Review of Paula Ansaldo’s “Broyt mit Teater.” Historia del Teatro Judío en Argentina

In 1964, Germán Rozenmacher’s Réquiem para un viernes a la noche [Requiem for a Friday Night], premiered in Buenos Aires at the Idisher Folks Teater (IFT, 1937-1966). Written and acted in Spanish, Réquiem is an intimate drama of a father (Sholem) and mother (Leie) waiting for their son, David, to come home for Shabbos dinner. David wants to be a writer and marry “María”; Sholem, a cantor, fears his son is becoming “a goy” – “an enemy in our home!” The play is narrated by Max, an aging actor of the Yiddish Theater, once “king of the Yiddish Opereta,” now free on Friday nights to explain words like “kaddish” to the (mostly non-Yiddish speaking) audience.

For Paula Ansaldo’s History of Jewish Theater in Argentina, Réquiem emblematizes not only the IFT’s decisive transition from Yiddish to Spanish – pragmatic and ideological, linguistic and intergenerational – but also the last (of several) seismic shifts in its identity and mission. In the 1964 program, the IFT describes its role as a theater as identical with that of the playwright: “Rozenmacher feels inside himself the vocation of national identity. The IFT Theater considers that search, and this approximation to it, to be its function as well” (259). ^{1 1} All translations mine, unless otherwise noted all page numbers are from Ansaldo This final attempt by the IFT to ensure its relevance by redefining its cultural mission (in rather clunky terms of national identity – “that search, and this approximation to it” – without specifying a nation), gives me an aching feeling, as if the IFT somehow sealed its extinction with its tireless quest to improve itself through compromise. This narrative reminds me, perhaps depressively, of my Grandmother’s disapproving, one-word answer for what had happened to something broken, usually a television set: farpotshket. Broken, because someone tried to fix it. I will return to Réquiem, and its ambiguous notion of “national identity,” but first I want to back up and give Ansaldo’s ambitious and eminently enjoyable history its due.

Although Latin American Jewish Studies has grown in the last decades, Jewish theater history has long been missing a detailed account of the history of Jewish theater in Argentina. Argentine theater history, meanwhile, has traditionally minimized the importance of Jewish theater both in Spanish and in Yiddish, failing to grasp the complex set of influences at work nationally and transnationally. I still remember where I was sitting in the library at Washington University in St. Louis (near those frightening, silent-moving stacks), reading a preeminent early twenty-first century History of Argentine Theater, when my jaw dropped at its tripartite taxonomy: there was “National Theater,” “Foreign Theater,” and – wait for it – Teatro israelita. (To clarify, israelita was once a common synonym for “Jewish” in Argentina, especially prior to the founding of the State of Israel, though not in the twenty-first century). It seemed incredible to me that Jewish theater was being relegated – nowadays – so matter-of-factly to an Other.

As Jorge Dubatti says in the prologue, Ansaldo’s book goes some way toward “settling this debt in the field of Theater Studies” (11). As Ansaldo explains in her introduction, “[Argentine] theater historiography simply didn’t study theaters founded by immigrants – especially putting on plays in languages other than Spanish.” This in turn erased “the linguistic diversity of Argentine theater, while minimizing the importance of the multiple connections, exchanges and links that existed between Jewish theater and ‘national’ companies” (26; Ansaldo uses the category “Jewish theater” to encompass its transformation from Yiddish to Spanish). With her “comparative cartography,” Ansaldo puts Argentine Jewish theater on the transnational map while improving that map with greater detail and nuance about Argentine Jewish theater. Ansaldo builds on Argentine theater scholarship and transnational Jewish theater scholarship, enriching both. It is a welcome and exciting contribution to the field.

Chapter 1 gives a readable overview of existing scholarship on the emergence and history of theater in Yiddish, from Purimspilers to kunst teater, and an introduction to the major authors, actors, and debates that would live on in Argentina. Chapter 2 begins with an overview of Jewish immigration to Argentina and the development of schools, libraries, clubs, and a strong Yiddish-language publishing industry. Yiddish in Argentina was not merely the language of home and daily life, but “the language in which political, artistic and cultural life of Ashkenazi Jews took place in the first half of the 20th century,” thus resisting “the homogenizing politics of the Argentine State toward imposing a national monolingual identity” (69).

