21 November 28th, 1946
Link to Forverts edition
My wandering around the provinces. – Jacob Gordin comes to St. Louis to stage the play Mirele Efros1 and I perform in the play. – Yiddish actors’ attitudes towards Jacob Gordin.
During the 6 months that we played in Cincinnati and things went well for us, I corresponded from time to time with my old friend Max Karp, and I made him an offer to come to Cincinnati and perform with us.
I thought that it would be good if he joined us. In the letters that I wrote to him, I always mentioned that he wouldn’t need to worry about his children, who he always brought with him, at all because it was more than certain that here with us in Cincinnati, he would definitely find a nice respectable family to take good care of them. The children would feel as though it was their home, and it wouldn’t cost him a lot.
But Karp was always busy traveling all around other cities. It seemed he had no desire to come to us, and when, finally, he did come, it was already getting towards the end of our time in Cincinnati, and things were not going so well for us. Karp immediately took a dislike to Cincinnati and on all the voyle yidn around us, and he insisted that we go with him to Louisville, Kentucky.
– Why have you become so sullen about Cincinnati? - he scowled. - Cincinneti, Cincinn-shmeti… Now, Louisville, Kentucky - that is a city!…
And so we left and went to Louisville, and there we put on several performances, and then something I didn’t expect at all happened…
Just when were playing in Louisville, Tanzman arrived there with his troupe. Nu, as you might expect, competition between us started right away, but that didn’t stop the actors and actresses in both troupes from meeting up and spending time with each other. And it ended with someone from our troupe having an affair with one of Tanzman’s sisters, and she joined into our troupe. We all became close pals with each other, but in the end they all went off together to play in another city and I was left behind, just as if I was a spare part…
Schoengold even tried to stand up for me. But interceding for my wife and I did not help, because the actor’s love affair with Tanzman’s sister - who, by the way, was really quite beautiful - created a situation where the troupe didn’t need me and my wife any longer, and on top of that, there were the usual series of intrigues and reminders of old feuds, so I could no longer be in the troupe.
All these things are very characteristic of the chaos that prevailed in our Yiddish theater world in those days. Nobody had contracts, nobody owed each other anything, you were always subject to the whims of this and that, and it was fairly common that, over some affair that lasted no longer than the Fast of Esther at Purim2, a troupe would go through complete upheaval and completely abandon some actors, who would get left behind…
I really resented that I was treated that way. I felt sorry for myself that I had to part with such good friends as Abba Schoengold, Jacob Frank, and Jakele Cone. But I had no other choice, so my wife and I went back to our family in Philadelphia, the same city where I settled after I arrived in America with a lot of high hopes. We lived off the money we had saved from the good times we had had in Cincinnati, we started preparing and I hoped that I would not go around empty for a long time.
At that time I was already a father of two children. We had a son and a daughter3. And when week after week went by and I still had nothing to show for myself, I became very restless. I must have been restless, because the little sum of money I had saved up in Cincinnati was growing smaller and smaller. It had already “run dry,” as we used to say. I left for New York. Confident that by now people would have heard a lot about me and certainly about the great success I had had in Cincinnati, I went to Thomashefsky, and also to Adler, and asked them to hire me.
Both of them - Thomashefsky and Adler - had indeed heard a lot about me. They knew about the success I had in Cincinnati, because I made sure that they would know about it. Even so, they were not greatly impressed by it; they received me well and complimented me, but they did not hire me.
Coming back from New York with nothing didn’t suit me at all. I just hung around like this for a while until I heard that my old friend Jacob Frank, "der royter"4 as we called him, had also lost his job; He too was pushed out of the troupe over the series of intrigues related to the affair which I mentioned earlier…
When I heard this I was very glad, because he, "der royter", had always stood by me throughout times of hardship. Whenever I was left behind, we always teamed up, and we set off to find our luck in the provinces…
He was always ready to travel, and with him you could act in plays, in sketches, or just fill an evening singing songs of all kinds.
Frank could do anything. He was indeed a good comedian, and there is no doubt in my mind that if he weren’t so negligent and if he had only had more ambition and the desire to work on himself, he would have occupied a more prominent place on our Yiddish stage.
