“The entire cultural renaissance of Central Europe was made possible,” it has been said, “by the emancipation and urbanization of Central European Jewry.”1 Whether there was anything specially Jewish about the culture they produced is another matter. The Judaic ingredients in early-twentieth-century European culture cannot be isolated like chemical elements. That does not mean, however, that they were not there at all. We cannot speak of a Jewish collective imagination, let alone of a Jewish mind. Yet there were characteristic milieux, mentalities, relationships, obsessions, hypocrisies, delusions, and preoccupations that were exhibited not only on the printed page but in the visual, plastic, and performative arts, particularly on the stage, the cinema screen, the concert platform, and the painted canvas.
“The school of fame that the Jewish youth of Vienna attended,” according to Hannah Arendt, “was the theater.”2 As individuals rather than a collectivity, Jews played a vital part in the theater in much of central and eastern Europe.
Max Reinhardt, the presiding genius of European theater in the early twentieth century, born to orthodox Jewish parents in Vienna, made his name as director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In the 1920s and 1930s he directed plays and opera in Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg, where he revived the annual festival of music and drama, and in Hollywood. His range extended from small, intimate studio performances to giant spectacles, such as his production of Büchner’s Danton’s Death, presented in an arena that seated five thousand spectators. Reinhardt was one of the hundreds of playwrights, directors, actors, cabaret artists, and critics of Jewish origin who transformed the European stage, especially in the German-speaking Kulturraum, in these years.
In one other essential respect, too, the theater in these lands was disproportionately Jewish: the audience. In Poland, it was said that without the Jewish audience the theater “could save itself the expense of turning on the lights.”3 Anti-Semites accused Jews of dominating and perverting the theater of central and eastern European nations to their own purposes. The extent to which Jewish components can be detected in German, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian drama in these years has been much debated. But of the Jewishness of one branch of the theater, which, through various subterranean connections, infused many of these others, there can be no doubt.
From its origins in the festive purimspiel and for long after the establishment of the first professional Yiddish theater at Jassy, in Romania, in 1876, Yiddish drama flourished in a direct relationship with its popular audience, eschewing any pretension to artistic or literary sophistication. But the standard repertoire, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, included plays with biblical, historical, social, or nationalist themes that resonated with a population that, as it was losing absolute faith in traditional religion, sought meaning elsewhere.
“Whatever was noble, and much of what was coarse and decadent in their culture,” according to Irving Howe, “found its reflection on the stage.” Yiddish theater, he writes, drew on “the hazan’s dramatism, the magid’s eloquence, the badkhn’s clowning” and on “the very depths of the Jewish past.” And he claims for the Yiddish stage a uniqueness at any rate in its more serious manifestations: “It was a theater spontaneously expressionistic, for it set as its goal not the scrutiny of personal relationships or the probing of personal destinies, both of which have been dominant concerns of the modern and classical theaters of the West, but rather a mythic ordering of Jewish fate, whether through historical spectacle or family drama.”4
The precarious economy of Yiddish theater prevented it from living up to such ambitious pretensions. In central and western Europe it led a hand-to-mouth existence. In Vienna, Yiddish drama, sometimes at a highbrow level, had flourished in the first quarter of the century. Two Yiddish theaters, the Jüdische Bühne and the Jüdische Künstlerspiele, continued to operate until 1938, performing the classic Yiddish repertoire as well as popular operettas and melodramas, translated plays by Strindberg, Arnold Zweig, and Ernst Toller, and newly written comedies with contemporary themes, such as On tsertifikat ken palestina (Without a Certificate to Palestine). While these Yiddish theaters functioned at some distance from the neighboring German-language stage, important figures in the latter, such as Arthur Schnitzler, often attended Yiddish plays.
In eastern Europe Yiddish theater suffered under political as well as economic constraints. Dramatic censorship in Poland and Romania, although not laced with terror as in the USSR, was a constraint on adventurous, particularly left-wing, drama. Most companies were short-lived and financial pressures led to endless rows among actors, proprietors, directors, and unions, not to mention critics and audiences. A few companies battled on regardless: the longest-lasting, in Lwów, was founded by Yankev-Ber Gimpel in 1889 and kept afloat under his family’s control until 1939.
In Warsaw, the center of European Yiddish theater between the wars, four main dramatic companies as well as several popular music halls competed for audiences. The leading serious company in the early 1920s was the Vilna Troupe. Founded during the First World War in Vilna, it later set up its base in Warsaw. In its heyday it excelled in ensemble performances. It had no permanent director and did not pursue a clear artistic direction. Rather it moved from realism to naturalism and from romantic mysticism back to social realism. The Troupe was welcomed on tour in Poland, Romania, Germany, western Europe, and the United States. “When Einstein saw them in Berlin,” it was said, “he changed his views on gravity.”5 Reinhardt went backstage after a performance by the troupe of An-sky’s Der dybbuk in Vienna and told the cast, “Das ist nicht ein Schauspiel. Das ist ein Gotte[s]spiel!” (“This is not mere acting; it’s divinely inspired!”)6 In New York, however, the troupe disintegrated and, although some of its members returned to Europe and reconstituted the company, it never recovered its original luster, disbanding altogether in 1935.
Der dybbuk (originally entitled Between Two Worlds) was not only the greatest success of the Vilna Troupe but the most-performed and best-known Yiddish play ever written. Its original version was not in Yiddish. With the encouragement of Stanislavsky, An-sky wrote it in Russian before the Russian Revolution and, only after it was banned by Russian censors, translated it into Yiddish. The first production, by the Vilna Troupe, was staged in December 1920, shortly after An-sky’s death. It ran for over three hundred performances in Warsaw alone, was translated into many languages, and was widely performed throughout Europe.
The Habimah theater company staged a Hebrew translation by Bialik in Moscow in 1922. A critic found it “a very strange amalgam of prophetic fury and discipline, of the spontaneous and the artificial, of fantasy and observation.”7 After the company’s departure from Russia in 1926, they took the production on tour all over the world. When they reached Paris, Chagall attended with delight. In extreme old age, Hanna Rovina, who had played the lead role in the Moscow production, was still performing it in the 1970s for Habimah (by then the national theater of Israel).
Termed a “mystery play” by contemporaries, Der dybbuk married Hasidic and kabbalistic imagery with modernist expressionism. Orthodox Jews boycotted it because of what they regarded as its insulting portrayal of Hasidim—but then they rarely attended the theater anyway. The play’s very success became an embarrassment for Habimah and the Vilna Troupe, since audiences clamored for repeat performances but seemed interested in little else.
