The Human Touch

THE PERFORMANCE at the Yiddish Art Theatre was over. We were plodding up the aisle toward the exit, meeting a tributary flow of people descending the balcony staircase when, just in front of us a#arge Jewish woman, spotting a neighbor or friend coming down the stairs, yelled: “Hello, Mrs. Vashingtone !”

The play was Sholom Aleichem’s “Stempenvu”, but the audience was much worse. It was the worst audience I can recall since a certain memorable Sunday evening at the Palace when a long outdated open atic#contra far broader than she was tall, insisted on singing and ac#ing that come on role of Carme which, in her slimmer days, had brought her glory. While she san# the audience guffawed its mer# ment and cat-called its contemp and while it guffawed and cat# called the singer’s eyes glittered behind the forced stage smile, like the eyes of an animal at bay.

The audience at Second Avenue and Twelfth Street the other evening was not so bad, but it was much worse than the play deserved. The worst offenders were women, one horsey group of whom kept braying through the most inappropriate passages of the paly, while others, scattered through the orchestra, felt obliged to maintain a running commentary on the action. Dear old Walt Whitman said or wrote once that before you can have great poetry, you must have have great audiences, too. The wonder is that the Yiddish stage in New York is as good as it is with the invaluabl# help of Maurice Schwartz, in view of the audiences for which it is designed. This is not me being snobbish, this is me being peeved. # dare play it should triumph over the rudest impulses of even an East Side audience.

You see, when I attend a Yiddish play, I must needs concentrate on the action and the dialogue, for althouth Yiddish is my mother tongue, English has usurped its place and when I hear a long flow of Yiddish, or attempt to express myself in that tongue, I hear, or speak, with all I’ve got, not merely with marginal or casual attention. And I think that in spite of the audience, I “got” Stempenyu all right.

Stempenyu, as all you experts in Sholom Aleichem probably know, is the romantic village fiddler and leader of the bant which performs at weddings and such-like cermonies in the meighboring villages and hamlets. His wife loves him dearly but Stempenyu has a roving eye and a gallant heart, and wherever he goes there is a flutter in the dovecotes and disturbance in the hearts of husbands. I am afraid, however, that the man who plays the title role for Mr. Schwartz is soulful rather than Don Juanish and most unconvincing as a fiddler. In fact, the best moments of the play are the broadly humorous, when Stempenyu (Lazar Freed) isn’t about, and Maurice Schwartz is. Mr. Schwartz has the happy faculty of shining even in the most minor of roles, despite certain obvious manmerisms.

After the first riotous and confusing scene, which meant almost nothing to me, I managed to get the drift of the play and relished it as much as that confounded andience would permit me to. Perhaps the most delightful dumor is in the scene nothing short of farce. A bad second is the scene wherein Stempenyu and his stooge try to compose a love letter but a better scene because Schwartz is on the stage and working at it most of the time ist that conducted in Rochel’s bedroom, Rochel being the wife of Moishe Mendel (Schwartz) with whom Stempenyu is in love. The play as a whole is such a curious combinadon of broad farce and pathos-accommon failing, I understand, of most Jewish drama-that the average audience itn’s supple or obliging enough to know at what point it must stop laughing and start crying. And for those who wish to see reflected on a New York stage some of the customs and manners and ways of thought of the Old World, I most heartily commend an evening of Stempenyu-provided the audience doesn’t attempt to compete with the actors for attention.

BORIS DEUTSCH, PAINTER

There is more than whiff of the Old World and, for me, a vague suggestion of Marc Chagall in the paintings of Boris Deutsch, which are going to be on exhibition here, beginning Feb. 3, at Seligmann’s 3 East 51st Street. In this origins Deutsch is from the East, but he comes to us out of the West, which seems to have given him a considerable amount of recognition. In fact, he has cut quite a streak through the Western museums. He has been exhibited by and-sold to public galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco Berkeley, Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Portland and Oakland. He has received prizes and honors of various kinds. Which is doing rather well for a young man who was born in the village of Krasnogorka, near Riga, who studied in the Bloom Academy of that city when he was fourteen and continued to learn about art in Berlin and whose canvasses reflect concern not with California sunset, but with European beth-hamidrashes.

In was in 1916 that he came to the Western world, landing in Seattle and three years later, in Los Angeles, he became an American citizen. His first exhibition was in 1926 in the Los Angeles Museum and thereafter exhibitions followed thick and fast, not to mention sales, by which, after all, an artist lives. His subject matter consists of Talmud students, rabbis, Jewish women, Jewish ceremonies, synagogue scenes and Jewish types redolent of the Old World, copies of some of which will be reporduced in The Bulletin from time to time. Perhaps among, his most interesting, canvasses is a Jewish version of Christ which has an authentic stamp, however much it may shock those for whom there is no other Christ but that painted by the masters of the Italian and Spanish Renaissance. His women painted from models whom he found to hand prohably around Riga, have a Biblical Palestinian aura about them.