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YIDDISH ROOTS
Baruch Lumet … makes a full-blooded character of a familiar type, though he tends to overact discreetly … and Sidney Lumet as an alert and warm-hearted youngster is all of that and charming.
—FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF THE BROWNSVILLE GRANDFATHER, APRIL 19, 1935
He was heavy-handed and middlebrow—according to Pauline Kael, the formidable New Yorker film critic who never tired of panning Sidney’s films. The first time she clobbered him was in 1968 when she was still establishing herself in New York, and her hostility baffled Sidney. Hadn’t he welcomed her, a young writer from California, onto the set of his tenth film, The Group, for something or other she was writing for Life magazine? Sidney thought that nothing could be more instructive to a critic than to learn something about how a movie is made. In fact, he couldn’t really fathom how someone could begin to evaluate a movie without knowing about film production. He hadn’t expected she’d planned to make her name as a wisecracking detractor. Her barbs hurt: “The emphasis on immediate results may explain the almost total absence of nuance, subtlety, and even rhythmic and structural development in his work.… He seems to have no intellectual curiosity.… He’ll go on faking it, I think, using the abilities he has to cover up what he doesn’t know.” But he wasn’t about to change the way he worked in response to a critic—or to anyone. Well aware of his own shortcomings, Sidney liked to joke about his “bad taste,” attributing it, more or less affectionately, to his background in Yiddish theater.
Sidney’s father, Baruch, had been a Yiddish actor and had put his son on the stage when he was five years old. The young Lumet had served his apprenticeship in immigrant melodramas, where it was more than acceptable to commiserate with the struggles of the poor, to make social commentary, to allow yourself as an artist to teach and even to take to task.
Sidney’s early apprenticeship in the Yiddish theater was, oddly enough, preparation for his career as a quintessentially American director. Its rough and ready atmosphere toughened him up. And despite Pauline Kael’s disdain for his approach to storytelling, immigrant melodramas provided instructive models. A new phenomenon in Jewish life, Yiddish theater had arrived in New York in the early 1880s, finding a ready audience willing to spend as much as half a week’s salary to get a seat at one of the lavish theaters built along Second Avenue between Houston and 14th Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Opening in 1911, the elegant 2nd Avenue Theatre held almost two thousand patrons, and other theaters on a similar scale soon followed. The “Yiddish Broadway,” also called the “Jewish Rialto,” was lined with costume houses, music and photography stores, and restaurants and cafés, where artists and intellectuals gathered with the theater crowd. They were considered the royalty of the Lower East Side. Actors hoping to find work frequented these lively cafés—among them, Baruch Lumet, sometimes accompanied by his precocious little boy.
A film of Sidney singing the Yiddish song “Papirosen” [Cigarettes] was projected as a flashback during a Yiddish musical of the same name. (From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York)
In one early performance, little Sidney, dressed as a beggar, sang a Yiddish ballad about an orphan whose sister, the only one who watches out for him, has died. Rain-drenched, he pleads to passersby to “take pity,” to purchase his cigarettes, his papirosen, assuring them that, though he is soaked to the skin, his wares are dry. But pathos—usually seasoned with social conscience—was only part of what the Yiddish theater had to offer. There were Yiddish versions of everything from Shakespeare to Strindberg to Chekhov. For newly arrived immigrants, it was a place where they saw their lives portrayed, where they received an education, were entertained and could let off steam. It was a rich emotional experience where ironies abounded and the sublime and the ridiculous lived side by side. Starving Jewish socialists traded on their good voices and impersonated cantors, singing heartrending versions of Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur prayer. Emotions were tossed back and forth from stage to audience and from audience to stage across a line that often disappeared. Even personal greetings were not out of place, with performers interrupting a scene to wave to friends and family.
The actors often had to appear in a new play every two weeks, and in addition they did benefit matinee performances of yet other plays simultaneously. They hadn’t time to learn each part by heart, so hidden at the foot of the stage was the prompter, called the soufleur, who whispered stage directions and lines to the actors. The Yiddish playwright B. Gorin (Isaac Goido) reveled in the mishaps and mayhem that sometimes occurred on stage as a result of the practice of “prompting.” In a 1905 issue of the journal The Menorah, Gorin tells this story:
During a scene of a so-called “historical opera,” a priest had to stab the king. The stage in that scene was packed with actors and actresses, chorus girls and supernumeraries, as in all the “thrilling” scenes of such performances. When the moment for the stabbing arrived the prompter said: “Stab!”
The priest ran at the actor who stood opposite him and stabbed him.
“Not that one! Not that one!”
“Not him!” repeated the actor who had already lost his head, and not losing any more of his valuable time he stabbed another.
“Ah, not him, the king!”
The priest having parted with his wits altogether, stabbed whomsoever he could get hold of.
