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Jan. 20th, 2020 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI found a copy of The Yiddish Theater and Jacob P. Adler in a bookstore a while back and, from the cover, assumed this was going to be a fairly dry book about a topic that I was interested enough in not to mind.
About this, I was extremely wrong!
Jacob P. Adler is one of the great actors of early Yiddish theater; this book is written by his granddaughter, which appears to mean that she has access to ALL of the early Yiddish theater gossip and also has zero qualms about reproducing any of it on the page. Within the three chapters or so, we've zoomed through Grandpa's early biography, with a focus on his first three love affairs (innkeeper's daughter who secretly smuggled messages for the anarchists, tragic Romani musician, virtuous Orthodox girl who offered to steal all her father's jewels and run away with him) and moved on to the infinite and infinitely dramatic squabbles of the world's first professional Yiddish-speaking actors.
As I said on Twitter while reading this book, the thing that's really incredible to me about the Yiddish theater is how much it feels like that bit in a Terry Pratchett book like Moving Pictures or Soul Music in which a Big Idea hits and immediately dozens of of more or less respectable individuals realize "oh ... I was born for This Idea In Particular," quit their jobs, reconfigure their personal aesthetics, and transmogrify into prima donnas before their confused families' very eyes. Avram Goldfaden started writing plays in Yiddish in 1876; literally as soon as he'd gotten enough people together to have a full theater troupe (mostly by recruiting a bunch of budding cantorial students who decided the theater was more fun) half the cast immediately got in a fight with him, split off, and found another playwright so they could throw their own shows. Long live the theater!
By 1879 or so it seems like there were at least four or five different Yiddish theater troupes bouncing through the Pale of Settlement, constantly stealing each other's talent and throwing enormous hissy fits about it. A playwright, bribed away from his troupe by his rival, steals all the copies of his scripts, leaves a candle burning on the chest that held them to signify to the troupe that they should consider him dead to them, and sneaks off in the middle of the night! The lead actor and actress of a troupe refuse to get recruited away by another troupe out of loyalty to their comrades, so the leader of the other troupe then pretends to recruit everyone else in the troupe, says "See! They had no loyalty to you! Why should you have loyalty to them?", and sneaks off with the actor and actress that he actually wanted in the middle of the night! An actress enters a small town and immediately comes face-to-face with her estranged father, on whom she had previously snuck out in the middle of the night! Overall just an astounding amount of theatrical professionals sneaking off in the middle of the night!
Eventually the action moves to London, and thence to New York City for the Yiddish theater's most prosperous but no less dramatic days. I'd come across a lot of the wacky anecdotes recounted here in Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedies and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America, but Lalla Adler's perspective is closer and warmer: she clearly has a great admiration and fondness for her grandfather and all of his incredibly dramatic compatriots, while being perfectly happy to air all their dirty laundry.
...especially Grandpa's. Even his affectionate granddaughter cannot explain why, having simultaneously knocked up both his dying actress wife and another unrelated actress, Jacob P. Adler then went on to marry a third, completely unrelated woman as soon as Wife 1 kicked the bucket. Truly, he was a cause of grief to every woman who loved him, Lalla Adler narrates, apologizing for Grandpa to the entire reading audience. I was happy to later learn that Wife #3, Lalla Adler's actual grandmother, the actress Sara Adler, got her revenge for all of them: "I'm leaving you for a hotter actor, and also I've just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and my doctor says I might DIE if I have TOO MUCH DRAMA so you have to be chill about it, BYE." What a power move! You will all be happy to know that she fully recovered from the tuberculosis, had her six-month fling, and returned to reign over the household and the entire Yiddish theater dynasty she and Adler founded.
I can't possibly sum up all the rest of the incredibly dramatic Yiddish theater anecdotes that I was delighted to discover in this book, but rest assured that if you encounter me in the next few weeks, you are likely to be regaled with them, will-you, nil-you. Apologies in advance!
About this, I was extremely wrong!
Jacob P. Adler is one of the great actors of early Yiddish theater; this book is written by his granddaughter, which appears to mean that she has access to ALL of the early Yiddish theater gossip and also has zero qualms about reproducing any of it on the page. Within the three chapters or so, we've zoomed through Grandpa's early biography, with a focus on his first three love affairs (innkeeper's daughter who secretly smuggled messages for the anarchists, tragic Romani musician, virtuous Orthodox girl who offered to steal all her father's jewels and run away with him) and moved on to the infinite and infinitely dramatic squabbles of the world's first professional Yiddish-speaking actors.
