THE YIDDISH 'HAMLET'ToC

I

The little poet sat in the East-side cafÉ looking six feet high. Melchitsedek Pinchas—by dint of a five-pound note from Sir Asher Aaronsberg in acknowledgement of the dedication to him of the poet's 'Songs of Zion'—had carried his genius to the great new Jewry across the Atlantic. He had arrived in New York only that very March, and already a crowd of votaries hung upon his lips and paid for all that entered them. Again had the saying been verified that a prophet is nowhere without honour save in his own country. The play that had vainly plucked at the stage-doors of the Yiddish Theatres of Europe had already been accepted by the leading Yiddish theatre of New York. At least there were several Yiddish Theatres, each claiming this supreme position, but the poet felt that the production of his play at Goldwater's Theatre settled the question among them.

'It is the greatest play of the generation,' he told the young socialists and free-thinkers who sat around him this Friday evening imbibing chocolate. 'It will be translated into every tongue.' He had passed with a characteristic bound from satisfaction with the Ghetto triumph into cosmopolitan anticipations. 'See,' he added, 'my initials make M.P.—Master Playwright.'

'Also Mud Pusher,' murmured from the next table Ostrovsky, the socialist leader, who found himself almost deserted for the new lion. 'Who is this uncombed bunco-steerer?'

'He calls himself the "sweet singer in Israel,"' contemptuously replied Ostrovsky's remaining parasite.

'But look here, Pinchas,' interposed Benjamin Tuch, another of the displaced demigods, a politician with a delusion that he swayed Presidential elections by his prestige in Brooklyn. 'You said the other day that your initials made "Messianic Poet."'

'And don't they?' inquired the poet, his Dantesque, if dingy, face flushing spiritedly. 'You call yourself a leader, and you don't know your A B C!'

There was a laugh, and Benjamin Tuch scowled.

'They can't stand for everything,' he said.

'No—they can't stand for "Bowery Tough,"' admitted Pinchas; and the table roared again, partly at the rapidity with which this linguistic genius had picked up the local slang. 'But as our pious lunatics think there are many meanings in every letter of the Torah,' went on the pleased poet, 'so there are meanings innumerable in every letter of my name. If I am playwright as well as poet, was not Shakespeare both also?'

'You wouldn't class yourself with a low-down barnstormer like Shakespeare?' said Tuch sarcastically.

'My superiority to Shakespeare I leave to others to discover,' replied the poet seriously, and with unexpected modesty. 'I discovered it for myself in writing this very play; but I cannot expect the world to admit it till the play is produced.'

'How did you come to find it out yourself?' asked Witberg, the young violinist, who was never sure whether he was guying the poet or sitting at his feet.

'It happened most naturally—order me another cup of chocolate, Witberg. You see, when Iselmann was touring with his Yiddish troupe through Galicia, he had the idea of acquainting the Jewish masses with "Hamlet," and he asked me to make the Yiddish translation, as one great poet translating another—and some of those almond-cakes, Witberg! Well, I started on the job, and then of course the discovery was inevitable. The play, which I had not read since my youth, and then only in a mediocre Hebrew version, appeared unspeakably childish in places. Take, for example, the Ghost—these almond-cakes are as stale as sermons; command me a cream-tart, Witberg. What was I saying?'

'The Ghost,' murmured a dozen voices.

'Ah, yes—now, how can a ghost affect a modern audience which no longer believes in ghosts?'

'That is true.' The table was visibly stimulated, as though the chocolate had turned into champagne. The word 'modern' stirred the souls of these refugees from the old Ghettos like a trumpet; unbelief, if only in ghosts, was oxygen to the prisoners of a tradition of three thousand years. The poet perceived his moment. He laid a black-nailed finger impressively on the right side of his nose.

'I translated Shakespeare—yes, but into modern terms. The Ghost vanished—Hamlet's tragedy remained only the internal incapacity of the thinker for the lower activity of action.'

The men of action pricked up their ears.

'The higher activity, you mean,' corrected Ostrovsky.

'Thought,' said Benjamin Tuch, 'has no value till it is translated into action.'