In the 1930s the leading Yiddish company in Warsaw was led by Ida Kaminska. She was a member of a famous theatrical family, daughter of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1926), known as the “Jewish Duse” or “Di Mame Ester-Rokhl.” Born in a theater dressing-room in Odessa, Ida first performed on the stage in Shakespearean comedy at the age of five and directed from the age of sixteen. Together with her first husband, Zygmunt Turkow, scion of another acting dynasty, she led the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater from 1923 until 1931.
Thereafter she headed the Esther Kaminska Ensemble, which often performed in the handsome Nowósci Theater. Built in 1926 in the heart of the Jewish area of Warsaw, it seated two thousand spectators and staged productions by Yiddish companies, including Kaminska’s, until 1939. The company was, as her former brother-in-law later wrote, “in the fullest sense Ida Kaminska’s, concentrating everything around her artistic individuality, … yet at the same time presenting harmonious ensemble performances.”8 Her appearance in the title role of Max Baumann’s Glückel of Hamlyn, translated into Yiddish from the original German, was a huge success, presented more than 150 times in Łódź, Cracow, Lwów, and elsewhere, before reaching Warsaw in 1938.
Unlike many Yiddish actors, Kaminska was a minimalist rather than an exaggerator. An obituarist later recalled:
She did not thunder in the declamatory tradition so often associated with Yiddish drama. She often spoke in a firm voice, very low, so low as to make the audience lean forward in unaccustomed silence to catch the power of her words. Although she was not leather-lunged, she rose to peaks of passion and anger that generated their own electricity. She could wheedle and coax on stage with a charm that attested to a rare stage presence.9
In the winter of 1938–39 she performed in Flamen based on a novel by Yoshue Perle, and in a Yiddish version of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well). The latter, an ambitious and expensive production with a huge cast, was a roaring success.
The experimental Young Theater, established by Michał Weichert, grew out of an actors’ studio he established in 1929. It first performed in February 1933 in the hall of the Warsaw tailors’ guild. Weichert, who had trained under Reinhardt in Berlin, drew together a collective of thirty young student-actors. They dispensed with curtain and footlights. The actors often stepped down from the stage to draw the audience into the midst of the action. In 1936, however, the company was closed down by government order, apparently on political grounds.
The Yiddish theatrical world was rent by conflict: bitter squabbles, fierce ideological argument, careless love affairs, and unforgiving personal rivalries. Actors flitted from one theater, city, country, and companion to another, rarely establishing a secure financial base. Those who aimed to perform serious modern Yiddish drama resented the cheap sensationalism of theatrical shund.
Such unashamedly entertaining stews, mixing vaudeville, music hall, burlesque, and cabaret, were often smash hits with the undiscriminating mass of theatergoers, even though they might be disapproved of by the more high-minded. The Bundist Folks-tsaytung declared in 1933: “We have no interest whatsoever in reviewing shund plays. Occasionally we make an exception but only in order to warn the Jewish workers against this claptrap which only warps their taste and distracts them from the superior Yiddish theater.”10 Yet however much they were “warned,” Jewish audiences continued to flock to earthy comedies, vulgar musicals, and crude melodramas that social and cultural elites considered beneath contempt.
The Yiddish theater faced a struggle for existence, since it was regarded with disfavor by the orthodox and with disdain by assimilationists. It was nevertheless very popular and, according to the impressionistic estimate of the critic Nakhmen Mayzel, drew an audience in Warsaw three or four times the size of the readership of the Yiddish press.11 The audience was generally working-class, since the Jewish bourgeoisie was moving rapidly toward Polish culture.
There was little direct connection between the Yiddish and Polish-language stage, although many actors and producers and much of the audience for Polish, as for Yiddish, theater was Jewish. Exceptionally, the director Mark Arnshteyn staged Yiddish plays in Polish in Warsaw in the late 1920s. His productions of Der dybbuk and of Jacob Gordin’s popular Mirele Efros were critical and commercial successes but his other exercises in translation from Yiddish encountered resistance. Arnshteyn’s dream of building “a bridge between Polish and Jewish societies” by way of the theater proved unrealizable, partly because of opposition from militant Yiddishists to the staging of Yiddish plays in another language.12 “The Yiddish theater in Poland,” wrote Mayzel, “lives apart, like the Yiddish cultural world in general, isolated in a veritable ghetto!”13 A rare, quixotic “gesture of Polish-Jewish solidarity” was the production in 1938–39 in Warsaw and Łódź of a Yiddish version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with a Jewish cast by the modernist director Leon Schiller, a leftist non-Jew.
In the Soviet Union, Yiddish theaters, subsidized by the state, were to be found in twelve cities in the late 1930s. Under the leadership of Shlomo Mikhoels, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater managed to survive the purges of the 1930s. Founded in Petrograd in 1918, the company was strongly influenced by modernist trends in Russian theater, in particular the expressionism of Eisenstein and the “biomechanics” of Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1928 the company went on a tour of western Europe from which its founding director, Aleksandr Granovsky, decided not to return. Henceforth the authorities applied stricter discipline, reining in deviations from Socialist Realism. Walking a narrow line, Mikhoels, who directed the theater from 1928, maintained the artistic integrity of the enterprise. His performance as King Lear in 1935 was hailed as a triumph of Soviet as much as of Yiddish theater and ran for over two hundred performances. Gordon Craig wrote in The Times of London, “Only now, after having returned from the Theatre Festival in Moscow, do I understand why we have no Lear worthy of the name in Britain. The reason is quite simple: we have no actor like Mikhoels.”14
The company’s staging of Boytre the Bandit by Moshe Kulbak, based on Schiller’s Robbers, about a proletarian Robin Hood–like figure who heads a gang of thieves, ran into trouble. Mikhoels explained that the production strove “to show the accumulation of rage and hate felt towards the oppressors.” It was welcomed in the press but the most senior Jewish figure in the party leadership, Lazar Kaganovich, visited the theater, demonstratively failed to applaud, and after the show gave the cast a dressing-down: “It’s a shame to me, a shame! … Look at me, at what I am … a Jew. My father was also one: exalted, bright, healthy. … Why do you drag down such Jews on your stage? Deformed, lame, crippled? … I want you to summon sensations of pride in today and yesterday with your plays. Where are the Maccabees? Where is Bar Kochba? … Where are the Birobidzhan Jews who are building themselves a new life?”15 Shortly afterward Kulbak was arrested, subjected to a show trial, and shot.
