your wife and kids to the seashore or the mountains in the summer. At that time, something called the Weingarts Insitutute, a sort of world’s first summer camp, was opened up in the Catskills, so the wealthy middle-class Jews sent their sons there. It was at Weingarts that Dr. William’s sons, Richard Rodgers and his brother, spent their summers with other kids like Lorenz Hart and his brother Teddy, and the brothers David and Myron Selznick, who would later go to Hollywood and make pictures like Gone With The Wind. So in time these talented, hardworking people made more money and sent their kids to Columbia University, which is conveniently right there on the west side of Manhattan. Ockie and Reggie Hammerstein, old Oscar’s grandsons, were in classes at Columbia with Bennett Cerf and Morrie Ryskind, also Herman Mankiewicz, who, you may remember, was the screenwriter on last year’s turkey from Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, Lincoln Schuster, and again, the boy genius Larry Hart. What an English department Columbia had in those days, with such scholars and writers such as Howard Dietz, John Erskine and Carl van Doren! Van Doren was Ockie Hammerstein’s faculty advisor, it’s no wonder Ockie ended up as a writer.”
He backed out from under the sink and sat down facing her, a burly, black-bearded man. “Along the way there is of course, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, even Ziegfeld, who Richard Rodgers worked for once and dislikes very much. Now it’s the present day, and look, we see all this talent on fire because of another bunch of Jews that did Showboat and Porgy And Bess. Behold, suddenly this third generation is not only rich and middle-class, it is reinventing the new Jewish homeland—America!”
She had to laugh. Moishe Levine’s irreverent assessments were like the comedy “asides” of the Yiddish stage, funny but telling. “Is that what it is? Reinventing America?”
“Why not? Don’t the theater and the movies tell us what we are? Don’t millions think already that America’s Civil War is Gone With The Wind?” He shrugged. “Can Dick Rodgers and Ockie Hammerstein do it? Ah, that is another question. But look at what has already been done. On the stage, to my mind Showboat was more opera than operetta, it was dealing after all with the problem of race, which had never been done before, God forbid, in anything like a Broadway musical. Then of course right after Showboat comes along George Gershwin with a real opera, Porgy And Bess, which is not only an opera all the way through without a stop but is about Negro people. Regard—America turned inside out. Naturally the public is not enthusiastic about a Jew like Gershwin interpreting this great country. Even Negroes are not certain. Everyone stays away, and box office is poor, but believe me, history has been made.” He got to his feet, picking up the tool box, and offered her a hand up. “Now you and I, darling Miss Jenny Rose, are going to be a part of Mr. Richard Rodgers and Mr. Oscar Hammerstein the Second’s turn to interpret America again in the musical theater. Only this time it is not about southern entertainers on a showboat on the Mississippi or Negroes in a ghetto somewhere, but cowboys.”
“You’re not going to play a cowboy, Ali Hakim the peddler is an Arab.” Jenny got to her feet and smoothed down the wrinkled front of her suit. She never knew what she was going to be called on to do those afternoons she pinch-hit for director Anne Bennett.
“Persian,” he corrected her. “Who knows if I’m an Arab? The peddler says he’s Persian.”
“All right, Persian, then. Let me fix you some coffee, Marty, it’s the least the canteen can do to express our thanks for bailing us out.” She laughed. “Literally.”
He smiled back. He was heavyset, handsome like his cousin, another Yiddish Art Theater actor, Muni Weisenfreund. Who had gone to Hollywood to become the film star Paul Muni.
They washed their hands at the sink and
He backed out from under the sink and sat down facing her, a burly, black-bearded man. “Along the way there is of course, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, even Ziegfeld, who Richard Rodgers worked for once and dislikes very much. Now it’s the present day, and look, we see all this talent on fire because of another bunch of Jews that did Showboat and Porgy And Bess. Behold, suddenly this third generation is not only rich and middle-class, it is reinventing the new Jewish homeland—America!”
She had to laugh. Moishe Levine’s irreverent assessments were like the comedy “asides” of the Yiddish stage, funny but telling. “Is that what it is? Reinventing America?”
“Why not? Don’t the theater and the movies tell us what we are? Don’t millions think already that America’s Civil War is Gone With The Wind?” He shrugged. “Can Dick Rodgers and Ockie Hammerstein do it? Ah, that is another question. But look at what has already been done. On the stage, to my mind Showboat was more opera than operetta, it was dealing after all with the problem of race, which had never been done before, God forbid, in anything like a Broadway musical. Then of course right after Showboat comes along George Gershwin with a real opera, Porgy And Bess, which is not only an opera all the way through without a stop but is about Negro people. Regard—America turned inside out. Naturally the public is not enthusiastic about a Jew like Gershwin interpreting this great country. Even Negroes are not certain. Everyone stays away, and box office is poor, but believe me, history has been made.” He got to his feet, picking up the tool box, and offered her a hand up. “Now you and I, darling Miss Jenny Rose, are going to be a part of Mr. Richard Rodgers and Mr. Oscar Hammerstein the Second’s turn to interpret America again in the musical theater. Only this time it is not about southern entertainers on a showboat on the Mississippi or Negroes in a ghetto somewhere, but cowboys.”
“You’re not going to play a cowboy, Ali Hakim the peddler is an Arab.” Jenny got to her feet and smoothed down the wrinkled front of her suit. She never knew what she was going to be called on to do those afternoons she pinch-hit for director Anne Bennett.
“Persian,” he corrected her. “Who knows if I’m an Arab? The peddler says he’s Persian.”
“All right, Persian, then. Let me fix you some coffee, Marty, it’s the least the canteen can do to express our thanks for bailing us out.” She laughed. “Literally.”
He smiled back. He was heavyset, handsome like his cousin, another Yiddish Art Theater actor, Muni Weisenfreund. Who had gone to Hollywood to become the film star Paul Muni.
They washed their hands at the sink and
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