'Exactly; you've got to work it up,' said Colonel Klopsky, who had large ranching and mining interests out West, and, with his florid personality, looked entirely out of place in these old haunts of his.

'Schtuss (nonsense)!' said the poet disrespectfully. 'Acts are only soldiers. Thought is the general.'

Witberg demurred. 'It isn't much use thinking about playing the violin, Pinchas.'

'My friend,' said the poet, 'the thinker in music is the man who writes your solos. His thoughts exist whether you play them or not—and independently of your false notes. But you performers are all alike—I have no doubt the leading man who plays my Hamlet will imagine his is the higher activity. But woe be to those fellows if they change a syllable!'

'Your Hamlet?' sneered Ostrovsky. 'Since when?'

'Since I re-created him for the modern world, without tinsel and pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony; since—even the cream of this tart is sour—since I carried him to and fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the pouch of the mother.'

'Then Iselmann did not produce it?' asked the Heathen Journalist, who haunted the East Side for copy, and pronounced Pinchas 'Pin-cuss.''No, I changed his name to Eselmann, the Donkey-man. For I had hardly read him ten lines before he brayed out, "Where is the Ghost?" "The Ghost?" I said. "I have laid him. He cannot walk on the modern stage." Eselmann tore his hair. "But it is for the Ghost I had him translated. Our Yiddish audiences love a ghost." "They love your acting, too," I replied witheringly. "But I am not here to consider the tastes of the mob." Oh, I gave the Donkey-man a piece of my mind.'

'But he didn't take the piece!' jested Grunbitz, who in Poland had been a Badchan (marriage-jester), and was now a Zionist editor.

'Bah! These managers are all men-of-the-earth! Once, in my days of obscurity, I was made to put a besom into the piece, and it swept all my genius off the boards. Ah, the donkey-men! But I am glad Eselmann gave me my "Hamlet" back, for before giving it to Goldwater I made it even more subtle. No vulgar nonsense of fencing and poison at the end—a pure mental tragedy, for in life the soul alone counts. No—this cream is just as sour as the other—my play will be the internal tragedy of the thinker.'

'The internal tragedy of the thinker is indigestion,' laughed the ex-Badchan; 'you'd better be more careful with the cream-tarts.'

The Heathen Journalist broke through the laughter. 'Strikes me, Pin-cuss, you're giving us Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.'

'Better than the Prince of Denmark without Hamlet,' retorted the poet, cramming cream-tart down his throat in great ugly mouthfuls; 'that is how he is usually played. In my version the Prince of Denmark indeed vanishes, for Hamlet is a Hebrew and the Prince of Palestine.'

'You have made him a Hebrew?' cried Mieses, a pimply young poet.

'If he is to be the ideal thinker, let him belong to the nation of thinkers,' said Pinchas. 'In fact, the play is virtually an autobiography.'

'And do you call it "Hamlet" still?' asked the Heathen Journalist, producing his notebook, for he began to see his way to a Sunday scoop.

'Why not? True, it is virtually a new work. But Shakespeare borrowed his story from an old play called "Hamlet," and treated it to suit himself; why, therefore, should I not treat Shakespeare as it suits me. The cat eats the rat, and the dog bites the cat.' He laughed his sniggering laugh. 'If I were to call it by another name, some learned fool would point out it was stolen from Shakespeare, whereas at present it challenges comparison.'

'But you discovered Shakespeare cannot sustain the comparison,' said Benjamin Tuch, winking at the company.

'Only as the mediÆval astrologer is inferior to the astronomer of to-day,' the poet explained with placid modesty. 'The muddle-headedness of Shakespeare's ideas—which, incidentally, is the cause of the muddle of Hamlet's character—has given way to the clear vision of the modern. How could Shakespeare really describe the thinker? The Elizabethans could not think. They were like our rabbis.'

The unexpected digression into contemporary satire made the whole cafÉ laugh. Gradually other atoms had drifted toward the new magnet. From the remotest corners eyes strayed and ears were pricked up. Pinchas was indeed a figure of mark, with somebody else's frock-coat on his meagre person, his hair flowing like a dark cascade under a broad-brimmed dusky hat, and his sombre face aglow with genius and cocksureness.