Mikhoels took Kaganovich’s guidance literally. He commissioned a play on Bar Kochba by Shmuel Halkin, who subtly altered the underlying Jewish nationalist theme, turning the hero into a model of socialist man. The second-century Palestinian Jews’ revolt against the Romans was transformed into a proletarian rebellion. To avoid any hint of Zionist deviation, the locale of the play’s action, the Land of Israel, was not mentioned in Halkin’s text.16 Remarkably, however, Rabbi Akiva was portrayed sympathetically, a rare such appearance for a religious figure on the Soviet stage. A critic commended the “grandfatherly, sincere, folk-lyricism—and, where necessary, manly severity and harshness” that Benjamin Zuskin injected into his portrayal of the rabbi.17 Bar Kochba toured the Soviet Union in the spring and summer of 1939, securing enthusiastic receptions from Jewish audiences. Meanwhile, the theater prepared a production of an antifascist and anti-Zionist play by Peretz Markish, The Oath. But as Germany and the USSR moved toward diplomatic rapprochement, the play was out of tune with the mood of the times and was never produced.
Mikhoels, it is now known, came close to being purged in 1939. Isaac Babel, who was arrested in May that year, was induced to implicate him in a forced confession that he retracted before he was shot.18 But by then the purges were winding down and for the time being Mikhoels remained free. The price of survival was some higher degree of conformism. The collective of the theater condemned those who had been unmasked as “enemies of the people” and Mikhoels issued ritual denunciations of religion, though he kept a Bible on his desk and traveled with one in his pocket.19 Jeffrey Veidlinger, whose history of the theater is based on its archive, previously thought to have been destroyed, argues that “while sharing many aspects of the state’s educational ideals and class-based world-view, the Yiddish theater successfully resisted all attempts to turn its stage into just another platform of Soviet propaganda.”20
In film as on the stage, the role of Jews as entrepreneurs, directors, and players was enormous. The European and particularly the German film industry were almost as much a Jewish creation as Hollywood. Directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, lost to the United States thanks to Hitler, created a genre of light comedy that was deeply infused with Jewish humor. The Jewish imprint was so pervasive that some saw it when it was not there: the pathos of Charlie Chaplin’s portrayal of the little tramp misled Hannah Arendt, among others, to assume that Chaplin was a Jew and to include him in her “thread of Jewish tradition.”21 In film, as on the stage, we tread on more solid ground in searching for the Jewish imaginary if we focus on Yiddish productions.
The short life of Yiddish cinema lasted for barely three decades. It suffered from even greater financial constraints than Yiddish theater. Production costs were no less than for films in languages with larger audiences. Subtitling might help but the potential appeal of Yiddish films was limited not only by language but by subject matter, since Jewish themes rarely appealed to non-Jews.
Some of the earliest Yiddish films, silent versions of stage performances by Ester-Rokhl and Ida Kaminska and others, were made before the First World War but have been lost. In 1912 Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekume was filmed in Moscow, also without sound. But as early as 1913–14 a number of experiments were made in Russia with sound film, including a hundred-meter talking film, Yidl mitn fidl.
In the 1920s silent Yiddish films were made in Austria, Poland, and Soviet Russia. In 1925, shortly before they left the Soviet Union, Habimah filmed Shalom Aleichem’s Der mabul (The Deluge). Considerable resources were lavished on the enterprise and scenes were shot on location in the Jewish quarter of Vinnitsa and in Litin, a nearby shtetl. But ideological problems and personality disputes arose in the course of the production, which was not judged an artistic success.22
The first Yiddish sound picture, Nosn beker fort aheym (Noson Beker Goes Home), starring Mikhoels, was released in the Soviet Union in 1932. Based on an original script by Peretz Markish, the film depicted a Jew returning to his shtetl from America and participating in the construction of the Dneprostroi power station. While it necessarily glorified the industrializing achievements of the first Soviet five-year plan and stressed the obsolescence of the shtetl way of life, the film included affectionate portrayal of Jewish folk themes. But this was the only Yiddish sound feature film ever made in the USSR.
The first actress to become a star of both Yiddish stage and screen was Molly Picon. Although born in the United States and possessing, initially, an uncertain command of Yiddish, she became hugely popular in Europe. She was sent there, she later recalled, “first of all to perfect my Yiddish which was none too good. … For three years we wandered over Europe to learn Yiddish.”23 She developed from a vaudeville performer into a star. In 1936 she was paid $10,000 (then a huge sum) to appear in a new version of Yidl mitn fidl, the first Yiddish musical feature film. It cost $50,000 to make and was the most commercially successful Yiddish film of all time. Itzik Manger wrote the songs. Outdoor scenes were filmed on location in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Cracow.
Purists decried such confections as shund. But during its short heyday in the 1930s Yiddish cinema also produced work with greater claim to seriousness. “The first artistic talking film in Yiddish produced in Poland,” Al kheyt (For the Sin), was produced in 1936 by a cooperative group called Kinor (Kino-or, golden cinema; as a Hebrew word it means harp) with actors drawn from the Warsaw Yiddish stage.24 Several of those involved, including the director Aleksander Marten, were refugees from Germany. The film, which took its title from a solemn hymn recited on the Day of Atonement, was a melodrama about a young shtetl girl made pregnant by a German-Jewish officer stationed in her town during the First World War. He promises to marry her but is killed in battle. She abandons her child and flees to America. Twenty years later she returns, rediscovers her father and child, and is reconciled with them. The plot, while formulaic, struck several obvious chords with its audience.
The film version of Der dybbuk appeared in 1937. Directed by Michał Waszyński, it starred Lili Liliana and many other leading figures of the Yiddish stage. The play’s mystical symbolism translated effectively to the screen and the film was an artistic and box-office success. A sour note was struck, however, by the prominent Polish (Jewish) critic Stefania Zahorska, who wrote in Wiadmości Literackie that the film left such “an insipid residue of pathetic kitsch that all the traditions on which it is based have not given birth to even one good scene.”25 Notwithstanding such criticism, Der dybbuk came to be generally recognized as the supreme achievement of Yiddish film-making and a masterpiece of the European cinema.
