by Curt Leviant
Curt Leviant’s sixth work of fiction is the two-novella collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara. His most recent book is a translation of Yudl Rosenberg’s classic 1909 Hebrew novel, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague.
Special to NJ Jewish News

January 10, 2008

edited by Benjamin Harshav, Yale University Press, 199 pages, $45

In retrospect — given the inimical, even occasionally murderous, attitude of the Soviet authorities to Yiddish and Hebrew culture, notably from the late 1930s to the death of Stalin in 1953 — the creation, existence, and success of the Moscow Yiddish Theater was a near miracle.

Founded by Alexander Granovsky in Petersburg in 1919, it would soon be heralded as one of the supreme avant-garde theaters in Europe, as Harshav’s illuminating book, The Moscow Yiddish Theater, makes abundantly clear. When Granovsky moved his studio theater to Moscow, it attracted the great actor Solomon Mikhoels and artist Marc Chagall, who created murals, scenery, and costumes for the theater, permanently influencing set design. His famous mural Introduction to Yiddish Theater on one wall and four large paintings, Music, Dance, Literature, and Drama, on the other (all masterworks) were preserved and were shown some years ago at the Guggenheim in New York City.

Granovsky had trained in Berlin with legendary director Max Reinhardt and developed a vision of theater that melded acting, set design, costumes, lighting, music, dance, movement, and gesture — even silence — into an organic whole. Rebelling against Yiddish theatrical kitsch, he worked his ensemble hard, rehearsing plays at least 150 times before presenting them to the public.

The Moscow Yiddish Theater begins with two essays by Harshav, on the Yiddish art theater and on Chagall’s theater murals, and continues with some 20 articles, memoirs, and reviews written by European and Russian luminaries. Many color plates of Chagall’s works and costumes and black-and-white photographs of actors and stage settings enhance the book. It concludes with Barbara Harshav’s translation of two one-act Sholom Aleichem plays, Agents and It’s a Lie, which were presented on the theater’s opening night.

Among the original documents offered is an assessment of the theater by the esteemed German playwright Ernst Toller (who fled Germany when Hitler rose to power), Austrian novelist Joseph Roth (The Radetzky March and Hotel Savoy), and Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam.

Other memoirs are by Granovsky himself, Chagall, and Mikhoels — who accents the friendly spirit that pervaded the company and their respect for their “leader.”

Most revealing are reviews from either visitors to Moscow or critics in Berlin in 1928 when Granovsky’s company went on tour. One critic exclaimed that the Moscow Yiddish Theater “has no equal in Europe,” while noted Berlin critic Alfred Kerr couldn’t stop repeating “This is great art, great art” in his review.

In a 1944 essay written in Yiddish in the United States, where he was living after having escaped occupied France, Chagall recalls that just before the opening-night curtain he was still applying makeup to Mikhoels’ face. Chagall, the surrealist with the wild imagination, looked at Mikhoels and grumbled, “Ah, Solomon, if only you didn’t have your right eye, I could have done so much.” Then Chagall spotted Granovsky bringing an old towel onto the stage. Chagall was furious. An unpainted shmatte? That rag too had to be decorated. But Granovsky, irritated at the artist’s intrusiveness, exploded, “Who is the director here, you or I?”

Chagall never worked for the director again but his influence was lasting — all succeeding artists connected with Granovsky’s theater used Chagallian themes in their sets and costumes. After Granovsky’s 1928 European tour, he did not return again to the Soviet Union with his actors. He staged plays in Germany and was invited to direct the Hebrew Habima Theater, also founded in the Soviet Union about the same time as the Yiddish theater.

Granovsky’s architectonic vision influenced Habima, a company that maintained its innovative edge and modernistic style for decades (and moved to what was then Palestine, eventually becoming Israel’s National Theater). It is fascinating to note that this world-famous theater almost did not come into existence. As we read in Harshav’s book, the notorious Yevsektsiya, an official group of loyalist communist Jews, was viciously opposed to the creation of a “reactionary” Hebrew theater. But supporters appealed to Lenin, who passed the petition on to his commissar for nationalities, who approved the formation of Habima. (By the way, that commissar’s name was Josef Stalin.)

After Granovsky’s departure, Mikhoels directed the Moscow Yiddish State Theater. One of his triumphs was his performance of King Lear. One leading British critic noted that the English stage could not present an adequate production of Lear “because we don’t have actors like Mikhoels.”

One of the book’s beautiful photographs is of Mikhoels and his comic sidekick, Benjamin Zuskin. The photo tugs at one’s heart — years later both would be killed at Stalin’s orders. After Mikhoels’ supposedly accidental death, Stalin gave the beloved actor an elaborate state funeral.

The Moscow Yiddish Theater is a valuable and imaginatively presented work, with a plethora of fascinating source documents. But it should be noted that the book’s authors — described as professors of Hebrew and Slavic literature at Yale (Benjamin Harshav) and a teacher of translation at that same university (Barbara Harshav) — make mistakes pertaining to words and Jewish traditions that would flunk a student in Basic Judaism 101.

For example, in translating the Yiddish name of the theater, Moskver Idisher Melukhisher Teatr, Harshav calls it the “Moscow Yiddish Royal Theater.” If “melukhisher” meant “royal,” no Yiddish theater after the overthrow of the czar would have got off the ground. “Melukhisher” simply means “state” or “national.”

Another example of the type of error found in the book: A footnote on Chagall’s use of the word “Tashlikh” explains: “The ceremony of casting unleavened bread crumbs into the water (a river)” — a boner that magically fuses Rosh Hashana and Passover. (It’s pieces of bread that are cast into water on the first day of the Jewish New Year.)

And, finally, in the Sholom Aleichem play Agents, the hero’s family name is an acronym composed of the Hebrew equivalents of the letters y, k, n, h, z. This widely used “word” is a mnemonic that reminds a Jew that when a festival begins on a Saturday night the order of the blessings is: wine, Kiddush, candle, Havdala, and — not “time” as Harshav renders it — season, the last referring to the prayer thanking God for keeping us alive to celebrate the season. Barbara Harshav reads the acronym as Yokenhaz, a word that, she says, “may suggest a kind of rabbit.” Alas, Yiddish knows no such critter. But at least the translator is on the right track. The actual pronunciation of this word is “yaknehaz,” and it is often jokingly broken into two parts, verb (chasing) and noun (rabbit). In fact, “Yaknehaz” is a favorite of Haggada illustrators, who invariably (on the Kiddush page) draw a picture of a hunter and his dogs chasing a rabbit.