THE YIDDISH THEATRE AND MY DAD
In my father’s autobiography, my dad talks about growing up on the Near West Side of Chicago and one of his happiest memories being when his family regularly attended the Yiddish theater on Roosevelt Road and Blue Island. Until I read his autobiography, I had never heard of the Yiddish theater.
You see, my father, a first-generation son of parents from the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Ukraine who communicated in Yiddish, a blend of the Hebrew, Russian and German languages, married my mother, an immigrant from Germany where the Yiddish language was considered low class and unacceptable. In my house when I was being raised by my parents, no Yiddish was allowed, and I probably never heard any Yiddish words until I went to high school and a large element of West Side Jews with Eastern European origins moved into my neighborhood. I still know very few Yiddish words. It’s a very earthy language. For example, “Mamzer” means a very bright child, and “Macher” is someone who arranges a fixer,” “shmendrick is a bumbler,” a “sheyna meydele is the center of attention, a flirt,” and a “kuni leml is an idiot.”
When I tried to imagine what my father must have seen at the Yiddish theater, I decided to consult the internet where, lo and behold, there was a link to a You Tube presentation entitled “The Whole Megillah (meaning scroll or volume): The Story of the Yiddish Theater.” For more than an hour I was glued to the video and found myself swaying to the rhythms of the music as I listened to “Raisins and Almonds,” (a lullaby about a dream to be rich) “Ach Odessa” (A Pearl in the Sun), and “Bei Mir Bis Du Schon” (Tell Me You’re Beautiful), a song later popularized in the nineteen forties by The Andrews Sisters. Despite my educated anathema for anything Yiddish, I couldn’t help thoroughly enjoying myself.
So, what was this Yiddish theater? I looked deeper.
Yiddish theater had its heyday in the nineteen hundred teens and twenties when “theaters were packed with both recent and established immigrants yearning to be entertained in the language of their home.” (Chicago Reader). The presentations, all written, produced and acted in Yiddish, tended to be outrageous, poignant or melodramatic. And they were versatile, sometimes comedy, sometimes opera, and sometimes tragedy. They were cheap to attend, and the fare changed frequently. From the start, the Yiddish theater was meant to be an outlet for those seeking comfort from the ostracism Jews experienced anywhere in the Diaspora where they lived.
Sometimes the purpose was just to entertain. Often the presentations were improvised in the moment. But when they became more sophisticated, it was also a way to educate the public and to forge a means of helping them assimilate into the country where they were living.
Apparently, the concept had been devised in 1870 by an out of work itinerant Jewish man by the name of Abraham Goldfadn, who came from Kiev in Russia, and who created revues for the Jewish population in which the theme was to forget one’s tribulations and enjoy diversions, kind of like today’s escapism to Dune and The Game of Thrones. Mr. Goldfadn started his work in Rumania, but then quickly moved on to Odessa in the Pale of Settlement and then on to America. Said the narrator of “The Whole Megillah:” “(In the Yiddish theater) Goldfadn produced everything from Shakespeare to “shund” (Yiddish for trash).”
The Yiddish theater thrived in New York and then went on to Chicago during a period of intense Jewish immigration that started in the late nineteenth century and ended in the early twentieth century. At its height, touring companies traveled all over to America’s larger Jewish populated communities like St. Louis and Cleveland.
New York was the residence for two major Yiddish theaters and where the greatest attention was given to the format. Productions began in the late 1800s. They were well received by the burgeoning population of Jewish immigrants. Plays concerned themes on generational conflict between the Old Country and their American born children or tensions between Hasidic (the Orthodox Jews) and “the enlightened Jews in Europe and America.” The plays had titles like “The Hell with Kings,” “Long Live Columbus,” “Goodbye Matchmakers,” and “Be Merry.”
The popularity of New York’s Yiddish theater led one of its actors, a man named Ellis Glickman, to recognize the need for Chicago’s Jews to find a similar outlet in their city. He brought the Yiddish Theater to Chicago in 1894. Born in Russia, Glickman had been featured in many European and New York stage productions of the Yiddish theater. Through the years he set up shop in three different locations in Chicago. Glickman’s Palace Theater was his last and most prestigious location and where my father’s family attended. I can just imagine my father and his family walking to Blue Island to see the latest program. From what I can calculate, he was probably ten or twelve years old at the time.
In Chicago, the goal of Glickman was focused on conflicts between cultures. He tried to please his crowds with melodrama or music and then slip in a message. In The Jews of Chicago, a book by Irving Cutler, the author describes the Yiddish theater as “melodramatic” with “tear-evoking performers that mixed deep emotions with religious and nationalistic fervor, miseries of immigrant life while being nostalgic about the ghetto, (such as a) problem of a nice Jewish boy meeting a nice gentile girl (or vice-versa). Often, the plays were “bawdy, lusty comedies and romantic musicals.” According to a Chicago Reader article on the Yiddish Theater, some of the revues were called “A Mother’s Heart,” “A Mother’s Tear,” “Sweet Dreams,” “David’s Violin,” and “The Wisdom of Women.”