The last Yiddish feature film made in Poland before the war, On a heym (Without a Home), which appeared in the spring of 1939, was directed by Aleksander Marten, who also acted in it. Based on a classic play by Jacob Gordin, it dealt with the hardships of turn-of-the-century immigrants to America. The female lead was played by Ida Kaminska and the cast included the comedic duo Szymon Dzigan and Yisroel Schumacher. But the film was not a success. A reviewer in the Literarishe bleter complained, “What Jew, if he gets a visa to America, will complain that he has no home?”26
In music, more perhaps than in any other form of artistic expression, the question of Jewishness was much debated. Wagner’s The Jews in Music, first published anonymously in 1850, maintained that Jews were incapable of genuine musical creativity, alleged that their control of the press had prevented proper recognition being accorded to major composers such as himself, and urged their complete removal from cultural life and the revocation of their civil rights. Wagner’s central position in the pantheon of German völkisch ideology and Hitler’s embrace of his legacy gave Wagnerian ideas about the Jews considerable currency in the 1930s.
Yet Jews in this period had few compunctions about performing or listening to Wagner’s music. Marcel Reich-Ranicki reports that the bridal music from Lohengrin was played at his parents’ wedding in Posen (then in Germany) in 1906. “Among Jews in Poland, at least among educated ones,” he writes, “this was nothing unusual; indeed it was part of the ritual.”27 Edith Friedler, a child in Vienna in the 1930s, “grew up hearing my mother tell of the many times she and her cousin Lilly … as teenagers, stood in line for hours at the opera to attend Wagner performances.”28
As with theater, so with music: Jews were the core of the audience for orchestral concerts and opera throughout central and eastern Europe. For German Jews in particular, classical music came to occupy a place in their spiritual life that amounted to an ersatz religion.
In a sense Wagner got it almost right: Jewish music, in the narrow sense of the term, was much less important than the role of Jews in music in general. Jewish popular entertainers, other than those associated with the Yiddish stage, commonly steered clear of Jewish themes. In the Netherlands, for example, where more than half the members of the Nederlandse Artiesten Organisatie were Jewish, almost the only performer known for a Jewish repertoire was Louis Contran, with such songs as “Moppen van Isaac.” Among the most popular entertainers, Louis Davids recorded “Het Jodenkind” (based on the English “What’s the Matter with Abie”) and Sylvain Poons issued “Isaac Meijer’s Wiegelied,” but these were exceptions.29
Without collapsing into the pitfalls of contributionism, we may say that absent Jewish composers, conductors, players, singers, and impresarios, music in Europe in the early twentieth century would have been a much-diminished mode of expression.
The foremost Jewish instrument was the violin. Jews played it in disproportionate numbers in all the great orchestras of the continent, save for those that had been racially purged by the Nazis. Since the late nineteenth century, through such figures as Joseph Joachim and Eugène Ysaÿe, Jews had personified, and often come close to monopolizing, the virtuoso tradition. In the 1930s Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, the young David Oistrakh, and countless others sealed the special relationship between the Jew and the violin. In later years Isaac Stern used to express wonderment that so many masters of the instrument had been born in the narrow confines of the former Russian Pale (he was one of them).
The celebrated teacher Petr Solomonovich Stolyarsky, who came from a family of klezmer players, trained a number of infant prodigies, including Oistrakh, one of the Stolyarsky pupils who scooped four of the top six prizes at the International Eugène Ysaÿe Violin Competition in Brussels in 1937. Isaac Babel was another early, though in his case unsuccessful, pupil: he wrote a story, “Awakening,” about this “Wunderkind factory.”30
In traditional east European society, instrumental music was not greatly respected or listened to, save for klezmer bands at weddings. The preeminent musical genre among religious Jews was hazanut. In the course of the nineteenth century the office of hazan (cantor) had become professionalized, especially in the Habsburg lands. Congregants took enormous pride in the quality of their cantors. Some participated in Vergnügungsabende, social events at which they would sing sacred and profane melodies to raise money for charity or to supplement their generally meager salaries.31 In non-orthodox congregations, the hazan would be accompanied by an organ. Opera singers in Vienna and elsewhere would come to the synagogue to sing solo parts. The celebrated cantor Moshe Koussevitsky was the star attraction in the Great Synagogue in Warsaw, accompanied by a fine boys’ choir. Christian Poles, especially visiting émigrés, were said to visit the synagogue just to hear him sing.
In the nineteenth century a tradition of synagogal choir singing developed. “Choral synagogues” were established in Bucharest (1857), St. Petersburg (1893), Vilna (1902), Minsk (1904), and other cities. In liberal temples choirs would be mixed, in more orthodox ones they were male-only. Julius Braunthal, who sang as a boy in the choir of the Seitenstättentempel in Vienna before the First World War, did not enjoy the three hours every Monday to Thursday that he had to spend rehearsing:
The master of the choir was then Professor Joseph Sulzer, a cellist of the illustrious Viennese Symphony Orchestra, and son of Salomon Sulzer, who was the first to compose and introduce liturgical music into the reformed Jewish service. It was an obsession with Professor Sulzer to produce perfect performances of his father’s works. He was mercilessly exacting; he rehearsed every chant untiringly, shouting, and beating our fingers and heads with his baton when we failed him. He never allowed us wretched, ill-fed children a moment’s rest, though there was always a shadow of pity in his big eyes when, entirely exhausted, he dismissed us at long last.32
The choirboys also had to be present for four services on the Sabbath, for the Friday evening kabbalat shabbat, and frequently for weddings on Sundays. The younger boys sang “for the glory of God”; older ones earned a very small stipend.
