14

Memories of a Decimated Theater Home

When my mother got to the end of her rope because no one was attending the performances in Father’s theater and there was no money coming in, she’d rail at him, “I hope the miserable business burns to the ground.”

Father would look at her, his smoldering black eyes filled with reproach, and sigh, “Rokhl, Rokhl what are you saying?”

Out of respect, my mother wouldn’t respond. She’d dismiss his question with a wave of her hand and go into the kitchen to prepare a simple meal. If she’d held my father’s gaze for even an instant, she would have suffered the fate of her own curse. The theater burned in Father’s eyes. It burned, but it didn’t go up in flames.

My father’s father was a rabbi in a poor neighborhood outside of Minsk, in White Russia. Father left home very young. Two forces drove him away: need and imagination. He studied at the Ramayles Yeshiva in Vilna for a while but was thrown out after a Russian grammar was discovered under his Gemara. After that, he learned the printing trade in the Vilna print shop of Rozenkrantz and Shriftzetser. They printed religious books in Hebrew and the Yiddish storybooks that brought so much joy to Jewish homes.

There was another apprentice in the print shop who was related to Shriftzetser, one of the owners. The two young men became close friends. Stooped over the printing plates for the Mishnah, they transported each other to brighter and more interesting worlds than the leaden gray print shop. My father’s friend, Leyb Shriftzetser, later became famous for his dramatic interpretations of Sholem Aleichem’s characters.

When my father and Shriftzetser were well on in years, they were still sharing stories from their youth. Father often described how Shriftzetser disguised himself as a devil and frightened everyone in the print shop half to death. Shriftzetser, in turn, told us that they once found Father hanging upside down from the beams in the attic. He had fainted. My father simply wanted to know how long a person could survive hanging upside down. He hoped to train as a circus acrobat, so he needed this information.

Shriftzetser’s path to the theater was shorter than my father’s. Shriftzetser was an actor in body and soul, but Father wasn’t. A whole world bubbled up in my father, but he couldn’t bring it to the surface. The quiet upbringing of his rabbinic home weighed on him.

My father only tested his ability on the stage once, and that was in an emergency. Isaac Samberg, one of the most acclaimed actors on the Yiddish stage between the two world wars, became ill. He was playing the messenger in Ansky’s The Dybbuk. The play was a great success in Poland during the 1930s. It ran in my father’s Vilna theater for an entire season with full houses. Even my mother was happy. But bad luck struck. Isaac Samberg fell ill, and it looked like they’d have to cancel some performances. My father was adamant; they couldn’t cancel any of the performances that were drawing such crowds. He couldn’t afford to lose the income he needed to keep the theater going.

My father met with the actor’s collective, headed by Avrom Morevski, who was playing the Miropol tsadik in The Dybbuk. My father convinced them that he could replace Isaac Samberg until the actor recovered. “I have a little beard.” (Father started growing a beard when he was a very young man.) “I’ll put on a long coat and recite the few words.”

My father’s first and last appearance as the messenger took place at a Shabbes matinee. He came on stage dressed in a long coat with his own beard, and quietly whispered the well-known line, “The groom will arrive in good time.”

Someone from the audience recognized him and yelled, “Karpinowitz, speak louder.”

My father answered the heckler, “I’m not an actor. I’m just replacing Samberg. I don’t have to speak louder.”

With that performance, my father bade farewell to the stage forever. He wasn’t willing to replace anyone, not even if it meant continuing a run and keeping the box office open.

My father came to the theater after a little detour. When his friend Shriftzetser was already traveling through Russia with various theater ensembles, my father was still working in the print shop. He fell in love with a young woman and tried his skill at journalism. His romance lasted longer than his passion for the pen. The young woman became his wife and bore him six children, but the newspaper he founded, the Vilne vokhnblat, bore no fruit. For years, my mother argued that if my father paid more attention to the print shop rather than organizing concerts for the singing duet of Kipnes-Zeligfeld, his business might have a chance. But just a chance.

World War I broke out. There was nothing but hunger in my mother’s cast iron pot. Father spent his days running around the city in search of food for his family. He benefited from the good deeds of his ancestors. The Shnipishok rabbi, a close friend of my grandfather’s, asked my father to speak to the city commander about starting a soup kitchen for the poor Jews from the neighborhood of Novogorod. My father put on his holiday overcoat, smoothed down his black Herzl beard, and went to see the German general.

