41 February 6th, 1947
Link to Forverts edition
A leap from light comedies and merry operettas to serious dramas. – The sad end of the great artist Mogulesko and the legacy he left behind.
Of all the Yiddish actresses who found themselves going through a big or small family tragedy or who had to deal with infidelity, Bessie Thomashefsky stood out from the very beginning. Not only her friends but also her enemies had to admit that, just like an independent man, she too was an independent woman, and her career on the stage didn’t depend on any man.
When she stood on her own two legs after parting ways with Boris Thomashefsky, her comedy Khantshe in Amerike made such a splash that she became a brand of her own. Whenever business was going poorly in one theater or another and they needed some major attraction to bring cash into the box office, they brought in Bessie Thomashefsky to put on Khantshe in Amerike with her troupe, and they brought in a lot of money.
Even the National Theater, where Boris Thomashefsky played with his troupe, brought in Bessie Thomashefsky to perform Khantshe in Amerike at the end of the 1913 season1. For her, this was of course a great triumph because it meant that business in the National Theater without her wasn’t as good as it used to be. And it didn’t matter if that was really true or not. The main point was that’s how it was interpreted.
Louie Goldberg, the manager of the National Theater at that time, engaged Bessie Thomashefsky to play Khantshe in Amerike for no more than a week. Thomashefsky himself wasn’t involved. He wasn’t in town at all at that time, because he had run off somewhere with Regina Zuckerberg. In the theater circles, people said that the love between them was so great that a very interesting novel could be written about it.
Many young Yiddish actresses were jealous of the prima donna Regina Zuckerberg because Thomashefsky had a generous hand - he conducted himself like a magnate, and money was no object for him. In awe, people told of the expensive gifts he bought for her, how he doted on her, and how he would do anything in the world for her. And along with their jealousy, they also slandered her. When someone caught wind of some gossip or slander, they brought it straight to Bessie Thomashefsky as if they wanted to show her what a good friend they were.
The sworn flatterers no longer flattered her as the wife of a star, but indeed as a star in her own right because Bessie had emerged as a self-made independent star herself.
Bessie Thomashefsky was paid very well during the week she was engaged to play in Thomashefsky’s National Theater - she made a lot of money in that one week alone. The income at the box office itself was huge, and this made the talented actress so pleased that she forgot about her grievances and the wrongs done to her, and she was really in seventh heaven. Triumphantly, she told to her close friends - “You see, they’re not coming to see the prima donna Regina Zuckerberg in Thomashefsky’s theater - they’re coming to see Bessie Thomashefsky.”
So, we put on the comedy Khantshe in Amerike. When Louie Goldberg saw me in the role of the elevator man, he wrote a letter to Thomashefsky saying that, in his opinion, they shouldn’t let me go at the end of the run but they should hire me to play in the National Theater for the next season. He told me this himself, and we signed a contract for me to play in Thomashefsky’s National Theater during the 1913/1914 season.
Boris Thomashefsky started the next season with a bang. In addition to the prima donna Regina Zuckerberg, he hired two more prima donnas, and he hastily wrote a new operetta called Dos Farblondzete Shefele, and he hired the two composers Perlmutter and Wohl to write the music.
They went all out for this show, including something entirely brand new - they build a bridge, a long bridge, that stretched all the way from the stage to the theater exit. And on this bridge was a choir with young women, with me between them leading all the “tsoyn kodoshim”2 over the long, narrow bridge. Such a thing was “not done,” as we said in our theater dialect.
It was thought that all the bells and whistles like this in Dos Farblondzete Shefele would make the show a big hit with audiences, and the show would of course play for the entire season and we’d make “golden business” with it. But audiences weren’t impressed at all. Dos Farblondzete Shefele, nebech, was a failure. Afterwards, we tried to put on other new operettas, all written hastily by Thomashefsky, and we put them on just as hastily as he wrote them. Each time, people thought that this one would surely be the one to have great success, but they were all failures, and we really didn’t know what to do next.
It seemed that Thomashefsky had suddenly lost all of his luck. In the theater kibitzarnie3, people cracked jokes at his expense, and made wisecracks that there was only one person who could save him now - Bessie Thomashefsky.
And Bessie was filled with joy when she learned about these jokes.
As it usually went in the Yiddish theater when things weren’t going well, we threw ourselves from one extreme to another - no longer playing operettas with all their “dances or marches,” as was the style in those times, we bought Sholem Asch’s serious literary drama Undzer Gloybn. With the full certainty that this one would of course bring us great success and would attract a large audience, roles were quickly handed out, rehearsals were held, and before we knew it, we put on Asch’s piece. I remember that at first, I was not given a role in this play, but when I complained and demanded that I too be given a role to play in Asch’s piece, Thomashefsky gave me some small role of one of the in-laws, and the critics greatly praised my performance.
Because my role was so well regarded, I really wanted the piece to be a huge success and play for a long time. But the piece as a whole was not a big hit with Jewish audiences. It was a huge failure and only ran for a short time.
Sholem Asch’s piece Undzer Gloybn was a powerful one, but it was constructed in such a way that, willy-nilly, the goyishe characters were very sympathetic, but the Jewish characters were not. As I recall, the play was about a Jewish girl who falls in love with a sheygets4 and converts to Christianity and marries him. Trouble arises when she requests that her Jewish mother and father come to see her; she wants to see them while she is in labor, a very difficult labor, and she is sure that if they don’t come, she’ll die of heartache. But the converted daughter’s parents will not go to her, even when the goyishe in-laws go to them and implore them to show mercy and compassion and save their own daughter - their own flesh and blood - from death. But they show no mercy and do not go to her, and she dies of heartache and resentment.
That is the “essence” of the drama, as it is etched in my memory. And it could be that because the goyim were sympathetic characters but the Jewish ones were not, Jewish audiences found it unpleasant, and the play was a failure.
It was in the 1914 season that Mogulesko passed away.
He died on the 4th of February 1914. His last residence in New York was a furnished room on a side street off of Second Avenue. This was the “home” of the great Yiddish artist who even to this day has no equal on the Yiddish stage. He could not afford a better home because over the course of his illness which drained him so thoroughly, he had to be judicious with his expenditures because, as I’ve already told you, annual benefit performances were his only source of income.
He was 56 years old when he died. And up until the last minute of his life, he had full cognitive function. He knew that he was dying. He often talked to me about it when I would visit him on his deathbed. And here, I want to mention what they said in the theater circles after his death about his relationship with me and his opinion of me: It was said that when he was once asked which comedian on the Yiddish stage should be his legacy and take over his roles, he answered that the only Yiddish comedian who he would leave his roles and legacy to was Sam Kestin, and no other.
That’s what they said.
And as long as I live, I will not forget the pleasure that I had every time I saw him in his roles, and every time I played together with him on the stage.
It was an honor to know Mogulesko and be his friend. It was an honor for a Yiddish actor to live in the same generation as Mogulesko.
Even now, we have never had an artist as great as Mogulesko on our Yiddish stage.
May his name ever remain among us! זאָל זיין נאָמען אויף אייביק בלײַבן צווישען אונז!