“The king! Stab the king!”
The priest ran up to the king and stabbed him, but this was the young king, the good king who should have remained alive, not the old, bad king whom the priest had to dispatch for his iniquities.
“Not him! Not him!”
The priest was now sure that the one whom he had to stab was not the king and he threw himself on everybody, stabbing without discrimination right and left the actors, supernumeraries and choristers, and hearing after each time the words “Not him! Not him!” he murdered everybody on the stage except the old king who remained alive after all others were slaughtered.
At the same time, Yiddish theater could be politically and aesthetically avant-garde, no matter how meager the production financing. For example, at a time when the Ziegfeld Follies and parlor dramas dominated Broadway, you could find the Sacco and Vanzetti story—of immigrant Italian American anarchists whose murder trial became a cause célèbre—staged on Second Avenue. It wasn’t only the subject matter of the Sacco and Vanzetti story that was radical. The play was staged in an unconventional way. Since the theater was very small—actually there was no stage at all—the director created a sequence of forty-four brief scenes, illuminated by spotlights and separated by blackouts, that were staged on every side of the seated audience. Such a technique is frequently used today, but it was quite novel at the time.
It may have been the freedom of the Yiddish theater that taught Sidney to experiment with so many different ways to tell stories. And this early exposure to Yiddish theater may have had something to do with his focus on characters from everyday life, his distrust of the idealized and the romanticized. In his movies, protagonists do extraordinary things like rob banks or expose corruption, but he emphasizes that they are just people, not so different from you and me, with recognizable emotions. You might encounter them any day on the street, especially the streets of New York.
As a child, Sidney did not much play with other children; he was too busy watching the adults play with great intensity and skill and learning from them. His father read him a Yiddish version of Hamlet when he was six, titled Der Yeshiva Bokher. An ardent spirit, Baruch, known to some by the nickname Bulu, threw himself into whatever he did, from the “high art” that was his calling to moneymaking ventures such as Der Brownsviller Zeyde, a Yiddish soap opera for the Brooklyn radio station WLTH in which the whole family performed beginning when Sidney was four. In daily fifteen-minute episodes, fifty-two weeks a year, the show related the adventures of the good-natured and charmingly disoriented immigrant zeyde (grandpa) who was trying to make sense of his new life in Brooklyn.
In the intense atmosphere of arguments over everything from stage timing to production costs to artistic shades of meaning, the boy underwent an apprenticeship. He became something of an enfant prodige, precocious, adult-oriented and serious. To everyone’s amazement, six-year-old Sidney shouted at a stagehand who missed his cue, “Bring that curtain down!” Sometimes he would answer his parents strangely—until they recognized that his replies were lines from a play. He lived in the world of the theater so intensely that after a production was over he could still recite scenes and even an entire play by heart.
In summer the whole family decamped to left-wing Yiddish-speaking summer camps in the Catskills, where his father wrote and directed children’s theater. According to Baruch, they alternated each year between Zionist and Bundist (anti-Zionist socialist) camps that shared a lake. The political, activist spirit of such places in the late 1920s and early 1930s was primed by Russian revolutionary, pro-union, Zionist and Territorialist (those who wanted to establish Jewish territories in Europe) ideas, as well as various utopian movements popular at the time. Camp photos include children waving flags that boast a hammer and sickle.
Added to the mix was an Orthodox religious background that encouraged the boy to think in terms of ethical paradoxes and moral riddles: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But being for myself, what am I?” Sidney cut his milk teeth on the contradictions and questions of Jewish thought. In an interview, he pointed to this early training as a major influence on his work. “And it comes back in a sense to the point of 12 Angry Men: those who are bearing the legal responsibility of our lives are therefore in a way bearing the moral responsibility as well. And what are they like? Who are they?” When asked where his concern for these kinds of questions came from, Sidney answered, “Just from having been a good, solid poor Jewish boy. That gets you into it. I was brought up in an essentially Orthodox household. The Jewish ethic is stern, unforgiving, preaching, moralistic. And I guess it starts you thinking like that at an early age.”
Sidney absorbed all kinds of influences, from the biblical to the Trotskyist, as well as the impact of the city, which Sidney was getting to know as a matter of necessity. To save a few dollars, the family moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Queens, to the Bronx, to Brooklyn, and then back through all the boroughs except Staten Island, because, as his father explained, “That’s where the goyim live.” As it happened, the neighborhoods were alive with fantasy. At Coney Island, a nickel subway ride away, it was Arabian nights, American style, complete with a flying car and an exhibit of premature babies in incubators brought straight from a local hospital.