As I said on Twitter while reading this book, the thing that's really incredible to me about the Yiddish theater is how much it feels like that bit in a Terry Pratchett book like Moving Pictures or Soul Music in which a Big Idea hits and immediately dozens of of more or less respectable individuals realize "oh ... I was born for This Idea In Particular," quit their jobs, reconfigure their personal aesthetics, and transmogrify into prima donnas before their confused families' very eyes. Avram Goldfaden started writing plays in Yiddish in 1876; literally as soon as he'd gotten enough people together to have a full theater troupe (mostly by recruiting a bunch of budding cantorial students who decided the theater was more fun) half the cast immediately got in a fight with him, split off, and found another playwright so they could throw their own shows. Long live the theater!
By 1879 or so it seems like there were at least four or five different Yiddish theater troupes bouncing through the Pale of Settlement, constantly stealing each other's talent and throwing enormous hissy fits about it. A playwright, bribed away from his troupe by his rival, steals all the copies of his scripts, leaves a candle burning on the chest that held them to signify to the troupe that they should consider him dead to them, and sneaks off in the middle of the night! The lead actor and actress of a troupe refuse to get recruited away by another troupe out of loyalty to their comrades, so the leader of the other troupe then pretends to recruit everyone else in the troupe, says "See! They had no loyalty to you! Why should you have loyalty to them?", and sneaks off with the actor and actress that he actually wanted in the middle of the night! An actress enters a small town and immediately comes face-to-face with her estranged father, on whom she had previously snuck out in the middle of the night! Overall just an astounding amount of theatrical professionals sneaking off in the middle of the night!
Eventually the action moves to London, and thence to New York City for the Yiddish theater's most prosperous but no less dramatic days. I'd come across a lot of the wacky anecdotes recounted here in Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedies and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America, but Lalla Adler's perspective is closer and warmer: she clearly has a great admiration and fondness for her grandfather and all of his incredibly dramatic compatriots, while being perfectly happy to air all their dirty laundry.
...especially Grandpa's. Even his affectionate granddaughter cannot explain why, having simultaneously knocked up both his dying actress wife and another unrelated actress, Jacob P. Adler then went on to marry a third, completely unrelated woman as soon as Wife 1 kicked the bucket. Truly, he was a cause of grief to every woman who loved him, Lalla Adler narrates, apologizing for Grandpa to the entire reading audience. I was happy to later learn that Wife #3, Lalla Adler's actual grandmother, the actress Sara Adler, got her revenge for all of them: "I'm leaving you for a hotter actor, and also I've just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and my doctor says I might DIE if I have TOO MUCH DRAMA so you have to be chill about it, BYE." What a power move! You will all be happy to know that she fully recovered from the tuberculosis, had her six-month fling, and returned to reign over the household and the entire Yiddish theater dynasty she and Adler founded.
I can't possibly sum up all the rest of the incredibly dramatic Yiddish theater anecdotes that I was delighted to discover in this book, but rest assured that if you encounter me in the next few weeks, you are likely to be regaled with them, will-you, nil-you. Apologies in advance!
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Date: 2020-01-20 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-01-20 11:08 pm (UTC)That is one of the most specifically Jewish Extra™ things I have ever heard, thank you for sharing.
[edit] Have you read Sholem Aleichem's Blonzhende shtern?
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Date: 2020-01-21 03:30 am (UTC)I did read it, like six years ago, but now that I've read the Adler bio I kind of want to reread it to see which bits specifically Aleichem was stealing ...
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Date: 2020-01-21 03:44 am (UTC)I await your report!
(The Ancient Law (1923) is somewhat more dignified about its plot and involves, of course, German rather than Yiddish theater, but I am entertained to realize in hindsight that it nonetheless contains the essential tropes of realizing one was born for the stage and promptly sneaking out in the middle of the night.)
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Date: 2020-01-21 03:46 am (UTC)Would you be able to adapt it yourself?
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Date: 2020-01-21 03:47 am (UTC)I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO SEE THAT.
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Date: 2020-01-21 03:50 am (UTC)THE DIALOGUE WRITES ITSELF.
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Date: 2020-01-22 06:11 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing.
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