Singing was not restricted to formal or religious spheres. Like other small, downtrodden nations, the Jews of eastern Europe were a people of song. “Serving-wenches and apprentice tailors, middle-class young women and Hasidic young men, virtuous housewives and boorish barrow-boys—they all sang.”33
Among the Hasidim, songs without words helped the devout attain high moments of exaltation. Ben-Zion Gold remembers the Lithuanian nigunim (melodies), “full of longing, reminiscent of Byelorussian folk songs,” different from “the Hasidic nigunim of central Poland, which were influenced by Polish folk dances.”34 Noyekh Pryłucki described the typical Hasidic singing style: “With the hands and with the feet, with the head, the eyes, the lips, every muscle moves, every vein beats to the rhythm, absorbing the holy content of the words, forming throughout the whole organism the soulful mood which joins man with the divine.”35
No less important to the Hasidim than song as a pathway to the most intense feelings of spirituality, was the dance. Nakhmen Mayzel witnessed one on a visit to the shtibl of the Bratslaver Hasidim in Warsaw in the late 1930s:
The essence of the thing was the dance, which came after prayers. They had hardly finished the afternoon or evening service than one of them began to sing the well-known tune of reb Nahman [of Bratslav, founder of the sect]. He began very quietly, slowly, shyly. Immediately others took it up, and soon all of them. Hands joined hands on neighbours’ shoulders. They already formed a circle, like rings in a chain, around the reading-table, and the dance began. The Bratslav dance is quite unusual. They do not go round and round. The circle does not move. Each person dances in place. The ecstasy grows ever greater, hotter, more fiery. One hears shrieks of joy, sighs. It’s as if one has thrown off all one’s heavy burdens, all one’s torments. Old and young, healthy and feeble—they all dance away their innermost joy and their love and their devotion to the holy memory of reb Nahman.36
Such moments were regarded by devotees as the very highest point of dvekut (bonding with God).
The storehouse of Hasidic music continued to fill in the interwar period. The Kuzmir-Modzits dynasty of rebbes, in particular, had manifested musical gifts for several generations. The Modzitser rebbe, Shaul Yedidyah Eliezer Taub, was said to have composed at least seven hundred nigunim, many of which became popular far beyond the confines of the Hasidic world. His tish in the summer resort of Otwock, near Warsaw, attracted visitors from near and far. Among them, at the festival of Shavuot (Pentecost) in 1939, was the young Ben-Zion Gold. He found a position that gave him a good view and watched as, halfway through the meal, the rebbe tapped his snuffbox with his finger and the whole assembly fell silent:
After a moment he began to sing a new nigun. The composition consisted of four parts. The first and third were meditative, while the second and fourth were rhythmic and cheerful. The singing was pure melody without words, and the Hasidim who stood behind the rebbe’s chair supported him. They sounded like a powerful and well-trained choir. The effect was spellbinding. When they finished the nigun I felt as if I had awakened from a marvelous dream.37
Another visitor, a hazan, described the impact on the audience: “A deathly, mystical silence fell over the entire hall. Even the festive candles that had wavered symmetrically the whole time were stilled.” The rebbe began to sing pianissimo. The crowd, who knew the tune, wanted to join in but the rebbe silenced them with an imperious glance. “His voice rose and I was astounded: a dramatic, heroic tenor … the shekhinah (the presence of the Lord) descended on him.”38
Jewish music was not limited to the religious sphere. Folk songs were popular in the Yiddish-speaking heartland and among Judeo-Espagnol-speaking communities of the Balkans. They were of all kinds: cradle songs, love songs, children’s songs, marching songs, and other types common to all nationalities—only drinking songs were hardly to be found among this sober race.
The first transcriptions of Jewish folk song in eastern Europe were not made until the end of the nineteenth century, unless one counts the occasion in the 1860s when the young Mussorgsky wrote down (and later incorporated into his opera Salammbô) a tune he had heard sung by Jewish neighbors during the festival of Succot (Tabernacles). In the early twentieth century, Jewish ethnologists embarked on intensive efforts to transcribe and record songs before they fell into oblivion. YIVO played an important part in this enterprise and its work was paralleled by folklorists in the Soviet Union. The latter, however, stressed songs with “proletarian” themes and accorded priority to Slavic over German elements in Jewish music, as in Yiddish folklore in general.
Among the most popular performers of Yiddish folk songs was the tenor Menachem Kipnis. An orphan from a family of cantors, he began as a boy singer accompanying itinerant hazanim. In later life he would publish much-feared reviews of prominent cantors. At the age of sixteen he entered the chorus of the Warsaw opera. He issued collections of folk songs, wrote short stories and a humorous column in the Haynt under various pseudonyms, and published photographic essays about street characters in Warsaw. His touring recitals of Poland, Germany, and France, with his singer wife, Zmira Seligfeld, won the hearts of their hearers.
Exactly what turned a song into a folk song, let alone a Jewish one, was a matter of dispute. “Is every expressive term that someone uttered out there to be called a folk-creation?” asked the socialist-Zionist theoretician Ber Borokhov.39 Some experts accorded highest respect to antiquity, regarding the folk song as the repository of the soul of the nation. Noyekh Pryłucki, who, in addition to his roles as politician, newspaper editor, and bibliophile, was one of the leading collectors of Yiddish folk song in interwar Poland, located its roots “in the most secretive darkness of ancient society.”40 As late as 1970 a writer on the subject could still maintain, with unabashed primordialism, that it was music that came not “from above” but was “a spontaneous outpouring of feeling from the broad Jewish masses, a music whose roots lay in the distant past and grew on the soil of full-blooded, original, Jewish life.”41 Yehuda Leib Cahan, head of YIVO’s folklore commission until his death in 1937, put it more simply: what made a song a folk song, he said, was the fact that the “folk” sang it.42
Folk songs were not all anonymous or ancient, nor spontaneous eruptions from the body of the people. New compositions by poets and professional songwriters could be “folklorized.” Among the leading practitioners in Yiddish in the interwar period were Mordkhe Gebirtig and Itzik Manger. Gebirtig’s songs bridged the worlds of the badkhn and the cabaret artist, appealing to sophisticates and sentimentalists and earning approval even in the Literarishe bleter. Often whole evenings would be devoted to concerts of his songs. But in spite of their huge popularity, there were noises off from the wider world of mass entertainment. We hear more than a hint of this in Kipnis’s praise of Gebirtig in 1936: “Now, when empty rhythm and broken, foreign, negro, foxtrot and tango tunes fill the air, the suppressed souls of song and folklore are embodied in Mordekhai Gebirtig.”43
Soviet Yiddish also generated what passed for new folk songs. Ideological pressures in the high Stalinist years required that songs composed by the “folk,” that is, bona fide proletarians, be accorded highest respect, irrespective of quality. Surviving shreds of the archive of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture, for example, contain the following wretched lyric from Kherson in Ukraine in 1939:
A yortsayt, khevre, kumt oprikhtn
An anniversary, comrades, marks
nokhn vistn doles
Another sad fate
lomir danken dem khaver stalin
Let us thank Comrade Stalin
far frayhayt un far ales
For freedom and for everything
…
…
Kumt a tentsl, khevre, fraylekh
Come dance a joyful jig, comrades
And down with the enemies
Zoln zay tsepiket vern
May they be exposed
Zay hobn shoyn a ponim!44
They already have a face!