'Why should you expect thought from a rabbi?' said Grunbitz. 'You don't expect truth from a tradesman. Besides, only youth thinks.'

'That is well said,' approved Pinchas. 'He who is ever thinking never grows old. I shall die young, like all whom the gods love. Waiter, give Mr. Grunbitz a cup of chocolate.'

'Thank you—but I don't care for any.'

'You cannot refuse—you will pain Witberg,' said the poet simply.

In the great city around them men jumped on and off electric cars, whizzed up and down lifts, hustled through lobbies, hulloed through telephones, tore open telegrams, dictated to clacking typists, filled life with sound and flurry, with the bustle of the markets and the chink of the eternal dollar; while here, serenely smoking and sipping, ruffled only by the breezes of argument, leisurely as the philosophers in the colonnades of Athens, the talkers of the Ghetto, earnest as their forefathers before the great folios of the Talmud, made an Oriental oasis amid the simoom whirl of the Occident. And the Heathen Journalist who had discovered it felt, as so often before, that here alone in this arid, mushroom New York was antiquity, was restfulness, was romanticism; here was the Latin Quarter of the city of the Goths.

Encouraged by the Master's good humour, young Mieses timidly exhibited his new verses. Pinchas read the manuscript aloud to the confusion of the blushing boy.

'But it is full of genius!' he cried in genuine astonishment. 'I might have written it myself, except that it is so unequal—a mixture of diamonds and paste, like all Hebrew literature.' He indicated with flawless taste the good lines, not knowing they were one and all unconscious reproductions from the English masterpieces Mieses had borrowed from the library in the Educational Alliance. The acolytes listened respectfully, and the beardless, blotchy-faced Mieses began to take importance in their eyes and to betray the importance he held in his own.

'Perhaps I, too, shall write a play one day,' he said. 'My "M," too, makes "Master."'

'It may be that you are destined to wear my mantle,' said Pinchas graciously.

Mieses looked involuntarily at the ill-fitting frock-coat.

Pinchas rose. 'And now, Mieses, you must give me a car-fare. I have to go and talk to the manager about rehearsals. One must superintend the actors one's self—these pumpkin-heads are capable of any crime, even of altering one's best phrases.'

Radsikoff smiled. He had sat still in his corner, this most prolific of Ghetto dramatists, his big, furrowed forehead supported on his fist, a huge, odorous cigar in his mouth.

'I suppose Goldwater plays "Hamlet,"' he said.

'We have not discussed it yet,' said Pinchas airily.

Radsikoff smiled again. 'Oh, he'll pull through—so long as Mrs. Goldwater doesn't play "Ophelia."'

'She play "Ophelia"! She would not dream of such a thing. She is a saucy soubrette; she belongs to vaudeville.'

'All right. I have warned you.'

'You don't think there is really a danger!' Pinchas was pale and shaking.

'The Yiddish stage is so moral. Husbands and wives, unfortunately, live and play together,' said the old dramatist drily.

'I'll drown her truly before I let her play my "Ophelia,"' said the poet venomously.

Radsikoff shrugged his shoulders and dropped into American. 'Well, it's up to you.'

'The minx!' Pinchas shook his fist at the air. 'But I'll manage her. If the worst comes to the worst, I'll make love to her.'

The poet's sublime confidence in his charms was too much even for his admirers. The mental juxtaposition of the seedy poet and the piquant actress in her frills and furbelows set the whole cafÉ rocking with laughter. Pinchas took it as a tribute to his ingenious method of drawing the soubrette-serpent's fangs. He grinned placidly.

'And when is your play coming on?' asked Radsikoff.

'After Passover,' replied Pinchas, beginning to button his frock-coat against the outer cold. If only to oust this 'Ophelia,' he must be at the theatre instanter.

'Has Goldwater given you a contract?'

'I am a poet, not a lawyer,' said Pinchas proudly. 'Parchments are for Philistines; honest men build on the word.'

