Diary Entry: On Yiddish Theater

23 October. The actors convince me by their presence time and again, to my consternation, that most of what I’ve written about them so far is wrong. It is wrong because I wrote about them with unwavering love (only now, as I am writing this down, this too becomes wrong) but wavering strength. And this wavering strength does not strike the real actors loudly and correctly, but wastes itself dully on that love, which will never be satisfied with that that strength, and by impeding it, believes that it protects the actors.

Quarrel between [Mania] Tschissik and [Jizchak] Löwy. –Ts.: [Dovid] Edelstadt [Edelshtot] is the greatest Jewish writer. He is sublime. Of course [Morris] Rosenfeld is also a great writer, but he is not the first. –Löwy: Tsch. is a socialist and since Edelstadt creates social[ist] poems, he is editor of a social[ist] newspaper in London, Tsch. Therefore considers him the greatest. But who is Edelstadt, his party knows him, no one else does, but the world knows Rosenfeld. –Tsch.: Recognition does not matter. Everything of Edelstadt is sublime. –L.: I also know him very well. “The Suicide,” for example, is very good. –Tsch.: What’s the use of quarreling. We won’t agree. I’ll insist on my view until tomorrow, and you on yours. –L.: I until the day after tomorrow.

Goldfaden, married, profligate even in great need. Nearly 100 plays. Stolen liturg[ical] melodies turned into popular tunes. The entire people sings them. The tailor at work (being imitated), the servant girl, and so on.

When there is so little room to get dressed, it is inevitable, says Tschissik, that you get into a row. One arrives excitedly from the stage, everyone considers himself the greatest actor, and when someone steps, for example, on someone else’s foot, which is unavoidable, there is not just a row, but a great fight. Well, in Warsaw there were 75 individual dressing-rooms, each one well-lit.

At 6 o’clock I met the actors in their café seated around two tables according to the two hostile groups. On the table of Tsch,’s group was a book by [Y. L.] Peretz. Löwy had just closed it and got up to leave with me.

Until the age of twenty L. was a bocher [an unmarried yeshiva student] who studied and spent his wealthy father’s money. There was a gang of young people his age who got together on Saturdays in a closed restaurant, smoked in their caftans, and violated in other ways the laws of the Sabbath.

“The great [Jacob] Adler,” the most famous Yiddish actor from New York, who is a millionaire, for whom [Jacob] Gordin wrote Der vilder mentsh (The Wild Man) and whom L. begged in Karlsbad not to come to the performance because he would not have the courage to act before him on their poorly equipped stage. Just a real set, not this miserable stage on which one can’t move around. How can we perform The Wild Man! One needs a sofa for it. In the Crystal Palace in Leipzig it was magnificent. Windows that could be opened, the sun was streaming in, a throne was required in the play, good, there was a throne, I walked through the crowd toward it and was really a king. It is much easier to perform there; here everything is disorienting. [ . . . ]