The majority of Chapter 2 is dedicated to the “entrepreneurial theater” and its star system that turned Buenos Aires into a Yiddish theater destination for provincial tourists and international celebrities, creating a diverse theatergoing public and a highly interactive theater “scene.” ^{2 2} Ansaldo uses the term “entrepreneurial” theater [Teatro Empresarial] rather than “commercial” theater – a universally reviled epithet – since, as she points out, all theater was still subject to commercial considerations, so what distinguished the two was – paraphrasing – the type of business model, rather than the existence of a business model (Ansaldo 23).
Ansaldo’s interviews with theater-goers are fascinating. Many recall meeting the international stars of the Yiddish theater in person, where the audience was able to approach Molly Picon or Jacob Ben Ami after the show as the stars drank coffee in the nearby cafés, shake their hand, and introduce them to their families. Ansaldo concludes that Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires wasn’t just about putting on a play, but an interactive space of community engagement beyond the theater, bringing together all ages and social classes, a fact Molly Picon and Maurice Schwartz used to praise Buenos Aires and contrast it favorably with New York’s dwindling, and aging, audiences (78).

Buenos Aires was “drunk on theater,” the Yiddish press said, suffering from a real “theater psychosis” – all anyone could talk about was the theater (Di Presse, 1931, 1933; cited in Ansaldo 87, 88). Spanish-language newspapers and magazines reviewed Yiddish plays, which attracted large numbers of non-Jews. Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison advertised their spectacles with the tagline “Good theater is understandable, even if it’s in a foreign language.” This idea appeared frequently in the Spanish-language press of the time: journalist Samuel Rollansky wrote in 1940 that the Yiddish theater “attracted a great crowd of gentiles, and not exactly intellectuals, but a common audience captivated by the visual effects, the music, the dancing, the movements, that transmitted clearly what words couldn’t explain” (Rollansky cited in Ansaldo 113).

Nonetheless, the star system had serious disadvantages for local talent. Local playwrights rarely saw their work staged; actors played second fiddle to international stars, “ruining their careers” (Salomon Stramer cited in Ansaldo 99). The Yiddish press “permanently” warned of the star system’s double blow – artistic and economic – and the real danger that Argentina might never develop “a Yiddish theater of its own” (97). In 1932, Jewish actors formed a labor union that limited companies to hiring no more than three foreign actors for no more than three months (102). The improvement in labor conditions – together with everything happening in Europe during the 30s – made permanent immigration to Argentina a viable option for stars like the Stramer family, Adolfo and Clara Straitman, Samuel Zilberberg and Esther Perelman.

It was in this new environment that the aforementioned Idisher Folks Teater emerged. Chapters 3 and 4 are the crux of Ansaldo’s most exciting contribution: a detailed study of the creation, development, and evolution of the IFT (1937-1966). Chapter 3 begins with an account of the IFT’s formation as an “independent” company that sought to be equally a political theater and an art theater, situating this case study in transnational debates about kunst teater and folks teater. It was the first – and for many years, the only – “properly Jewish-Argentine” theater company: independent from the movements and demands of itinerant stars and entrepreneurs, the IFT had a stable cast and could develop its own aesthetic and political commitments.

Emerging from amateur groups in the 1920s, actors who would go on to form the IFT created the Idishe Dramatishe Studye (IDRAMST, 1932-1937), a collective theater school that brought together members of amateur groups after working hours, until 1 or 2 in the morning (cit 142). Its first play was Los negros, a social drama criticizing the treatment of African Americans in the United States, at the end of which – when the workers triumphed over the strikebreakers – the entire audience got to its feet and began singing and celebrating (op cit 142 n7).

The IFT, as it renamed itself in 1937, known in Spanish as Teatro Popular Judío, also viewed art as a tool of social transformation. It sought to liberate aesthetic and political choices from the profit motive. It was also very much a kunst teater, dedicated to educating and improving as (in I.L. Peretz’s words, engraved on one of its walls) a shul far dervaksene: a school for adults. The decision to hire Polish actors Nachum Melnick and Devorah Rosenblum, of the Vilner Trupe, as Artistic Directors, and eventually David Licht as its long-term Director, brought prestige (with the Vilner “brand,” as Debra Caplan explains so brilliantly). ^{3 3} See Debra Caplan, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).

The IFT had an explicitly collectivist identity, against the “individualism” of entrepreneurial theater, yet it incorporated diverse theatrical elements, including religious and folkloric elements, creating an “ensemble aesthetic” close to Caplan’s notion of “inclusive modernism” (162; 179). To accommodate a wider audience, the IFT offered bilingual program notes, including a Spanish summary of the play, along with guidance such as “Don’t be surprised by the combination of humorous aspects with dramatic or tragic ones. It is a Hebraic mode, practically ancestral, to laugh while in pain” (cit 181). Rollansky saw this type of hybrid theater “strengthen[ing] the Jewish community, combat[ting] assimilation and act[ing] as our national representative – for Jews and non-jews” (op cit 121). When Pablo Neruda saw David Licht’s Mother Courage in Santiago, he wrote, “I saw Mother Courage performed by Argentine Jews and an Italian director in a language I don’t know. That performance hit me more than all the other versions I’ve seen of Mother Courage in my life” (cit 186).

