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Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925-1940. - book review

MELUS, Fall, 2001 by Kenneth Wishnia

Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925-1940. Edna Nahshon. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. xvi + 260 pages. $72.50 cloth.

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"The Provincetown Players have come to life again. In their reincarnation they speak Yiddish." So proclaimed a New York Times review of the Artef's 1934 production of Rekrutn, Recruits, Lipe Resnick's adaptation of The First Jewish Recruit in Russia by Israel Akseford (1776-1866). That year the Artef--acronym for the Arbeter Tearer Farband (Worker's Theatrical Alliance)--arrived on Broadway after six seasons in various theaters around Manhattan, and it is just short of astounding for the modern reader to learn that this production was favorably reviewed by most of the city's English-language papers (the Times, World Telegram, Post, Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror, among others), by critics who did not speak Yiddish; astounding not simply because of the language barrier, but because of the politics: unlike many similarly-oriented group theaters of the mid-1930s, the Artef's members really were workers who toiled in shops during the day and performed at night and on weekends without wages because they were truly committed to forming a revolutionary theater for the masses.

The Jewish immigrant population supported eleven separate Yiddish theaters in New York City during its heyday, selling about 1.5 million tickets in the 1937-38 season, a per-capita figure "unmatched by any other ethnic group in the city." Most of these theaters offered star vehicles and "bourgeois" melodrama, but in 1925 the Artef studio was organized with the goal of being a permanent collective with an emphasis on ensemble acting. The first large-scale production in which the studio took part was titled Mass Play and Ballet of the Russian Revolution, presented at the Lenin memorial celebration in (the original) Madison Square Garden on January 21, 1928, before an audience of twenty thousand people. But the official opening night of the first Jewish worker's theater was December 16, 1928, when After presented Beynush Shteyman's Baym toyer (At the Gate), a symbolic play about people's rescue from tyrannical oppression during three distinct periods of history, by an "idealistic" writer who was killed at the age of twenty-one during the Russian civil war. The staging owed a considerable debt to the theatrical stylings of Max Renhardt, "which aimed at liberating the stage from the supremacy of the spoken word," and the simply-constructed sets of Gordon Craig. Emphasizing music and movement, mash-like make-up and "tight costumes that left their semi-nude bodies free to show maximum gesture and movement," it becomes somewhat more understandable how the non-Yiddish-speaking critics could have been impressed by the Artef studio's productions during its twelve full seasons stretching from 1928-29 to 1939-40.

At its height, the Artef was supported by such theater and film luminaries as Fannie Brice, Harold Clurman, Frances Farmer, Ben Hecht, Lillian Hellman, Moss Hart, Fritz Lang, Paul Mini, Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice, Irwin Shaw, Sylvia Sidney, Orson Welles, and William Wyler. But the road was always rocky, due to vitriolic conflicts within the highly-politicized Jewish immigrant community (Ah, the days when "the right" referred to conservative socialists and union democrats!) and, of course, by widespread unemployment and shrinking wages during the Great Depression. There was also the perennial problem of all concerted attempts to "elevate" the workers' taste in popular art: like it or not, proletarians enjoy "bourgeois" realism. Theater critic William Abrams, of the Communist Morgn Freiheit (Morning Freedom), charged the Artef with elitist tendencies, saying that it "had built a wall of stylization that cut it off from the masses. The efforts to arrive at a new theatrical style and to experiment with new forms were indeed sophisticated, yet this very sophistication alienated proletarian spectators."

Nahshon's book is more encyclopedic than analytical, tending to follow a linear narrative description of events. It is a rich resource for details of plots, production design, and especially the varied critical responses to the plays, and it contains many useful, dispassionate summaries of the continually changing (yet rigid in whatever form) official Party-line doctrines and the often crippling internecine ideological warfare between the Communists and anyone else on the Jewish left deemed insufficiently left. As Nahshon recounts, practically every production mounted by the Artef was criticized as being too polemic by the non-Communists and as not revolutionary enough by the Communists, clearly a difficult situation for an institution whose members spent all day working in factories and shops.

The demise of the Artef is due to three primary causes: the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, which drained the American-Jewish Communist movement of considerable support; the general decline of far-left theater during the second half of the 1930s; and the assimilation of the Yiddish-speaking population. The latter also brought about the gradual fading of all popular Yiddish theater-left, right, or center. The Yiddish theater "was first and foremost an immigrants' institution," writes Nahshon. The ending of her final chapter is quite downbeat, and it could have used some discussion of the ongoing Jewish contribution to socially-conscious art in America (in her preface, Nahshon writes that the Artef was part of "a movement that redefined the course for the American stage during the half century that followed," but goes no further), the greater Jewish radical dispersal into the larger English-speaking world (and its effects on the 1960s, for example), or the uses of similar staging techniques by today's politically-engaged immigrant group theaters, which speak languages other than Yiddish. But that, perhaps, is another chapter.

Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925-1940. - book review

MELUS, Fall, 2001 by Kenneth Wishnia

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