Whether folk songs or pièces d’occasion, such works by proletarian poetasters were judged worthy of publication in Soviet Yiddish newspapers.
Not all Soviet Jewish folk song was so despicable. In the 1930s the dedicated Soviet ethnomusicologist Moisei (Moyshe) Beregovskii, working out of the Jewish cultural institute in Kiev, recorded performances of folk songs in Ukraine and Byelorussia. The singers were seamstresses, bristle workers, tailors, teachers, shoemakers, an actor, a schoolboy, “three working girls in Belaia Tserkov,” “a blind bandura [plucked instrument, similar to a guitar] player,” and so on.
The first of Beregovskii’s projected five volumes on Jewish folk music appeared in 1934. The introduction denounced “bourgeois-clerical-Zionist” approaches to the subject based on the concept of the “soul of the nation,” dutifully quoted Lenin, and claimed to represent a new, advanced stage of “workers’ and revolutionary folklore.”45 It assembled workers’ and artisans’ songs, including such items as “Oy, ir narishe tsiyonistn” (Oh You Crazy Zionists), revolutionary and military anthems, as well as family ballads. Beregovskii avoided much Hasidic or religious music, though some religious motifs, drawn from the traditional liturgy, crept in, as in the “Av horakhamim” (Father of Mercy, first words of the prayer for the dead). A second volume was set in print in 1938 but, probably for political reasons, not published. A compilation drawn from this and other unpublished volumes appeared in the USSR after his death in 1962. That included seven melodies of the Bratslaver Hasidim. To what extent these were still being sung in the USSR in the 1930s must be a matter of conjecture but, as we have seen, the Bratslav Hasidim still maintained a presence in the Soviet Union at that time.
Folk song formed one strand of a broader genre of popular folk music. Elements of badkhones lingered in the Yiddish cabaret of Warsaw and Cracow, in the songs of the Soviet jazz musician and cabaret artist Leonid Utesov, and in the repertoire of klezmer players in interwar Poland and the USSR.
Klezmer (the word comes from the Hebrew term klei zemer, “musical instruments”) bands traveled around the shtetlakh, performing at weddings and on the merrier Jewish festivals such as Purim and Hanukah. Klezmer music was viewed by many city folk as hopelessly old-fashioned and by the 1930s had given way, at most Jewish weddings in Poland, to “light-classical items or even popular songs in Polish or Yiddish, including new songs by Jewish composers, using Jewish themes but in Polish.”46 Klezmorim nevertheless continued to play throughout the former Russian Pale as well as in Galicia, Bukovina, Transylvania, and Subcarpathian Ruthenia.
The bands had their own hierarchies, customs, and argot. Each town’s klezmer-kapelye had its own territory into which a rival would stray at its peril. Some players were full-time professionals; most were part-timers with other jobs, especially, by tradition, barbers. Typically the band comprised violins, flute, clarinet, horn, tambourine, and drum, sometimes also cembalom (hammered dulcimer), lute, double bass, and trumpet. Klezmer music was influenced by surrounding folk styles, especially Turkish and gypsy, and some bands included gypsy players. In cities they would play in theaters, dance halls, restaurants, taverns, and bordellos. On Soviet territory, klezmer musicians played in privately owned restaurants in the NEP period and at weddings in Ukraine and Byelorussia into the 1930s.
Since most folk music was not written down (many klezmer players could not read musical notation), much of it has been lost, though Beregovskii recorded some klezmer bands. With the violinist M. I. Rabinovich he also helped organize the State Ensemble of Jewish Folk Musicians in Kiev. Then in his late sixties, Rabinovich had learned his klezmer technique from his grandfather, a celebrated musician of the mid-nineteenth century, born as far back as 1807.47 The ensemble began in 1937 as an old-fashioned band but was dissolved after a few months, apparently as a result of political convulsions in the Ukrainian Communist establishment.
In 1938, however, it was reorganized into a large orchestra that toured the Crimea and Ukraine. The musicians performed onstage with actors reciting badkhones responsively. When they appeared in Odessa, a reviewer in Emes praised their “real folk temperament” but criticized their attempt to “foxtrotize this or that folk motif.”48 Der shtern reported on their visit to the Jewish “national district” of Naye-Zlatopol in 1939: “hundreds of people from the collective farms of the district came together in automobiles and wagons. The summer theater was overfilled. From the other side of the fence a peculiar sort of loge seats were improvised on the trucks.”49 The ensemble gave at least eight radio concerts and issued recordings of klezmer music that were sold at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939–40.
Folk musical traditions also survived and evolved in the Balkans. In Salonica the blind oud player Sadik Nehama Gershón (Maestro Sadik) performed in Judeo-Espagnol and achieved popularity, particularly with the songs of Moshé Cazés. The Greek singer Roza Eskenazi, who became the most acclaimed performer of rembetika (songs of the Greek demi-monde), began her career on the stage of the Grand Hotel in Salonica. She toured taverns all over the Balkans, singing haunting, Oriental, jazz-junky tunes in Greek, Turkish, Judeo-Espagnol, and other languages, accompanied on the bouzouki, zither, or baglama (small lute).
Contrary to the conventional anti-Semitic wisdom that held that such musical talent as they might have was merely performative rather than creative, Jews were also among the most innovative composers of the era. Ernest Bloch, son of a Geneva clockmaker, stood out as “incontestably one of the contemporary composers whose art may most legitimately be described as authentically Jewish,” according to a writer in a French-Jewish newspaper in 1939.50 Bloch had moved to the United States during the First World War but returned to Europe in 1930. He lived on the French-Swiss border until December 1938, when, alarmed by the rise of Nazism, he returned to America, eventually to be celebrated as “Oregon’s most famous composer.”
Bloch’s music frequently employs liturgical forms, biblical texts, and Hasidic or other folkloristic themes. His works on Jewish subjects included Schelomo (Solomon, 1916) for the cello and Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service), an arrangement of the Sabbath liturgy for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1930–33). Bloch denied that it was his purpose to “reconstitute” Jewish music “or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archaeologist. It is the Jewish soul that interests me, the complex, glowing, agitated soul, that I feel vibrating through the Bible; the freshness and naïveté of the Patriarchs, the violence that is evident in the Prophetic books, the Jew’s savage love of justice, the despair of the Preacher in Jerusalem, the sorrow and the immensity of the Book of Job, the sensuality of the Song of Songs.”51 Bloch himself, at any rate, had no doubt about the Jewishness of his music.