Chapter 4 focuses on the last ten years of the IFT (1957-1966), when the theater reconfigured itself in Spanish. Beginning with the 1957 premiere of El diario de Ana Frank, the IFT performed mostly in Spanish. The primary motive was pragmatic: younger members of the IFT (a predominantly young troupe, the opposite of the trend in most Yiddish theaters) spoke Yiddish with difficulty. Studying plays in Yiddish was more difficult and time-consuming – and reached a smaller audience.

There were also ideological reasons for the change. Ansaldo gives a detailed account of the major rifts in the Argentine Jewish community in the 1950s. The DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, the Argentine affiliate of the Latin American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress) wanted Jewish groups to take certain political positions, beginning with denouncing the USSR’s anti-Semitism apropos of the Slavsky trial in 1952, and evolving to include a Zionism that had historically divided the Jewish community. Refusing, the IFT was expelled from the DAIA, along with the majority of the Idisher Farbund (ICUF), an umbrella group of which the IFT had been a member since 1941, which included the majority of the “non-Zionist Jewish Left” (59). The “cherem” (ban), as it was called, further divided the dwindling Yiddish audience. Internal divisions deepened over what it meant to be a Jewish theater. David Licht resigned, along with several actors. The IFT repositioned itself as part of the Independent Theater Movement, as the Argentine Communist Party (PCA), under new directives, exerted pressure to “acriollarse” (“Argentinize,” i.e. reduce Jewish content) and “proletarianize” their plays, viewing Yiddish as a “European sectarianism” (233).

It is thus bittersweet that Réquiem achieved success for the IFT’s newest approach to “the vocation of national identity,” reaching a broad audience, in Spanish, with a non-Jewish actor in the role of Sholem, and receiving critical acclaim for its metatheatrical representation not just of the IFT’s Yiddish past but of existential issues plaguing the theater, only two years before it dissolved. The play’s ending is stark. David begs for his father to accept him as he is: a writer, not a cantor, who wants to marry “Mary”; it’s Sholem’s bridge too far. “My son is dead,” Sholem concludes. “He died today” (Rozenmacher 850). A sad ending for the play, a sad ending for the IFT, though a critical and popular success embraced by critics as a parable of “the same immigration project” as all Argentina (Tirri cited in Rozenmacher 799).

Ansaldo’s concluding pages consider the afterlife of the IFT and how its members continued to shape Argentine Jewish culture, before and after its formal dissolution as a troupe, including new companies directed by David Licht and Max Berliner. I was lucky enough to see former “IFTer” Max Berliner, O.B.M., direct Réquiem at the AMIA in July 2007. For this occasion, Berliner rewrote the ending, adding, after a long silence, David’s return, and acquiescence to his father’s demand. “Me quedo, papá [I’m staying, Papa].” A somewhat ambiguous acquiescence to paternal law, David agrees to stay – for Shabbos dinner? Forever?

Afterwards, Berliner came onstage to explain the change he had made, asking the audience for their opinions. As the microphone made its complicated way through the elderly crowd, most interpreted the ending to mean David would – at the very least – “not marry María.” A self-professed follower of “Spinoza and Einstein” disagreed, taking the opportunity to shame the AMIA for an arrangement by which converts would be buried on the other side of a “decorative wall” in the Jewish cemetery. This was met with a smattering of applause and considerable booing.

Back then, I was irritated by the change. I saw it as a treacly concession to reactionary views on intermarriage, a way of exercising inappropriate artistic control over complexities of Argentine Jewish history, such as the existence of the ICUF, the non-Zionist Jewish Left, and the IFT itself. Now I feel less sure. I had no idea how soon everyone in that generation would be dead. David’s sacrifice of personal fulfillment feels less reactionary, more IFT-y, an ensemble decision based on an impossible, wished-for wisdom transfer from old to young, from an emeritus member of the quintessential Jewish Argentine repertory theater to a young “individualist,” “fixing” Rozenmacher so the young man in 1964 takes one for the team. What might such a counterfactual history have been? I’m hesitant to call this return of the prodigal son farpotshket, perhaps because it is so clearly a fantasy, and unbreakable.

Paula Ansaldo’s book brings about a long-awaited return of Yiddish and the IFT to their rightful place in Argentine theater history and Jewish theater history. Her comparative cartography helps scholars move beyond the debates she historicizes here, by creating for the first time an independent history of Argentine Yiddish theater – entrepreneurial and independent, star-system and collectivist – in all of its complexity.