Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté: Zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika by Susanne Korbel (review)

The high-spirited, three-part title of this important study is telling. Susanne Korbel aptly views this revised form of her Jewish Studies doctoral dissertation from Graz University as part of a complement to the intense, decades-long scholarship of Viennese turn-of-the-twentieth-century high literary culture. Because of her clearly argued thesis and her focus on the mobility of the traveling Jewish women and men vaudevillians between Vienna, Budapest, and New York City, Korbel firmly underscores the stark differences between centripetal turn-of-the-twentieth-century Viennese “high art” and its centrifugal “popular art” counterpart.

The first of the study’s five chapters begins with Korbel’s emphasis on the ever-increasing access to the mobility of railway transportation from Eastern Europe to Vienna and Budapest during the five decades prior to World War I—which contributed to the two million Eastern European Jews settling in the western urban centers of the Habsburg monarchy. She immediately points to the personalized stories about this increasingly accessible railway travel and their capacity to provide shared material for an ever-increasing number of Jewish vaudevillian performers and for their ever-growing numbers of coreligionist audience members—who increasingly had the free time and spending money to dedicate to entertainment. This ever-increasing Jewish visibility, both on the stage and in the audience, also led, as a consequence, to further interaction between Jews and non-Jews. The ten-page conclusion of this first chapter clearly details the recent scholarly cultural studies research in which Korbel anchors her research.

The second and third chapters follow logically in dealing with the respective neighborhoods of Vienna, Budapest, and New York in which the Jewish newcomers from the East were settling and examines the striking cultural similarities of the ever-growing numbers there of popular cultural venues such as music halls, cabarets, and small theaters. The increasing traveling troupes, as a consequence, found ever-burgeoning numbers of welcoming coreligionist audiences in these new cultural venues in such predominantly Jewish-populated areas as the Leopoldstadt, the Elisabethstadt in Budapest, and the Lower East Side in New York (which were often located in close proximity to synagogues). And the multi-linguistic makeup of these newly arrived audiences would invariably be drawn by a typical two-to-three-hour program of selections often offered in at least two different languages— Yiddish from the East and the predominant language spoken in that city. Instead of only performing to exclusively sectarian audiences, Korbel convincingly argues, using facts and figures, that these vaudeville revues often brought together audiences of diverse ethnic backgrounds—thus serving as a socially integrating force.

The study’s meatiest portion, Chapter 4, comprising over one-third of the book, deals with the actual mobility of performers “hitting the road.” Beginning with her discussion of the variety-trade press and its array of advertisements for the ever-increasing number of artistic management agencies, modes of transportation, and the accommodation locations for performers— including the listing of the actual vaudevillian performances, Korbel sees the leading publication in this area as the Internationale Artisten Revue, founded in 1894. And she views the power of this variety trade paper and many others circulating in the field as reflecting the doubling number of vaudevillian performances in Vienna and in Budapest and the quadrupling of them in New York by the turn of the century.

The second half of this chapter deals with the key participants of turn-of-the-century Yiddish-language vaudeville and their gender-related roles: women were increasingly replacing the earlier female impersonators, gender-bending roles were beginning to come into vogue, the scurrilous anti-Semitic rumors linking vaudeville theater to prostitution were being debunked, and, alas, some of the Jewish performers found their tragic end in the Holocaust. Korbel wisely traces the assertive role of the vaudevillian solo soubrette, in part, to the actively...