real” Jerry Lewis conversing with his Jerry Lewis puppet.
He also created innovative puppets, like the “Apache Dancer” who did a tango–like dance while the man lit and smoked a cigarette, and “Spinning Plates,” where a hobo (Emmet Kelly) would spin six plates at one time on a dark stage illuminated by a giant strobe light as the music played faster and faster.
Lola the Stripper was my dad’s last puppet, and probably his favorite. She could hold her arms over her head and do the stripper’s “bump and grind” with her hips to the music of David Rose’s “The Stripper.” As Lola danced, my mom would strip off her clothing. Naked, in a flickering strobe light, her bosoms would light up. This went over really well at midnight shows, especially at the bungalow colonies!
It was a wonderful odyssey and adventure for me to have Nat Norbert, puppeteer, and Norbert Buchholz, mensch, as my father. He loved what he did—and it showed. A 1960s fan letter says it all: “Children of all ages were mystified by your magic and delighted by your puppets. I think the key is that you seem to enjoy your work as much as the audience does. That is what makes Norbert’s Puppets so special.” That’s his legacy.
DAVID BUCHHOLZ, BLOOD BANK SUPERVISOR, RETIRED, NEW YORK
It is unclear why, but Maud and Cutler parted ways in 1933. Critics considered it a tragedy, saying that they would never achieve apart what they had accomplished together. In 1935, Cutler was killed by a drunk driver in Iowa on his way to California.
The Modicut Puppet Theatre represents a moment when Yiddish culture was at its peak and serves as an example of what was possible within the framework of a greater Yiddish culture. The medium of puppetry was important in this respect because it allowed for a flexibility of form that human actors could not offer. In its simple, humorous, and often biting manner, Modicut provided an expression of the clash and consequent synthesis between tradition and modernity.
Modicut puppets, 1926–32.
From left: a Jew; a dybbuk; a “Boss.”