'After all, it comes to the same thing—with Goldwater,' said Radsikoff drily. 'But he's no worse than the others; I've never yet found the contract any manager couldn't slip out of. I've never yet met the playwright that the manager couldn't dodge.' Radsikoff, indeed, divided his time between devising plays and devising contracts. Every experience but suggested fresh clauses. He regarded Pinchas with commiseration rather than jealousy. 'I shall come to your first night,' he added.

'It will be a tribute which the audience will appreciate,' said Pinchas. 'I am thinking that if I had one of these aromatic cigars I too might offer a burnt-offering unto the Lord.'

There was general laughter at the blasphemy, for the Sabbath, with its privation of fire, had long since begun.

'Try taking instead of thinking,' laughed the playwright, pushing forward his case. 'Action is greater than Thought.'

'No, no, no!' Pinchas protested, as he fumbled for the finest cigar. 'Wait till you see my play—you must all come—I will send you all boxes. Then you will learn that Thought is greater than Action—that Thought is the greatest thing in the world.'

II

Sucking voluptuously at Radsikoff's cigar, Pinchas plunged from the steam-heated, cheerful cafÉ into the raw, unlovely street, still hummocked with an ancient, uncleared snowfall. He did not take the horse-car which runs in this quarter; he was reserving the five cents for a spirituous nightcap. His journey was slow, for a side street that he had to pass through was, like nearly all the side streets of the great city, an abomination of desolation, a tempestuous sea of frozen, dirty snow, impassable by all save pedestrians, and scarcely by them. Pinchas was glad of his cane; an alpenstock would not have been superfluous. But the theatre with its brilliantly-lighted lobby and flamboyant posters restored his spirits; the curtain was already up, and a packed mass filled the house from roof to floor. Rebuffed by the janitors, Pinchas haughtily asked for Goldwater. Goldwater was on the stage, and could not see him. But nothing could down the poet, whose head seemed to swell till it touched the gallery. This great theatre was his, this mighty audience his to melt and fire.

'I will await him in a box,' he said.

'There's no room,' said the usher.

Pinchas threw up his head. 'I am the author of "Hamlet"!'

The usher winced as at a blow. All his life he had heard vaguely of 'Hamlet'—as a great play that was acted on Broadway. And now here was the author himself! All the instinctive snobbery of the Ghetto toward the grand world was excited. And yet this seedy figure conflicted painfully with his ideas of the uptown type. But perhaps all dramatists were alike. Pinchas was bowed forward.

In another instant the theatre was in an uproar. A man in a comfortable fauteuil had been asked to accommodate the distinguished stranger and had refused.

'I pay my dollar—what for shall I go?''But it is the author of "Hamlet"!'

'My money is as good as his.'

'But he doesn't pay.'

'And I shall give my good seat to a Schnorrer!'

'Sh! sh!' from all parts of the house, like water livening, not killing, a flame. From every side came expostulations in Yiddish and American. This was a free republic; the author of 'Hamlet' was no better than anybody else. Goldwater, on the stage, glared at the little poet.

At last a compromise was found. A chair was placed at the back of a packed box. American boxes are constructed for publicity, not privacy, but the other dozen occupants bulked between him and the house. He could see, but he could not be seen. Sullen and mortified he listened contemptuously to the play.

It was, indeed, a strange farrago, this romantic drama with which the vast audience had replaced the Sabbath pieties, the home-keeping ritual of the Ghetto, in their swift transformation to American life. Confined entirely to Jewish characters, it had borrowed much from the heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically true only in its minor characters, which were conceived and rendered with wonderful realism by the gifted actors. And this naturalism was shot through with streaks of pure fantasy, so that kangaroos suddenly bounded on in a masque for the edification of a Russian tyrant. But comedy and fantasy alike were subordinated to horror and tragedy: these refugees from the brutality of Russia and Rumania, these inheritors of the wailing melodies of a persecuted synagogue, craved morbidly for gruesomeness and gore. The 'happy endings' of Broadway would have spelled bankruptcy here. Players and audience made a large family party—the unfailing result of a stable stock company with the parts always cast in the same mould. And it was almost an impromptu performance. Pinchas, from his proximity to the stage, could hear every word from the prompter's box, which rose in the centre of the footlights. The Yiddish prompter did not wait till the players 'dried up'; it was his rÔle to read the whole play ahead of them. 'Then you are the woman who murdered my mother,' he would gabble. And the actor, hearing, invented immediately the fit attitude and emphasis, spinning out with elocutionary slowness and passion the raw material supplied to him. No mechanical crossing and recrossing the stage, no punctilious tuition by your stage-manager—all was inspiration and fire. But to Pinchas this hearing of the play twice over—once raw and once cooked—was maddening.

