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7 Musical and Dramatic Societies: Amateur Performers and Audiences
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a 7 b Musical and Dramatic Societies: Amateur Performers and Audiences In the shtetls that dotted the Pale of Jewish Settlement and the Kingdom of Poland, it often seemed as though every young Jewish man and woman was striving to become cultured and modern. “My shtetl longed for beauty,” wrote Moyshe Olgin in his nostalgic portrait of an anonymous Ukrainian town. “It was a dark life with filthy roads, damp houses, earthen floors, smoky ovens, shoes without rubber, pillows without covers, a dinner of bread with a bit of herring . . . but in the midst of this bleak life, people thirsted after beauty, refinement and elegance. We envied the wealthy not for their fortunes, but for their education, for the good life.”1 Their image of what this meant was rooted in an imagined urban milieu often derived largely from newspaper accounts and novels. For Olgin, this image was derived from stories of famous and fictional cantors and klezmer musicians—Nisi Belzer, the Vilner Balebesl, Yosele Solovey, and Stempenyu (the latter two the subjects of Sholem Aleichem novellas)—as well as painters, singers, and performers. Upwardly mobile Jews often looked beyond Ukraine and Belarus to the Russian metropolises in the east or to the Polish, German, French, and American capitals in the west for inspiration about what it meant to be cultured. In the vision of modernity they received from popular culture, leisure and performing arts loomed large. No respectable young Jewish man or woman could expect to be perceived as modern unless they had mastered some basic cultural performance skills: dance, music, or theater. Those who did not feel they had the natural talent could enroll in classes with local tutors. In the last decade of the nineteenth century in Bobruisk, for instance, a local Jewish drama circle organized dance classes for young men and women. According to Hamelits, “They danced even on the Ninth of Av fast, and not only young Jewish women, but women and men together.”2 In fact, the practice of hiring dance teachers was so popular by the early twentieth century that Der fraynd published a warning about “a dance teacher, a Jew” who was traveling around towns signing up people for dance classes, taking their money, and then fleeing town without providing the lessons. He had picked up 400 rubles in Aleksandrovsk (Kovno Province) alone. “The community must beware,” warned the paper.3 Musical and Dramatic Societies 197 Others sought a route to modernity through musical performance. Sholem Aleichem recalled his desire as a young man to become a kener, an expert in all things: To learn to play the fiddle was in those days part of the program of knowledge. It was equal to other things, and belonged with other studies, such as French and German, that a father would teach his child. It had no practical purpose, but a father who wanted his child to be accomplished needed to have him learn everything. Almost all the fine boys in town studied the fiddle.4 As it became more possible to form groups to present theatrical and musical performances, groups of young people got together in the shtetl and formed amateur drama circles. In Taurage (Kovno Province) a correspondent for Der fraynd wrote, “Our shtetl is in the midst of a major competition. The competition is not in the market, though, but on the stage.” Three competing groups of amateur performers were trying to perform three different plays.5 Amateur drama circles were, in the words of Der fraynd, “very much in style” in 1908. Throughout Poland and the Pale, local small-town intellectuals were emulating the big city professionals by establishing their own dance groups, orchestras, choirs, and theaters. Amateur theater was not new to the Eastern European Jewish world. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, performance of theatrical pieces had been a popular form of entertainment and leisure in many Jewish communities. Even during the period of the ban onYiddish theater, amateurs continued to perform in small shtetls throughout the Pale. Unfortunately, few sources about these theaters have survived as they tended to avoid public advertising and were rarely mentioned in the national press. Many probably followed the example of Mordukhe Rybalskii, whose troupe performed Goldfadn’s Sorceress in Bialystok “in a private lodging without any advertisements and without the approval of the local authorities. Announcements about the performance were spread only in the synagogue and tickets distributed by hand.”6 One colorful description of how a group of...