Mrs. Liptzen's first success with a Gordin play was in Medea, for which Gordin received, it is said, the enormous sum of $85—having sold plays previous to that time for the well-fixed price of $35. Medea's Youth, written by Gordin for Mrs. Liptzen, was a failure, altho the author thought so well of it as a literary production that he had it translated into English. The next of Mrs. Liptzen's successes was the Jewish Queen Lear, for which Gordin received $200—an enormous sum for a Yiddish playwright in those days. The Slaughter was produced two years ago, and last year Mrs. Liptzen appeared in Gordin's The Oath, a Yiddish production of Fuhrmann Henschel. Of late Mr. Gordin's plays have been produced by a younger actress of more varied talent than Mrs. Liptzen—Mrs. Bertha Kalisch, on the whole a much worthier interpreter than the older woman.
It is Adler, however, who has been the belligerent promoter of the original and serious Yiddish drama. In 1893 he tried to introduce Gordin's plays and the new spirit of realism and literature into his company at the Windsor Theatre. But the old style is still strong in popular affection, and Adler's company rebelled. Whereupon Adler went to Russia to form a new company which would be more amenable to his ideas. He came back with the new troupe, and ordered a new play from Gordin, who produced The Jewish King Lear. At the first reading of the play the company protested, but Adler begged for a trial, telling them that they did not know what a good play was. The play proved a great and deserved success, and is now frequently repeated. It contains several scenes of great power, and portrays with faithful art the life of the Russian Jew. In 1894 Adler tried the experiment of leasing a small theatre, the Roumania, in which nothing but plays which expressed his ideas should be presented. A number of Gordin's plays were given, but the theatre had much the same fate that would befall a theatre up town which should play only the ideally best. It failed completely. After that both Adler and Gordin were compelled to compromise. Adler is now associated with a company which presents every kind of play known to the Ghetto, and Gordin has had to introduce horseplay and occasional vaudeville and comic opera into his plays. Even the best of the Yiddish plays contain these excrescences.
But both Adler and Gordin, while remaining practical men, with an eye to the box-office receipts, are working to eliminate more and more what is distasteful to them and impertinent to art. A year ago last autumn Gordin succeeded in having his latest play, The Slaughter, performed without any vaudeville accompaniment. He deemed it a triumph, particularly as it was successful, and felt a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Liptzen, who produced the play without insisting on unworthy interpolations.
Gordin now hopes that the days of compromise for him are past, and Adler expects to secure, some day, a theatre in which he can successfully produce only the serious plays of Jewish life. But both these men are pessimistic about the future of dramatic art in the Ghetto. They feel not only the weight of the commercial spirit, but also the imminent death of their stage. For the Jews of the Ghetto as they become Americanized are liable to lose their instinctive Yiddish, and then there will be no more drama in that tongue. The only Yiddish stage, worthy of the name, in the world will probably soon be no more. Jacob Adler consequently regrets that his "jargon" confines him to the Bowery stage, and Jacob Gordin longs to have his plays translated and produced on the English stage.
Mogalesco, the actor, who has, perhaps, the greatest talent of them all, whose dramatic art was born with the Yiddish stage, and who is equally happy in a comedietta by Latteiner or a character-play by Gordin, is, like the true actor, without ideas, but always felicitous in interpretation, and enthusiastically loved by the Jewish play-goers. He and Adler, if they had been fortunate enough to have received a training consistently good, and had acted in a language of wider appeal, would easily have taken their places among those artistically honored by the world. Even as it is they have, with Gordin, with Kessler, with Mrs. Liptzen, Mrs. Kalisch and the rest, the distinction of being prominent figures in the short career of the Yiddish stage, which, founded by Goldfaden in 1876, in Roumania, has received to-day, in New York, its highest and almost exclusive development.
Chapter Six
The Newspapers
Yiddish newspapers have, as compared with their contemporaries in the English language, the strong interest of great freedom of expression. They are controlled rather by passion than by capital. It is their joy to pounce on controlling wealth, and to take the side of the laborer against the employer. A large proportion of the articles are signed, a custom in striking contrast with that of the American newspaper; the prevalence of the unsigned article in the latter is held by the Yiddish journals to illustrate the employer's tendency to arrogate everything to himself, and to make the paper a mere organ of his own policy and opinions. The remark of one of the Jewish editors, that the "Yiddish newspaper's freedom of expression is limited by the Penal Code alone," has its relative truth. It is, of course, equally true that the new freedom of the Jews, who in Russia had no journal in the common Yiddish, runs in these New York papers into an emotional extreme, a license which is apt to distort the news and to give over the editorial pages to virulent party disputes.
Nevertheless, the Yiddish press, particularly the Socialistic branch of it, is an educative element of great value in the Ghetto. It has helped essentially to extend the intellectual horizon of the Jew beyond the boundaries of the Talmud, and has largely displaced the rabbi in the position of teacher of the people. Not only do these papers constitute a forum of discussion, but they publish frequent translations of the Russian, French, and German modern classics, and for the first time lay the news of the world before the poor Jewish people. An event of moment to the Jews, such as a riot in Russia, comes to New York in private letters, and is printed in the papers here often before the version "prepared" by the Russian Government appears in the Russian newspapers. Thus a Jew on the east side received a letter from his father in Russia asking why the reserves there had been called out, and the son's reply gave him the first information about the war in China.
The make-up of the Yiddish newspaper is in a general way similar to that of its American contemporary. The former is much smaller, however, containing only about as much reading matter as would fill six or eight columns of a "down-town" newspaper. The sporting department is entirely lacking, the Jew being utterly indifferent to exercise of any kind. They are all afternoon newspapers, and draw largely for the news upon the morning editions of the American papers. The staff is very limited, consisting of a few editors and, usually, only one reporter for the local news of the quarter. They give more space proportionately than any American paper to pure literature—chiefly translations, tho there are some stories founded on the life of the east side—and to scientific articles of popular character. The interesting feature of these newspapers, however, consists in their rivalries and their differences in principle. This can be presented most simply in a short sketch of their history.