Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America by Stefan Kanfer

gesture. The prospective bridegroom stares open-mouthed.
    KUNI-LEML : Reb Kuni-Leml?
    MAX : W-what is it now?
    KUNI-LEML : I m-meant to ask…. If I walk down the street and someone c-calls out to m-me, “Reb K-Kuni-Leml! Reb K-KuniLeml!” should I answer or not?
    MAX : No, you m-mustn't answer, since you're not K-Kuni-Leml! Now r-run along home!
    KUNI-LEML (
Reflecting
): So he r-really is Kuni-Leml, and I am…me.
     
    Pandemonium reigns, and amid the confusion true love wins out. But something else prevails as well—the children of the
Haskalah.
They have triumphed over the old-style Judaism of blind obedience and rote scholarship.
    In
Shmendrik
the title character is a ponderous
yeshiva
student. With the help of his overprotective mother, he also tries to wed a sweetfaced young woman. She barely manages to evade his clutches by running off with
her
lover. In the end the blockhead is left with a homely girl whose IQ is lower than his. Simple as these narratives were, they spoke directly to the Jewish playgoers of Romania. Before the year was out, “Kuni-Leml” and “Shmendrik” had entered the Yiddish language as synonyms for the kind of dolts who get tangled in their own idiotic schemes.
    And then came March 4, 1878—a momentous day for Russia, a catastrophic one for the Yiddish Theater. Outgunned and outmanned, the Ottoman Turks sued for peace. Russian businessmen, enriched by the war and elated by the victory, returned to their homes. Goldfaden's troupe played to smaller and smaller houses, shrank to a few loyalists, and then split up. Their leader refused to give in to circumstance. He spent hours pondering an atlas and asking himself the same questionover and over. Where to go? America? Still out of the question. The papers spoke of a Lincoln County War in the territory of New Mexico. Somebody shot an Englishman, a friend of a crook called Billy the Kid. And then Billy put together a posse to kill the killers. It was crazy over there. Uncivilized. Wild. Since Russians would not come to him anymore, maybe he should go to the Russians. He would think on it.

CHAPTER THREE
     

THE FIRST SON
     

i
    A FTER THE RUSSIAN TRIUMPH , a Jewish soldier returned to his home in the port city of Odessa. The angular, highstrung veteran spent his days as a newspaper distributor and his nights at the town's major theater, smitten with an actress. Then again, Jacob Adler was always beguiled by one female or another. He was known in nearly every café, wine cellar, and bordello in Odessa. “And yet,” his memoirs note with melodramatic zest, “there was an emptiness. Something was lacking. I was restless, ill at ease, blindly seeking a place where my soul could find peace.”
    One day as he sat in the paper's editorial offices, Jacob's eye was caught by a story about the Yiddish Theater in Bucharest. “My heart began to beat fast,” he recalled; “the blood rushed to my head and I sprang to my feet. I looked again. No, I have not dreamed it. Yiddish Theater! The language is Yiddish, the plays Yiddish, the actors Yiddish. The troupe is under the directorship of the poet Abraham Goldfaden. Gone, my vague longings, my melancholia and malaise! I had a goal, a purpose in life. I was determined to bring the Yiddish Theater to Odessa!” There is no more pregnant sentence in the memoirs of any Yiddish actor. In the years to come, the childless Goldfaden was to have three spiritual sons, and Jacob Adler was to be the greatest of them.
    For more than a year Jacob sent the troupe letters full of promises, extolling his fellow Jews, who were “starved” for Yiddish theater. When the war ended, and the audiences trickled back from Romania, two Goldfaden performers sent the word Jacob had been praying for. They were on the way to Odessa. Adler waited for them at the station. As they stepped from the car he was not sure whether to laugh or cry. The hams were identical: “Rosenberg …not a hair on his face—a regular priest!