The case of Arnold Schoenberg is more complex and, in view of his centrality to musical modernism, more significant. Schoenberg had become a Protestant in 1898. Unlike those of many of his Viennese intellectual contemporaries, however, Schoenberg’s conversion appears to have been one of conscience rather than convenience.52 Indeed, whereas anti-Semitism induced some Jews to opt out of Judaism, for Schoenberg collision with anti-Jewish prejudice had the opposite effect. In 1921 he and his family were forced to leave a gentiles-only resort in an Austrian lake area. Two years later, after discovering that his close friend the painter Wassily Kandinsky had expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, he wrote to him that he would “never again forget … that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being … but I am a Jew.”53 Kandinsky’s reply, in which he assured him of his love but stated, “I reject you as a Jew,” grieved him and, although they met again once or twice, the two remained distant for the rest of their lives.54
In May 1933, anticipating the Nazis’ racial cleansing of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, where he was director of a class in musical composition, Schoenberg left Berlin. Two months later, in a ceremony at the Liberal synagogue on the rue Copernic in Paris, formally witnessed by Marc Chagall, he was readmitted to the Jewish fold. “Now that I have returned officially to the Jewish religious community,” he wrote to his friend and pupil Anton Webern, “it is my intention … to do nothing more in the future than work for the Jewish national cause.”55 Over the next few years Schoenberg devoted considerable energy to formulating proposals for the creation of a “Jewish Unity Party,” with an ultranationalist, nondemocratic program. He saw himself as its prophet and, perhaps, leader. Nothing came of these ideas but they testify to his suddenly inspired Jewish political commitment, an engagement that was registered clearly also in Schoenberg’s artistic creativity.
The Nazis condemned Schoenberg’s music, like that of all “non-Aryans,” as “un-German” and banned its performance. Schoenberg reacted with defiance. At the time of his departure from Germany, he was working on the opera Moses und Aron, which, he wrote, confirmed his conception of himself as Jewish.56 His Kol Nidre, based on the most solemn Jewish prayer, sung to a traditional tune on Yom Kippur, was composed in 1938 in exile in Los Angeles. Set for chorus, speaker (Sprechgesang), and orchestra, it was written in reaction to what Schoenberg saw as the excessive sentimentality of the (non-Jewish) Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre. The latter remained the more famous rendering of the melody. Jewish music? Certainly in the eyes of the Nazis who consigned both to the realm of entartete Musik (degenerate music).
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) was the title of an exhibition, sponsored by Goebbels, that opened in Munich in 1937. Supposedly illustrative of the corrosive effects on art of the Jewish and Bolshevik spirit, it included works by many non-Jewish and non-Communist artists, including one or two who had tried to curry favor with the Nazis. The 650 items in the exhibition were hung next to jeering slogans on the walls. It toured Germany over the next three years and was eventually seen by four million people. Among the stars of the show were artists whose life and works were deeply influenced by their Jewish origins and others whose Jewishness was detectable only by Nazi racial taxonomists.
If we reject the Nazi criterion, how might we define the Jewish artist? As in music and literature, the attempt to pin down a uniquely Jewish sensibility has led to palpably absurd conclusions. The German-Jewish artist Hermann Struck boldly declared Rembrandt a Jewish artist on the ground that the “sentiment underlying [his paintings] is Jewish” and Struck added for good measure that “he must have been of Jewish descent.”57 “Once beyond the representational,” writes Irving Howe, “the ‘Jewishness’ of art by Jewish painters becomes an all but meaningless question, dissolved as it now is into the categories of the modern.”58 The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, recalling his time in Paris in the early decades of the century, remembered anxious arguments over the question: “In Paris … we had a society of Jewish artists to which I belonged … We often had meetings to discuss the question of what is Jewish art. Did it exist? We concluded that Jewish art was a bit nebbish—you know, broken down and melancholy … I said that I was not nebbish and that it was time others outgrew such a feeling.”59 Whatever view may be taken of the problem of definition, there can be no doubt about the Jewishness of the work of at least one major artist of the period.
Marc Chagall’s star has risen and fallen over the past century. With Lipchitz and others, Chagall participated in an exhibition of Jewish artists in Paris in June 1939: he showed Ma maison natale, in which a critic found “a grace, a simplicity of popular art, reality modified by poetic dreaming.” The picture reminded the writer of Chagall’s early works in which he had initiated “a Jewish style in modern painting.”60 A more recent critic, however, dismisses Chagall’s work as original only in its subject matter, not its form.61 This is an ungenerous and inaccurate judgment.
In Paris between 1911 and 1914, Chagall discovered and entered the world of artistic modernism. He was deeply influenced by his Hasidic background and in the “magical chaos” of his canvases returned endlessly to his hometown, Vitebsk.62 Actually, he was by no means the first Jewish artist to seize on the life of traditional shtetl Jewry as subject matter for painting. Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879), from Drohobycz, was one of several precursors in this regard. What was original in Chagall’s work was not at all his subject matter but on the contrary, what he made of it.
Chagall’s early paintings included several versions of Over Vitebsk (1914–18), in which an old Jewish pedlar, literally a luftmensh, floats over the deserted, snow-decked city; Die Erinnerung (1914), in which the old pedlar reappears carrying on his back not a bundle but his entire home; Newspaper Vendor (1914), in which a sallow, thin-faced, bearded man in a peaked cap displays an array of papers, including the Yiddish Moment; and Cemetery Gates (1917), in which what appears to be the angel of death hovers batlike above the Hebrew-engraved gates of the burial ground. Drawings such as The Jewish Wedding (after 1910) and Rabbi of Vitebsk (1914) are valuable to the historian as social documents of the shtetl in its final moments before the shattering blows that began with the First World War. “That this ‘Jewish hole,’ dirty and smelly, with its winding streets, its blind houses and its ugly people, bowed down by poverty, can be thus attired in charm, poetry and beauty in the eyes of the painter— this is what enchants and surprises us at the same time,” was the verdict of the critic Alexandre Benois.63
Chagall, however, was more than a nostalgic manufacturer of folksy, fantastical whimsy, though he could produce that, too, in huge quantities, and often on a high level, as in his illustrations of stories by Der Nister (1916) and his many depictions of klezmer musicians. In 1918, having fervently embraced the revolution, Chagall returned to Vitebsk after eleven years of absence and was appointed commissar for artistic affairs. This period of liberated, experimental artistic efflorescence in Soviet Russia was the most tumultuous, but also the most creative, of Chagall’s life. Inaugurating the People’s Art School in the city, he declared that “the doors to the scientific and artistic holy of holies” would be open to all workers, “these former outcasts of life.”64 Chagall himself directed and taught in the school for two years until political and aesthetic disputes led to his departure. In the early 1920s, he designed for the Yiddish theater in Moscow sets that still exist and that even his critics recognize as probably among his greatest achievements.