In 1915 and 1916, Vilna was occupied by the Germans. Why did the Shnipishok rabbi choose my father to speak to the commander? Because my father knew German. When he’d worked for Rozenkrantz and Shriftzetser, they’d recognized his ability and sent him to Frankfurt am Main to learn the art of color printing. He’d worked for a few years in a large company that printed books in color. My father returned to Vilna enamored with German culture. He even brought back a few parcels of books that adorned our house until the Nazis arrived in 1941 and obliterated our home along with the admirer of German literature.

My father managed to convince the German commander to provide food for the kitchen. Father received help from a soldier who worked in the commander’s office. The soldier was Arnold Zweig, who later wrote the famous book The Case of Sergeant Grischa, based on a situation he encountered during his military service in Vilna. Even though Zweig was assimilated and estranged from Judaism, he felt moved by my father’s request to save Jews from starvation. When I think of the Novogorod kitchen, with its large black cauldrons of potato and oat groats soup, it’s as though I’m still peering through thick steam. Years later, the line of hungry Jews seeking food was transformed into a line of well-fed people wanting theater tickets.

My father was apparently destined for the theater. A bit of theater whirled around the kitchen cauldrons in the form of a beautiful girl with a dark complexion. She used to rub her body against Father’s legs, like a kitten. Her mother worked in the kitchen peeling potatoes. The girl later appeared on theater posters as Khayele Kushner. She performed in the Yiddish theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia, where she was murdered with all her fans.

The war ended, and actors gathered in Vilna from the far reaches of Russia. They showed up wearing military boots and cloaks without buttons, smelling like freight trains and moldy bread. Yitzkhok Nozshik, his wife, Shtraytman, and Maksimov were among the first to arrive. At that time, the actress Franye Vinter was singing at the Shtremer Cinema. During the intermission, she came onstage dressed like a young Hasid and performed two songs.

The kitchen closed. Dr. Yakov Vigodski, one of the leaders of the Vilna Jewish community, said they shouldn’t let a man like my father slip through their fingers. “The community needs people like him.” But my father didn’t go to work for the Vilna Jewish community. As soon as an actor’s union was formed in Vilna, he became the secretary. Yitskhok Nozshik, who later became the director of the Israeli satirical theater Hamatatei (The Broom), got my father involved in the actors’ union.

My father followed his heart. My mother wept and cursed her bitter fate. Only a month earlier, she’d seen Father in a black top hat and a snow-white shirt at a Jewish community meeting with the finest gentlemen in the city, and now he was running around with a bunch of paupers. My mother didn’t like actors. She didn’t even like her own son-in-law, Leybl Vayner, the son of a successful furrier. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Leybl wanted to become an actor. My mother thought of her children going into the theater as an evil decree from above, dooming them to a life without peace and quiet.

Foreign armies made their final attempts to wrest the city of Vilna from each other. Meanwhile, my father rented a theater to stage Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu. He had adapted the story for the stage himself. My father had immense respect and admiration for our classic Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem.

In 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the first world war, my father had organized an evening for Sholem Aleichem in Vilna. The street around the hall where the event was to take place had been black with people. The performance was an enormous success.

My father often spoke with admiration about Sholem Aleichem’s talent as a reader of his own work. A postcard Sholem Aleichem sent my father was displayed in our home like a holy relic. I am certain that when my father walked the final road to his death, he had Sholem Aleichem’s postcard in his breast pocket.

It was 1918, and there was no established authority in Vilna. People were afraid to stick their noses outside in the evening. The actors predicted that not even a dog would show up for the performance. My father stood his ground. “We have to give it a try,” he insisted. So they gave it a try and people came. A lot of people. The hall was full. My father didn’t, God forbid, gloat over his success. He just stroked his beard with pleasure and murmured quietly, as though to himself, “Jews need theater. They love it.”

Father took over the Eden Cinema and converted it into a theater. Nozshik directed The Rabbi’s Reyzele with Yokheved Zilberg as Reyzele. After that, a play called The Yeshiva Student premiered. Standing in front of an open coffin, Zubak the actor talked to his dead father. The critics said Shakespeare’s Hamlet didn’t hold a candle to The Yeshiva Student. In another performance, the handsome young Motl Hilsberg played Bar-Kochba. Standing half-naked on the mountains of Palestine, he ripped off the chains of foreign oppression. The chains were paper and the sword made of wood, but Hilsberg’s acting was the real thing. Ignoring the cardboard mountains, the audience believed every word and kept coming back for more.

