Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin

5. The Jewish King Lear

174 5 The Jewish King Lear Not a tie, not a bond, but it is loosed here—every good and ancient thing. What in our Russia stood like the eternal rocks, Faith, Family, over here they thaw—yes, thaw, melt and dance away. Dissolution! Chaos! —Jacob Gordin, The Kreutzer Sonata my great-grandfather spent the summer of 1906 embroiled in yet another dispute over the translated Kreutzer Sonata. He insisted he had given the rights to Blanche Walsh, whose producers Wagenhals and Kemper were planning a Broadway opening. His former acolyte Bertha Kalish, however, was going ahead with her own English-language production, produced by Harrison Grey Fiske. The feud was reported in the American press; one of the headlines cried, “Agog over Kreutzer Sonata—East Side Theatergoers Side with Gordin and Kalich.” Which means that they took one side or the other. Gordin, in a furious letter to the rival producer Fiske, wrote that the man has done him the honor of turning his dramas into dollars. But how can the producer grant himself the power to issue an English translation, when even the Yiddish text of Gordin’s plays is not to be altered? “When writing a play I try to the utmost of my humble powers,” he explained, not humbly at all, “to characterize minutely all the participants in the cast, to portray their inner life, to create the atmosphere, to make clear the dramatic situation. For this reason every line, every word, has its importance.” But, he protests, Kalish’s husband Spachner has sold the right to adapt the play although he has no right to do so. “Probably you do not know the full meaning of the phrase ‘to adapt’ in the vernacular of a theatrical man- The Jewish King Lear 175 ager,” he writes. “It means that he hires a butcher and sets him to chop and cut the play at will. Meanwhile, he is spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to make the play cheap.” I think many modern playwrights would agree with Gordin’s definition of “to adapt.” Blanche Walsh’s production, with Gordin’s full support, opened at the Manhattan Theater on August 13, attended by many of the writer’s friends and associates including Morris Winchevsky, the star Keni Lipzin and her husband Michael Mintz, labor leader Joseph Barondess, editor Louis Miller, and dramatists Kobrin and Libin, but not, it seems, by the playwright himself. David Kessler, who had finally thrown his support behind rival Bertha Kalish, was also not there, nor were Gordin’s enemies Paley of the Daily Page or Abraham Cahan. The event, in one of the few favorable reviews, “marked the opening of the present dramatic season in New York. The play is notable chiefly as the work of a singularly gifted playwright, and as a type of a school of drama with which, as yet, the American public is almost totally unacquainted.” Unlike the politely enthusiastic Chicago reviews, however, many of the New York notices were lukewarm, except for the one in the New York Times, which was virulent. Under the play’s title was written, unequivocally , “An Offensive Theme Which is Handled with No Great Skill. THEATRICAL MIRE AND MUCK. Use of Disinfectant Strongly Recommended for this Latest Effort in Stage Sensationalism.” In the face of all sorts of threatened legal proceedings, Jacob Gordin’s so-called domestic drama was produced last night at the Manhattan Theater . The play is an offense against decency. It cannot be excused even on that ground of last resort—that it is good art, and, therefore, to be considered outside the pale of the commonly accepted conventionalities. Like most plays based upon transgressions of the great moral law, it is not without occasional flashes of power and moments of pathos, but these are almost buried beneath of the mass of shallow talk and cheap sentimentality. Perhaps it is a badge of honor to be massacred, at least once, by the Times. This same year Strauss’s opera of Oscar Wilde’s salacious Salome, mounted by the Metropolitan Opera, met such a hail of protest and such vicious reviews that it was forced instantly to close. The conservative Yiddish press seized on the English-language re- 176 Finding the Jewish Shakespeare views. “Our Shame on the English Stage,” proclaimed one; “Smut and Anti-Semitism as ‘Art.’ ” Undaunted, the Kalish production opened at the Lyric a...