The Human Touch

THE other evening, at a small theatre in the upper East Side, I saw an amateur company give an English version of a tragedy by David Pinski under the title of “The Zwei Family.” This company did as well as its lim-ted resources permitted, but it was rather a pity that one was so profoundly con-Harry Satpeter scious during the performance of the limitation of the resources, rather than of the resources. However, no service would be rendered either by charitable comment or by severity in criticism, for by the time your eyes light on this column, the play will have completed what we shall refer to, without a smirk, as its rum. Actors might find charitable comment rather tepid comfort by the time they see this, and there is no audience for whose protection it will be accessary to set up a warning sign of criticism.

The Forum Theatre, as the or-ganizntion which presented the Pinski drama is called, did me the service, at the very, very least, of sending me back to a battered and much marked up book in which, sixteen years ago, I had firs read the play performed under the title of “The Zwen Family.” Its title in the book si “The Last Jew,” a much more faithful title, and the book in which it appears is known simply as “Three Plays,” Not only does “The Last Jew” mean more to me now than it did sixteen years ago, but it must mean more now to any Jew than it meant sixteen years ago-simply because of the course of events. Hitlerism has given it a new meaning and a fresh accent. The place of the play is “the exile” and the time “a bitter one for the Jews” but while you localize the setting and the time to a small village in pre-war Russia, you can, at the same time, universalize it. But only to a limited extent.

The playwright”s foreword reads: “This is not a pogrom tragedy, but the tragedy of a sole survivor, the tragedy of a moribund religion, of a crumbling world-philosophy. Who can say that this is exclusively Jewish?”

I can, and do. The subject matter of the play and the nature of the tragedy, no matter over how wide an area or deep a period you stretch it, is Jewish. That Is what I mean by limited universality. “The Last Jew” is so Jewish that it loses reality by being given in any tongue but Yiddish. We have the illusion-and I have shared in it-that to be great a play or a novel must have a universal application. I don’t see why that should be so. The record of a life in a small village can yield a great work of art, while a book which takes the world for its setting and all history for its time may be shallow. The village pond may be deep enough to drown in.

The play dramatizes for us the conflicting loyalties that divide the Jew. It dramatizes that situation for us by centering the action around a pogrom, supposed to be raging off-stage and of which we get occasional signs and symbols, a pogrom the consciousness of which motivates the act, the word and the suggested thought of every character.

Chief of these is the man against whose eager martyrdom for the Torah and the Synagogue every other character seems unworthy, if not utterly contemptible. He is Reb Mayshe, the town’s preacher, the patriarchal grandfather of the Zwei family, who rushes off to defend the synagogue at the first alarm, only to find it deserted, except by two worthless idlers, and who strives in vain to summon enough Jews to defend it. His faith is ancient and single, but unshared. He is the last Jew and the only Jew and the crisis proclaimed his valor and his purity as it exposed the cowardice and meanness of his fel-low-Jews. And while exposing their unwillingness to defend their heritage, it exposed also their true loyalties-the things held by them more precious than their Law.

Lipman, the Zionist, and Reuben, the Socialist, the grandsons, were not cowards; they were willing to fight, but to fight in their Bund, their self-defense corps. They rush to the defense of human beings, Jews, but not a Scroll. Leon, the third grandson, is the symbol of the young poetic unbeliever, who is moved by the beauty of his grandfather’s singleness of purpose, but cannot share it. In Eda, granddaughter of Reb May-she by a previous marriage, we look upon a symbol of that Jew who takes refuge in the baptismal font. Knowledge of that ultimate humiliation is spared “the last Jew.” In Yekef, Reb Mayshe’s son and the father of the three boys, we see the petty trader in the Jew regnant; the man who, when the pogrom break3 out, must save his possessions with his skin. His loyalty is to the store.

There is the fat synagogue idler, whose loyalty is to food and whose pretended love of Torah is a device to gain food and shelter without toil. His thin companion is a less well-fed version of himself. They are Jewish versions of hoboes. But the dramatist’s most cutting exposition is reserved for Hershman, the banker, who, at the height of the pogrom, is secure in his home, guarded by soldiers considerately lent by His Excellency, a home to which he has invited the Rabbi and his Dayons in order to decide on a plan of action for the future. And their plan is to stamp out Socialism and secular learning among the young, to suppress Jewish newspapers and prohibit attendance at secular schools, to make of the Jews in the community such good and harmless citizens that even His Excellency will approve. When Reb Mayshe descends on this group and calls on them to leave their shelter and help defend the synagogue, they talk of their plan for the future, for which they receive as reward a classic curse. When I heard the actor who took the role of Hershman say the usual thing about the need for action, not words, I saw before me a long line of Jewish orators and editors, leaders of Jewry who have been saying the same thing ever since the beginning of this century, which is probably the true time of the play, and have said it, since the time of Moses, who did do something, after all, and will say it for a long time to come, so long, indeed, as non-Jewish loyalties, necessarily, cut athwart Jewish loyalties.

David Pinski does not halt his exposure of the Jewish community in the study of the banker, but continues remorselessly to the very end, with the Jew who puts the sign of the cross in the window, with the Jews too deeply engaged in reading their Benedictions and their Psalms in their forest shelter to heed the Reb’s call. There is the young Jew who must rash his girl-friend to shelter and can’t be troubled with the Torah and the Yellow Jew who has his three little ones, down to the beggar woman, the demented one, the only one willing to share the Reb’s lot.