And so a generation of theatergoers was groomed. Later, a troupe that could grace any world stage, including Zigmund Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Ida Kaminski, Moyshe Lipman, and Isaac Samberg, performed at the city concert hall. Night after night, the building teemed with mature audiences who knew exactly what they wanted.

Even my mother got used to the commotion. She wore a black silk dress and a lambskin coat to the premieres. In truth, she still looked on everything with critical eyes, but she stopped berating my father when he got carried away during a successful run. Once, she even experienced the theater’s lofty possibilities. This was when Mr. Khayim Gordon, one of Vilna’s religious leaders, came to a performance for the first time in his life. The Dybbuk was playing, as I mentioned earlier. The Gordons were our neighbors. They also lived in the synagogue courtyard in the center of the city, at number 12 Daytshe Street. When he had a free moment, my father used to visit Mr. Gordon to study a page of Gemara with him. Ramayles Yeshiva had left a deep impression on my father’s soul.

Father convinced Khayim Gordon to attend a performance of The Dybbuk. My father kept his guest in a separate room until the hall became dark. As the curtain went up, Mr. Gordon slipped quietly into the hall and sat down on a chair that had been placed behind the last row for him. A moment before each intermission, my father led the observant Jew back to his hiding place. For weeks afterward, Khayim Gordon made no mention of his visit to Father’s theater. But one day, during a chance encounter in the synagogue courtyard, he said, “Mr. Moyshe, I’m sure you realize that I’ll never go back to the theater. But I want you to know that the Divine Presence actually resided for a moment in the Miropol tsadik. I congratulate you for bringing the Divine Presence onto the stage of your theater, if only for a moment.”

My mother figured that if Father could persuade Mr. Khayim Gordon to watch Avrom Morevski play the Miropol tsadik, then the theater couldn’t be so crass. There had to be something about it that couldn’t be grasped with simple common sense. She stopped criticizing Father when he spent a few hours after a performance with the actors at Velfke’s restaurant on Yiddishe Street. That’s where the devotees of Yiddish went to eat broiled kishke and chopped liver. Coachmen, who drove passengers around the city in their horse-drawn carriages, sat in one area. The hucksters, who dragged customers into the ready-made clothing shops on Daytshe Street, sat with them. The actors and writers sat in another area with the patrons who helped out in a pinch, during a bad theater season or by providing whiskey for theater celebrations. Shapely girls, fans of various artists, adorned the tables. Itsik Manger imparted wisdom over a glass of slivovitz. Shimson Kagan, the reviewer for the Vilner tog newspaper, thundered against performing trashy plays. Avrom Morevski, who had a huge appetite, tore pieces of meat from a duck and shouted hoarsely, “Velfke, I’m hungry.” A frying pan of latkes with griven immediately appeared.

Behind the restaurant, there was a little walled-in courtyard where the actors gathered on summer evenings with my father. A linden tree grew there. The branches of the tree peered over the wall at Velfke’s guests, offering them its honey scent while they ate cold beets with slices of white cheese, the cheapest dish on Velfke’s menu. My father stroked his beard and declared the tree to be a symbol of the blossoming Yiddish theater. In 1944, when the Germans retreated from the city, the crown of the linden lay buried under a heap of debris. All that remained of Velfke’s sanctuary was a broken piece of wall.

My father achieved a degree of security. He had his own theater, the Palace Theater, and he was renowned in the theater world. Zelverovitsh, the director of the Polish Theater in Vilna, had enormous admiration for Father’s accomplishments, particularly given his modest resources and the fact that he had no state support. Even my mother was happy. Thank God, the business was doing well. But my father wasn’t satisfied. He kept imagining building a theater with a balcony that would have as many seats as the parterre, so the common people could also afford to buy tickets. “What’s a Yiddish theater without the common people?” he’d ask. The Palace Theater didn’t have a balcony, and from my father’s point of view, this had to be rectified.

The actors often marveled at how my father produced financial reports on the covers of cigarette packages. He wrote out the tiny figures like little mosquitos and, rubbing his hands together with glee, slid the pack over to my mother so she could look at his calculations. “Rokhl, it’s as good as gold. One evening from the balcony will cover expenses for an entire week.”

My mother pushed the pack away and groaned, “Meyshe, you’re just looking for trouble.”

