The Human Touch

Within a week the English version of “Yoshe Kalb” had its run on Broadway and was taken off the boards. Because this was the week during which I took a holiday, the pleasure, or the perturbation, of seeing a performance was not mine. When the English version was announced I said to myself, said I: Mr. Frohman is making a mistake. “Yoshe Kalb” is not for Broadway. I would have been delighted had I been proven wrong, even to myself, and Mr. Frohman right. There is no particular sense in conducting an autopsy. Most of the Gentile Jews whose presence might have been counted on to bring patronage to the theatre had already seen the Yiddish version, even if they did not understand it fully. I recall that on one occasion I saw “Yoshe Kalb” at the Yiddish Art Theatre, Elmer Rice, the playwright, was sitting behind me and getting as much sense out of the performance as a faithful reading of the English program notes and the help of a volunteer translator who was sitting at his side, could furnish him. It would seem to me, off-hand, that when the English version was announced there would be enough Fannie Hursts and Elmer Rices who had not seen the Yiddish version on free passes who might be willing to hand over a couple of dollar bills at the box office to see an English version.

There was of course enough precedence for the belief that a play that had succeeded in Yiddish should make at least an equal success in English. Take “Bronx Express,” for example, and, more to the point, “The Dybbuk,” as somber in its way as “Bronx Express” was humorous and whimsical. And as for “The Dybbuk,” not only was it a success in English, but people travelled to what seemed to me then to be the end of the East Side-the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street-to make it a success. I recall that it was on a New Year’s Eve that I saw the Neighborhood Playhouse performance, and sitting then in orchestra seats which had been paid for, too, I found myself surrounded on all sides by men in dress clothes and women in evening wraps, and during a lull in one of the nerve racking epileptic scenes-that’s how cheerful an opus it was-I heard one of the dress-shirted gentry mutter to-his wife, presumably: “This is a fine show to drag a man to on New Year’s Eve !” You see, it had become “the thing” to see the Dybbuk in English as it had, more recently, become the fashion to see “Yoshe, Kalb” in Yiddish. “My bones,” so to speak, told me that it would not become the thing to see it in English. I thought it rather noble and Quixotic for Mr. Frohman to try to bring a wider audience to this Yiddish folk play, and I regret the failure too much to want to say, “I told you so.”

At the time the English theatre public was staying away in droves from the English version of “Yoshe Kalb” I was one of a small group of auditors assembled one night in what might be called the salon so ably conducted by Mr. Goldberg at Lakewood. I am told that this Mr. Goldberg is well known as an entertainer in the Jewish world, despite the fact that he has made rather few theatre appearances, if any. It is possible that the nature of this humor, so effective among a few hundred, might evaporate in a large theatre. I myself don’t think so, for Mr. Goldberg strikes the ludicrous note so ef- fectively that I could see a thousand auditors doubling up with laughter as easily as the several dozens he was entertaining. Most of his stories were descriptions of situations which had arisen in his career of summer and winter hotel keeper, and many of his most humorous verbal sketches were descriptions of curious individuals whom he had met. Perhaps he embrodered here and there, but in our delighted laughter we more than forgave him for the liberties he may have taken. If ever you meet the estimable Mr. Goldberg, in Lakewoood, or elsewhere, ask him to tell you the story of the bearded Jew who got paid in merry-go-round rides on Coney Island for the groceries he had sold; or the story of the merry widow who found two bearded Jews sleeping in the room in which she had put her boy to bed. Or, in fact any story. For two hours he kept reeling off story after story–each one a raconteur’s gem–and at the end showed far less sign of exhaustion than any one of his auditors.