'The lazy-bones!' he murmured. 'Not thus shall they treat my lines. Every syllable must be engraved upon their hearts, or I forbid the curtain to go up. Not that it matters with this fool-dramatist's words; they are ink-vomit, not literature.'

Another feature of the dialogue jarred upon his literary instinct. Incongruously blended with the Yiddish were elementary American expressions—the first the immigrants would pick up. 'All right,' 'Sure!' 'Yes, sir,' 'Say, how's the boss?' 'Good-bye.' 'Not a cent.' 'Take the elevated.' 'Yup.' 'Nup.' 'That's one on you!' 'Rubber-neck!' A continuous fusillade of such phrases stimulated and flattered the audience, pleased to find themselves on such easy terms with the new language. But to Pinchas the idea of peppering his pure Yiddish with such locutions was odious. The Prince of Palestine talking with a twang—how could he permit such an outrage upon his Hebrew Hamlet?

Hardly had the curtain fallen on the act than he darted through the iron door that led from the rear of the box to the stage, jostling the cursing carpenters, and pushed aside by the perspiring principals, on whom the curtain was rising and re-rising in a continuous roar. At last he found himself in the little bureau and dressing-room in which Goldwater was angrily changing his trousers. Kloot, the actor-manager's factotum, a big-nosed insolent youth, sat on the table beside the telephone, a peaked cap on his head, his legs swinging.

'Son of a witch! You come and disturb all my house. What do you want?' cried Goldwater.

'I want to talk to you about rehearsals.'

'I told you I would let you know when rehearsals began.'

'But you forgot to take my address.'

'As if I don't know where to find you!'

Kloot grinned. 'Pinchas gets drinks from all the cafÉ,' he put in.

'They drink to the health of "Hamlet,"' said Pinchas proudly.

'All right; Kloot's gotten your address. Good-evening.'

'But when will it be? I must know.'

'We can't fix it to a day. There's plenty of money in this piece yet.'

'Money—bah! But merit?''You fellows are as jealous as the devil.'

'Me jealous of kangaroos! In Central Park you see giraffes—and tortoises too. Central Park has more talent than this scribbler of yours.'

'I doubt if there's a bigger peacock than here,' murmured Goldwater.

'I'll write you about rehearsals,' said Kloot, winking at Goldwater.

'But I must know weeks ahead—I may go lecturing. The great continent calls for me. In Chicago, in Cincinnati——'

'Go, by all means,' said Goldwater. 'We can do without you.'

'Do without me? A nice mess you will make of it! I must teach you how to say every line.'

'Teach me?' Goldwater could hardly believe his ears.

Pinchas wavered. 'I—I mean the company. I will show them the accent—the gesture. I'm a great stage-manager as well as a great poet. There shall be no more prompter.'

'Indeed!' Goldwater raised the eyebrow he was pencilling. 'And how are you going to get on without a prompter?'

'Very simple—a month's rehearsals.'

Goldwater turned an apoplectic hue deeper than his rouge.

Kloot broke in impishly: 'It is very good of you to give us a month of your valuable time.'

But Goldwater was too irate for irony. 'A month!' he gasped at last. 'I could put on six melodramas in a month.'

'But "Hamlet" is not a melodrama!' said Pinchas, shocked.'Quite so; there is not half the scenery. It's the scenery that takes time rehearsing, not the scenes.'