Together with Frank, I left for Cleveland, our wives also joined us. Soon we had a troupe, and we played Joseph Lateiner’s historical operetta called Kiddush Hashem, oder Der Yidisher Minister - a play named with an “or,” as was the style in those days…
Without an “or,” a writer at that time couldn’t make any headlines. And if there was not an “or” in the name of a play, because the writer thought that it was unnecessary, the director of the theater provided one himself…
At that time, we brought the actor Sigmond Weintraub and his wife, the talented actress Rivke Weintraub, down to Cleveland, and we really hit the jackpot with both of them in our small troupe; Weintraub was not only of those actors who was honest in his acting, but also of those people who was honest in his relationships. In addition, he was intelligent, he understood people, he knew how to get along with them, and on top of all his virtues, he always came up with a way to get out of a tricky situation when we needed to work out a new plan.
Together with the Weintraubs, we played in Cleveland for a little while. After that, we traveled around other cities. Like gypsies, we schlepped around to the ends of the land. And when later, as it usually happened, people started to quarrel over some foolishness, I left the troupe. Tanzman let me know that he no longer had a problem with me and that he was ready to let me join, so he invited me to come to him in St. Louis, where he was stationed with a troupe…
Dropping out of a troupe, or joining a troupe in such a manner, was nothing new. Just like actors schlepped around like gypsies, they also fought like gypsies and then reconciled. And when they reconciled, you still couldn’t know how long they would last together, because at any moment someone could easily be out of the troupe - the whole troupe could easily fall apart, and there wouldn’t be anyone left…
In St. Louis, Tanzman handled himself with skill. When business was not so good, he would bring down a star from New York. I remember how once he brought down Madame Keni Liptzin - not alone, but together with the famous dramatist Jacob Gordin.
Madame Liptzin performed in two plays in St. Louis - Grillparzer’s Medea, which Gordin translated into Yiddish, and in Mirele Efros, which he wrote specifically for her. In the play Mirele Efros, I was given the role of younger son Daniel, who the actor Samuel Tobias (Tabatshnikov)5 played when the piece was first staged in New York. Tobias’s name was famous in the Yiddish theater world; he was considered a good actor and a good singer, so I was therefore terrified when I was assigned to play his role, and even moreso in a performance where Jacob Gordin himself will be there. That’s why I really girded myself when I played the role; I really wanted my acting to stand out to the famous dramatist, who made such an impression with his beautiful beard and his poise that all the actors simply trembled before him and had the greatest respect for him. And I was really very pleased when, after the performance, I heard him say to Madame Liptzin in Russian, that “Kestin, who played the young boy Daniel, was very good in the role”…
I feel such high esteem and joy and when I heard this from his own mouth, and I boasted about it to everyone.
And here I want to pass along something that is really worth sharing, because there is a good moral to this story:
This was on a Saturday night, after a performance of Mirele Efros. The audience in the theater then gave Gordin an ovation, and he went up on the stage and bowed, and the theater simply lit up with applause. And all of us, the actors on the stage, felt small amid his greatness…
After the applause died down and the curtain was lowered after the last act, Gordin said that he was interested in going to a Turkish bath…
He asked who wanted to go with him in the Turkish bath, and needless to say, the actors immediately expressed their interest in joining. That was really something - to have the honor of going with Jacob Gordin himself, with the great Yiddish dramatist, to a Turkish bath!…
I was one of the actors who joined him. When we went with him to the Turkish bath, we behaved in a very dignified and serious way, and we approached him like yeshiva students to their teacher. None of us dared utter a word that might be unbecoming to say in front of such a great and famous man…
Even after we had already warmed up in the sauna and sat down in one of the rooms, wrapped in towels, we all behaved very seriously. Even just wearing towels, we still behaved seriously.
And suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, he, Jacob Gordin himself, started telling jokes…
He told us one joke after another until he moved on to completely cynical jokes…
And when we heard that, we simply couldn’t believe our ears and we glanced around at each other…
– Wh-a-a-t? Him too…?
If we hadn’t heard it ourselves, we would have found it difficult to believe such a thing…
And I have to say that after that, we looked at him with completely different eyes, and we started to lose the respect we had had for him before…
This is an idiom (note there is indeed a Fast of Esther) meaning that something does not take a long time or ends quickly/abruptly. So, Sam means that the it didn’t last longer than something that already is over quickly - it was extremely short-lived↩︎
Their daughter Lily was born April 1898 in Cleveland, so we are now in either in late 1898 or 1899↩︎
“the red one”↩︎
Sam writes both last names, so I have as well↩︎