My father went to see the former home of Tzinizeli’s circus on Ludvizarske Street and decided it was the perfect place to build a theater. He chose the circus for one very important reason: it already had a balcony for the common people. My father decided to put the parterre in the arena.

Elaborate performances took place in the Folk Theater. Morris Liampe played A Heart That Yearned. Women were so moved by the play, they used to come to the box office very early to get cheap tickets. The balcony was full and my father walked around the theater like a conqueror striding across the battlefield.

On Saturday nights, the balcony was so packed it almost collapsed. A woman once fainted during the scene in A Heart That Yearned when two children sing the sad refrain, “I’ll remember you. I’ll always yearn for you.” The loyal women from Father’s theater audience left the performances with swollen red eyes, cursing the seducers with deadly insults and taking a lesson from the melodrama for their own lives. Men crinkled up their noses and quietly wiped away a tear.

And so my father gave the Folk Theater to the common people to whom he was so attached. The theater tickets didn’t lie in a lacquer purse but in a basket amid a heap of greens, a piece of lean meat, and a small carp for Shabbes.

One day, when my father came home from the theater, instead of busying himself with his collection of cigarette lighters (he had a weakness for all kinds of fire-producing paraphernalia), he just sat on the edge of the couch, rubbing his eyebrow. He used to rub his right eyebrow when he was deep in thought—this was an old habit from his yeshiva days. He often sat like that at night after a performance, but this was the middle of the day. When Mother came out of the kitchen with a plate of chopped herring and saw father rubbing his eyebrow, she felt a twinge in her heart. “No doubt he’s thinking about something new for the theater,” she thought. “He’s bothered by the few groschen he earns.”

Sure enough, when we sat down to eat, my father said, “You know, Rokhl? I’ve been talking with people. There are complaints about the theater.” My mother didn’t ask about the complaints. She just looked at Father with the chestnut-colored eyes he loved so much. My father explained. “The problem is that the Jewish intelligentsia goes to the Polish theater. We have to lure them away.”

My mother cut the Spanish onion, my father’s favorite appetizer, and mumbled under her breath, “The intelligentsia. Hmm. How much do we get from them anyway?”

To satisfy the Jewish intelligentsia in Vilna, my father traveled to Warsaw and hired the famous Vilna Troupe as guest performers. Expenses were huge. The troupe set difficult conditions. My father realized that the honors from the visit wouldn’t go to him, but to Mazo, the director of the Vilna Troupe. But none of this affected his decision to bring the troupe that bore its name to Vilna.

Mazo did, in fact, take the honors for himself. At the gala premiere, he stood at the door greeting all the important guests. He also gave interviews to journalists and spoke at all the banquets. But my father had his satisfaction. During the intermissions, the Vilna upper crust paraded around the foyer of the Folk Theater praising the play in the Polish language with Jewish enthusiasm.

The troupe performed Shakespeare’s Shylock. Vayslitz played Shylock and Yakor Mansdorf, Bassanio. Mansdorf strolled gracefully across the stage, dressed in short velvet breeches, with stockings covering his young muscular legs, and a little velvet jacket tossed over his powerful shoulders. Zakovitsh, the prop master, girded Mansdorf’s hips with a rapier. The actor smiled with his full lips and beautiful white teeth. The audience really enjoyed his youthful appearance. They also enjoyed the fresh new tone the Vilna troupe brought to the Yiddish theater.

What happened to that world?

The Germans converted my father’s Folk Theater into a garage for military tanks. They tore down the balcony. Before they left the city in 1944, they destroyed the theater, tearing it down to the ground. Not a single one of the beams that my father had so lovingly placed in the building remained intact. He went to the mass grave at Ponar with his audience, the loyal Vilna theatergoers.

My father walked the last road alone, without my mother, the love of his youth. The Germans had already taken her and my sister Devorah, a gifted actress, to Ponar to be murdered. Devorah’s husband, the actor Leyb Vayner, went with them.

My father’s dream about a theater, actors, performances, scenery, the stage, and special effects: about the entire colorful world that gave him so much joy went up in flames. The ash from that dream still smolders in my memories of my decimated home.

Translator’s Note

There is some repetition in the original version of this story, “Zikhroynes fun a farshnitiner teyater heym” from the book Vilna mayn Vilna, and the story entitled “Der boym nebn teyater” from the book Auf Vilner vegn, translated here as “The Tree beside the Theater.” To avoid this repetition in this collection, three paragraphs from the original Yiddish of this story have been omitted in this translation.