In those early days he saw how the crowds loved fantasy and make-believe, from the illusionist ceilings of the movie palaces, with their moving clouds and stars, to their marble staircases, goldfish ponds, and Spanish troubadours. Such fantasies weren’t too much for the crowds, working people or not. But the illusion never caught his imagination. His eye went to the people who craved the fantasy.
More American than his parents, he became part of his Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx neighborhoods in ways they never did. His father resisted identifying with the working-class immigrant community, although he and his wife were themselves fresh off the boat. Baruch saw himself as an artist with a cosmopolitan background, and Sidney’s mother, Jenny or Gittel—her birth name is uncertain—came from a well-to-do Warsaw family. Baruch spoke of the servants in her home and recalled that her father, a learned man, had owned so much property that a street was named after him. But apart from her affluent origins, Jenny never integrated into the community, in part because Baruch never settled his family in one place long enough for her to make friends.
A cousin of Sidney’s, Henri Wermus, remembers Jenny’s father, Abraham Izaak Wermus, as a wealthy landowner who had a library that was “filled to the ceiling with innumerable volumes.” He taught the grandchildren lessons in literature at every holiday, and, taking them into his study, he would recount the family history. They got their name, he explained, from Worms, a town in the Rhineland, where their forebears had resided; it was an important center of study where the biblical interpreter Rashi founded a yeshiva in the eleventh century. The family fled the massacres that followed a blood libel in 1410 and had made their home in Warsaw since the sixteenth century. When Henri returned to Warsaw from Switzerland after World War II, he found not a single surviving member of his family.
Sidney never heard his grandfather’s stories or learned those lessons. The lessons he was absorbing were about getting your foot in the door, getting what you need as an artist, asserting yourself and surviving. And he was learning that no circumstances are ever perfect, that you have to seize the moment and bend circumstances to your will. This came from his father.
Baruch’s father—Sidney’s paternal grandfather—had died when Baruch was only five years old, leaving the family in terrible straits. In their small town outside of Warsaw, his mother delivered milk door to door with a bucket and ladle, barely scraping by. Baruch was sent to live with his grandfather on a farm that consisted of a few cows, a horse and a wagon. Restless and unhappy, Baruch ran away to live in Warsaw with an uncle and became an apprentice to a tailor. Many days, Baruch took care of the tailor’s baby, which allowed him to wander with the child around the corner and listen to rehearsals of the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater. One day the stage manager asked him to be part of a crowd scene—and this was Baruch’s beginning on the stage.
As he described in his memoir, Baruch learned to act by appearing before sometimes jeering audiences and by moving from theater to theater, place to place. With the exception of the acting studio operated intermittently by Michal Weichert, there were no Yiddish acting schools. Even in Warsaw, despite interminable efforts, Yiddish dramatic companies never managed to acquire their own theater and were forced to move from one locale to another at the whim of theater owners.
With a strange mix of nostalgia and abhorrence, Baruch painted a picture of the general tumult of Warsaw in those days, and his catch-as-catch-can existence there. In the opening decades of the twentieth century Warsaw had become home to the largest population of Jews anywhere outside of New York City. After the assassination of Russia’s relatively tolerant Czar Alexander II in 1881, tens of thousands of Jews flooded into Warsaw, fleeing increasing persecution in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the Russian Empire. These newcomers brought secular culture and ideas—mostly socialism and Zionism—to that city’s conservative, mostly Hasidic community. Yiddish arts and political movements flourished; creative energy soared with the emergence of a modern secularism that maintained Jewish identity without assimilation. The language itself had powerful significance for this left-leaning generation; as Isaac Bashevis Singer pointed out, Yiddish might have been “the only language on earth that has never been spoken by men in power.”
For Jews and Poles alike, life in Warsaw was uncertain. The city had been under the control of the Russians for a century when Baruch watched the Germans march into Warsaw in 1915. “The Jews were happy,” Baruch explained. “Things got better under the Germans. Theaters and vaudeville opened up, restrictions were lifted; you [meaning Jews] could travel anywhere.” The renowned Yiddish theater troupe came from Vilna, a city with “everything of culture,” and merged with Baruch’s Warsaw troupe. Baruch reminisced, “That was beautiful, new life began.”
Everything was great until the Germans lost the war and Poland gained its independence in 1918. A series of border conflicts escalated into full-scale war between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1920. “Everyone was impoverished again; no one knew what to do. Some volunteered for the army—as it was better for those who volunteered.” For those who didn’t volunteer, however, there were the press gangs that roamed the streets, grabbing men to dig trenches to fortify the city against the Bolsheviks. Baruch was picked up off the street by the “snatchers,” or khapers, and put to work for two terrible weeks, “without so much as a change of shirt.” There was no chance to tell anyone where he was. “That’s where I was when my daughter Feiga was born,” he explained, accounting for his missing the birth of Sidney’s sister.
Copyright © 2019 by Maura Spiegel