In 1923 he returned to France, where he remained until the Second World War. The 1930s were perhaps Chagall’s most intensely Jewish decade. In 1931 he traveled to Palestine in the company of Bialik and became preoccupied with biblical themes. In 1935 he visited Vilna, where he attended a conference of YIVO, met Yiddish poets, and drew the Great Synagogue. In 1938 he published a long (not very good) autobiographical poem in Yiddish in the Literarishe bleter.65
Also in 1938 he painted the White Crucifixion, in which a Jew, with a loincloth like a talles (prayer shawl), is martyred on the cross, while around him are scenes of pogrom, arson, mayhem, plunder, and sacrilege, from which refugees are fleeing by land and sea. Although Chagall was inspired by contemporary events in Germany, the figures are clearly those of Ostjuden, reminiscent of those from Vitebsk in Chagall’s early paintings. Benois rightly called this angry, eloquent, terrifying work “a document of the soul of our time.”66
After 1933, Jews in the Third Reich were expelled from German culture even before they were forced to leave German territory. Jewish authors could no longer publish books in Germany; actors and musicians could no longer perform, save before fellow Jews; playwrights and scholars were also silenced. Many were driven into exile.
On the evening of Quinquagesima Sunday (the last before Lent) 1933, the night before the ban on public performances by Jews took effect, the Jewish alto singer Paula Lindberg participated in a broadcast concert from the Thomaskirche in Leipzig of Bach’s cantata 159, “Sehet, wir geh’n hinauf gen Jerusalem.” The concert was one of a series broadcast live throughout Germany. The church, in which Bach had been choirmaster and in which he is buried, was full. Boy choristers wore swastika armbands. The bass aria “Es ist vollbracht” (It Is Fulfilled), ending with the words “Welt, gute nacht” (“World, good night”), Lindberg later recalled, “left not only me but many, many who heard the cantata on 19 March, 1933 on the radio, in particular the Jewish listeners, with the definite feeling that this was a Menetekel, a kind of sign of the danger that threatened the Jews.”67 “Many, many”—but by no means all, as she later sadly reflected.
To provide cultural production exclusively by and for Jews, the German government in June 1933 permitted the formation of a special body, the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (later it was obliged to change its name to Jüdische Kulturbund, since Jews were not permitted to call themselves “German”). It operated for most of its history under the control of Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda but was accorded a certain autonomy, so long as it followed general guidelines. The organization was founded at a meeting in the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin in August 1933, attended by hundreds of artists, actors, musicians, and cultural workers of all kinds, presided over by the prominent drama critic Julius Bab. Each major city with a significant Jewish community had its own branch of the organization. Separate departments were established for theater, music, lectures, film shows, and other activities. At its height, the Kulturbund sponsored three theatrical troupes, an opera company, two symphony orchestras, choirs, and chamber music groups. It also organized lectures and art exhibitions. It employed, at one time or another, 2,500 artists for an audience of 70,000 (probably about half of all remaining adult Jews in the country by the end of the decade) in about a hundred towns.68
The organization’s head from 1933 to 1938 was Kurt Singer. A small, silver-haired man with a bent for sarcasm, he had been trained as a medical doctor before becoming intendant of the opera house of Berlin-Charlottenburg. The musical director from 1936 to 1941 was the Viennese-born Rudolf Schwarz, former conductor of opera orchestras in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe. Together with others, these men, under near-impossible conditions, created one of the bravest cultural phenomena of the era.
In the early years the opera and music sections of the Kulturbund performed Mozart and Richard Strauss as well as Handel’s oratorios Judas Maccabaeus, Israel in Egypt, and Saul. “For reasons of tact,” as Singer put it, they refrained from performing Wagner.69 In later years the Kulturbund was not permitted to perform “German music.” Exactly what was included or excluded under that rubric, however, was a matter for delicate interpretation. Eventually Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were placed on the forbidden list. Mendelssohn, however, a non-Aryan by Nazi standards even though a Christian from birth, featured frequently in its programs. Schubert songs with texts by Heine were regarded as sufficiently Jewish to permit their inclusion in Kulturbund programs. And Handel, who had no Jewish blood, was never banned.
Recordings of some of these concerts survive. Sound quality is often poor but there is a palpable tension that renders them unique in the history of recorded music. Each player and singer seems to perform (as any player and singer always must, though few can) as if this were both the first and last time he or she interpreted the piece. And the audiences, whose response can often be gleaned even from the audio records, convey a sense, particularly after November 1938, that these occasions were the few, precious moments of spiritual freedom left to them in what was otherwise a caged existence.70 It is impossible for any sensitive person to listen to these records without being deeply moved.
The drama section was headed by Bab, who, in a private letter in June 1933, insisted that its performances must be so outstanding “that the Germans would have to be ashamed of themselves.”71 In October 1933 the Kulturbund’s Jüdisches Kulturtheater presented, as its first production in Berlin, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. Over the next few years the repertoire included Shakespeare, Molière, Shaw, and Ibsen, as well as plays by Jewish writers (Stefan Zweig, Sholem Asch, S. An-sky, and others) and/or on Jewish themes. Gradually censorship tightened. First works by Communists and other anti-Nazis were prohibited. Then German playwrights such as Schiller were prohibited on the ground that their performance by Jews was a sacrilege. Eventually all works by “Aryans” were forbidden.
The Kulturbund provided a means for Jews to continue to explore realms of the mind and spirit. Enforced isolation from the broader currents of German culture in which they had played such a significant part was painful. Yet in a sense it was liberating, since the muses in general were being poisoned by their new masters.
In all the arts, as in life, the Jews were thus being driven into exile or back to the ghetto.