There was often an attempt to elevate the audience’s tastes by bringing in classic literary plays and novels and inserting Jewish values and themes. A Yiddish King Lear talked about a “thankless child.” Shylock in Merchant of Venice was characterized as a villain from the Jewish perspective, “a victim of revenge and pride.” (The Whole Megillah). Hamlet was renamed “Der Yeshiva Bokker” (The Yeshiva Student). Oscar Wilde’s sexy Salome starred a nice Jewish lady named Bessie Tomashevsky. The idea as explained in the Jewish Virtual Library was to “help Yiddish speaking immigrants place the contradictions in their own lives in perspective. By adapting works by revered literary artists like Shakespeare or Ibsen and giving them “hamische” (friendly, homey) endings, the theater helped working class Jews partake of “high” culture while preserving traditional Jewish values. The audiences preferred melodrama, but watched the cultural plays if a favorite actor starred and there were a few songs and dances.
In the early 1930s the tradition of the Yiddish theater began to wane because of continuing assimilation, declining immigration, the movies and the Great Depression. By then my father was busy trying to make a living and he and his family, like others in the Jewish community, turned their attention to other activities.
The tradition of the Yiddish theater had its influences in film, in the “Borscht Belt” where Jewish New Yorkers famously summered in the Catskill Mountains, and on future standup comedians like Jack Benny, Morey Amsterdam, and Shelly Berman. In the 1937 premier talkie movie, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson is featured singing the haunting “Kol Nidre,” traditionally sung on the sacred Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Of all the celebrities most associated with the Yiddish film, a darling petite woman named Molly Picon was the most acclaimed. Her first movie “Yiddle with a Fiddle” was a huge public success, and she went on to star in several more movies into the 1950s. Another well-known Yiddish theater alumni was Paul Muni who eventually became the first Jewish actor to win an Oscar for his performance in The Story ofLouis Pasteur in 1936.
The list of Jewish performers who inherited the skill of entertaining the public in general and of further sharing their Jewish roots is endless. One of the last actors to play in Chicago’s Yiddish theater was a man named Bernard Schwartz, who became known in the world for his acting skills in movies like Some Like it Hot and The Sweet Smell of Success. His screen name was Tony Curtis. “Blue Skies” written by Irving Berlin and some say inspired by the earlier Yiddish song “Raisins and Almonds” and the famous “Mein Yiddische Mame” recorded by the songstress Sophie Tucker in 1928 all recall the halcyon days of the Yiddish theater.
Most of the big names in Yiddish theater are not recognizable today. They include Jacob Adler, Abraham Goldfadn, Boris and Bessie Tomashefsky, (their grandson is the vaunted conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) and the Chicagoan Ellis Glickman.
Few of the plays have survived. The most famous among them is The Dybukk, by S. Ansky. Originally titled “Between Two Worlds,” it depicted a young woman possessed by the malicious spirit known as “dybbuk” in Jewish folklore and by her dead lover. The most famous Jewish literary artist, Sholom Aleichem, did not gain recognition until after the musical Fiddler on the Roof was produced on Broadway in 1965 and became an outstanding hit.
I’m continually amazed at how this group of immigrants found ways to amuse themselves and to lift their spirits. Even if I still have no idea how to speak Yiddish.
It’s also interesting to me that the Yiddish playwrights and actors identified a need for their people and served to satisfy that need. It worked for both those who patronized the theater and for those who were the presenters.
Though I will always consider myself more a German Jew than a Russian Jew, I can’t help but admire this period of Jewish history in which Jewish artists created an outlet and a safety net for their fellow brethren who were newcomers to America and longing for home.
REFERENCES:
—Charles Troy: “The Whole Megillah: The Story of the Yiddish Theater.” June 26, 2022, Chicagoyivo.org,
—Wikipedia – Yiddish Theatre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_theatre
—Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb By Irving Cutler, University of Illinois Press, 1996
—Undereverystone.blogspot.com “He Brought Yiddish Theatre to Chicago: Ellis F. Glickman” http://undereverystone.blogspot.com/2013/10/he-brought-yiddish-theatre-to-chicago.html
—“Glickman’s Yiddish Theater of Chicago,”Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1902. Museum of Family History, https://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/moyt/glickmans-theatre.html
—-Chicago Reader, March 30, 2009, Lecture Notes: “The Joys of the Yiddish Theater” by Jack Helbilg, https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/lecture-notes-the-joys-of-yiddish-theater/
—Jewish Virtual Library – Yiddish Theater https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/yiddish-theater-in-america