The poet was now as purple as the player. 'You would profane my divine work by gabbling through it with your pack of parrots!'

'Here, just you come off your perch!' said Kloot. 'You've written the piece; we do the rest.' Kloot, though only nineteen and at a few dollars a week, had a fine, careless equality not only with the whole world, but even with his employer. He was now, to his amaze, confronted by a superior.

'Silence, impudent-face! You are not talking to Radsikoff. I am a Poet, and I demand my rights.'

Kloot was silent from sheer surprise.

Goldwater was similarly impressed. 'What rights?' he observed more mildly. 'You've had your twenty dollars. And that was too much.'

'Too much! Twenty dollars for the masterpiece of the twentieth century!'

'In the twenty-first century you shall have twenty-one dollars,' said Kloot, recovering.

'Make mock as you please,' replied the poet superbly. 'I shall be living in the fifty-first century even. Poets never die—though, alas! they have to live. Twenty dollars too much, indeed! It is not a dollar a century for the run of the play.'

'Very well,' said Goldwater grimly. 'Give them back. We return your play.'

This time it was the poet that was disconcerted. 'No, no, Goldwater—I must not disappoint my printer. I have promised him the twenty dollars to print my Hebrew "Selections from Nietzsche."''You take your manuscript and give me my money,' said Goldwater implacably.

'Exchange would be a robbery. I will not rob you. Keep your bargain. See, here is the printer's letter.' He dragged from a tail-pocket a mass of motley manuscripts and yellow letters, and laid them beside the telephone as if to search among them.

Goldwater waved a repudiating hand.

'Be not a fool-man, Goldwater.' The poet's carneying forefinger was laid on his nose. 'I and you are the only two people in New York who serve the poetic drama—I by writing, you by producing.'

Goldwater still shook his head, albeit a whit appeased by the flattery.

Kloot replied for him: 'Your manuscript shall be returned to you by the first dustcart.'

Pinchas disregarded the youth. 'But I am willing you shall have only a fortnight's rehearsals. I believe in you, Goldwater. I have always said, "The only genius on the Yiddish stage is Goldwater." Klostermann—bah! He produces not so badly, but act? My grandmother's hen has a better stage presence. And there is Davidoff—a voice like a frog and a walk like a spider. And these charlatans I only heard of when I came to New York. But you, Goldwater—your fame has blown across the Atlantic, over the Carpathians. I journeyed from Cracow expressly to collaborate with you.'

'Then why do you spoil it all?' asked the mollified manager.

'It is my anxiety that Europe shall not be disappointed in you. Let us talk of the cast.'

'It is so early yet.''"The early bird catches the worm."'

'But all our worms are caught,' grinned Kloot. 'We keep our talent pinned on the premises.'

'I know, I know,' said Pinchas, paling. He saw Mrs. Goldwater tripping on saucily as Ophelia.

'But we don't give all our talent to one play,' the manager reminded him.

'No, of course not,' said Pinchas, with a breath of hope.

'We have to use all our people by turns. We divide our forces. With myself as Hamlet you will have a cast that should satisfy any author.'

'Do I not know it?' cried Pinchas. 'Were you but to say your lines, leaving all the others to be read by the prompter, the house would be spellbound, like Moses when he saw the burning bush.'

'That being so,' said Goldwater, 'you couldn't expect to have my wife in the same cast.'

'No, indeed,' said Pinchas enthusiastically. 'Two such tragic geniuses would confuse and distract, like the sun and the moon shining together.'

Goldwater coughed. 'But Ophelia is really a small part,' he murmured.

'It is,' Pinchas acquiesced. 'Your wife's tragic powers could only be displayed in "Hamlet" if, like another equally celebrated actress, she appeared as the Prince of Palestine himself.'

'Heaven forbid my wife should so lower herself!' said Goldwater. 'A decent Jewish housewife cannot appear in breeches.'

'That is what makes it impossible,' assented Pinchas. 'And there is no other part worthy of Mrs. Goldwater.'

"You compare my wife to a Kangaroo!"ToList