The police authorities in Leipzig have prohibited the production of “Shadows over Harlem”, a negro comedy by Ossip Dymov, a famous Jewish dramatist living in America, because they are afraid that Hitlerists will arrange antisemitie disturbances like those which compelled the play to be taken off when it was produced in Stuttgart a year ago.
“Shadows over Harlem” was produced in Stuttgart in October, 1930, and had to be withdrawn after a few days’ run, because of Hitlerist violence. The Hitlerist leader in Stuttgart, Professor Otto Meier, announced that if the play was not taken off, 21,000 Stuttgart Hitlerists would march to the theatre and would smash up the building.
Herr Bazille, the Minister of Education and Fine Arts in Wurtemburg, of which Stuttgart is the capital, and who is himself a member of the antisemitic German National Party, declared in the Diet in answer to a demand from a Hitlerist Deputy, Professor Morgenthaler, that the Government should prohibit the play, that there was nothing objectionable in it, and he could not, therefore, see why it should be prohibited.
The repeated Hitlerist disorders in the theatre and in the streets outside and the threats of more serious violence compelled the management, however, to announce the withdrawal of the play.
Ossip Dymov is the pen-name of Joseph Perelman, who was born in Bialystock 53 years ago. His early work was in Russian, and it was only in 1912. that he became known as a Jewish writer by his pogrom play, “Shema Israel”, which was translated into Yiddish by A. Goldberg, because Dymov himself did not yet know any Yiddish at that time.
His first Yiddish work appeared in 1913, when he had already settled in America, where he has lived since. He is to-day one of the most important Yiddish playwrights. He has also written several plays in English, one of them “Personalities”, being plagiarised by the American playwright Guy Bolton, who produced it in New York and London as “Polly Preferred”. An action brought by Dymov against Bolton was successful and Bolton was ordered to pay to Dymov all receipts he had obtained on account of the play, a sum amounting to about 200,000 dollars.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
