Yiddishlands: A Memoir

21.

NeveragainwouldIseeMotherlaughsohard.TheMontrealYiddishYouth Theater under the direction of Dora Wasserman was putting on an evening of improvisations, billed as “Études,” and the first act was in pantomime. Eachyoungactorhadtoinventaroleandstickwithit,playingalongsidebut separate from four other members of the troupe. I chose Trotsky, as I imagined him haranguing the crowd in Red Square. Using a crate as my soap box, I began my “speech” deep in thought, haltingly, then gradually worked myself up to a frenzy. I knew it wasn’t fair of me to upstage the other four actors , but I couldn’t help it. The part Mother loved best was when I threw off my glasses and started waving them in the air, something, in fact, I had seen Rabbi Hartman do from the pulpit just two weeks before. As it happened, my hair was appropriately long for the role of Trotsky, because for a whole month already, we had been rehearsing The Importance of Being Earnest at Outremont High, which not only won me parole from Miss Cowper’s Latin class and from chemistry with Mr. Gordon but also gave me a special dispensation to let my hair grow. I knew that Rona Altrows as Aunt Augusta would steal the show again, as she had the year before with her performance of Lady Macbeth—my wiry and always disheveled friend Rona, who alone could project our adolescent rage in iambic pentameter without even raising her voice. Talk about adolescent rage! At Northmount High, they 125 21 Études were rehearsing The Crucible, with Esther playing Rebecca Nurse and the electrifying Anna Fuerstenberg in the role of Elizabeth Proctor. Directed by Marion André, these buxom girls in Puritan dresses really went berserk. The last time a woman on stage made me want to die was when Bryna Cytrynbaum played Hannah Senesh awaiting her execution at the hands of the Gestapo, and here in The Crucible there were so many of them about to be burned at the stake. But I hated this Marion André. At a screening of the 1937 Dybbuk at the YMHA, he made fun of the sets. So what if the tombstones were fake? The rest of the film was made on location, in the heart of prewar Poland, and the actors then perished in the war, or at least some of them did, and after I finished college I would make Yiddish films, maybe even before then, because Jules Dassin, who was married to Melina Mercouri , had just bought up the screen rights to The Last of the Just, which he was planning to make entirely in Yiddish. That’s what I really wanted, to strike out on my own, to stop being graded for learning someone else’s repertoire, to make things up as I went along; to play Trotsky, and get away with it. Didn’t Mother’s hysterical laughter prove that I could? The time had come to act. “I am sixteen years old,” the letter began, “and have been attending the public tribute in honour of the Jewish martyrs for the past five years. I must say that I found this year’s memorial programme quite disappointing and incomprehensible .” For the first time, the complainant went on, two keynote speakers were invited, the poet Jacob Glatstein to deliver the standard address in Yiddish and another to address the crowd in English, this, ostensibly, to attract a younger audience. As the youngest member of that audience could testify, however, the strategy had failed. The vast majority of those in attendance needed no English exhortation to remember their murdered kinsfolk. “Dear David,” came the swift reply from Leon Kronitz, chairman of the Eastern Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, “You are probably right . . . that we were not successful in bringing out the non-Yiddishspeaking crowd to the tribute. But would you please tell us . . . what would you do to get them to attend?” What would I do? I’ll tell you what I would do! I would scrap the whole deadly format and start from scratch. What young person in his right mind would show up to hear not one lecture, but two? Who cared if some cantor chapter twenty-one 126 turned the Memorial Prayer into an aria? That six fidgety schoolchildren were called upon to light six symbolic candles? The only real moment was when everyone stood up to sing the “Partisans’ Hymn,” but for that you didn’t need to organize a...