Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (51 page)

This kind of devotion to a literally volatile “theater of mixed means” has generally not found favor with theorists of drama and performance. Practi- tioners since Plautus (who called his
Amphitryon
a tragicomedy) have been eager to establish the indispensability of the notion of an unproblematically “mixed” genre called “tragicomedy.” Consider this exemplarily academic com- mentary on the matter:

What has tragicomedy actually contributed to the modern drama since the Renaissance? Tragicomedy, whether actually so called or not, has al- ways been the backbone of the modern drama, which has always been a compromise between classical tradition and the modern way of life, and a compromise between classical tragedy and classical comedy. . . . The term is now antiquated . . . but most of the significant modern dramas still occupy a middle ground between tragedy and comedy.
37

In this simple academic equation, tragedy + comedy = tragicomedy; “compromise” and “a middle ground” punctually present themselves as need- ed, and there is no contradiction remaining anywhere in the process. Intro- ducing Marsden Hartley’s
Adventures in the Arts
(1921), Waldo Frank com-

plicates the matter by mapping tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy back onto the kind of child-adult distinction dear to the heart of a first-generation Ro- mantic like Lamb: “Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child’s world is tragi- comic.” In doing so, Frank finesses the issue in a way I want to resist. The standard edition of the classic script of puppet theater farce, first published in 1828, seems to me to get something right that writers like Frank may tend to reduce to a simple “fusion” too quickly: the book in question is entitled—take your pick—
The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy
. Not tragicomedy
tout simple
, but the unresolved contradiction “tragical comedy or comical tragedy” seems richly evocative to me of a crucially important aspect of the epistemology of queer childhood, the recognition of how thoroughly permeated with each other these two performative modes—one associated with loss, psychic pain, and mourning and the other with the powers of wit, laughter, and ridicule—can be.

The anecdotal history of the Yiddish theater is predictably rife with such tragedy-comedy confusions. When, for example, Adler made his much her- alded theatrical debut in New York, he declined to appear in Gutskov’s
Uriel Acosta
, which would soon become one of his signature roles, and appeared in- stead in a comedy called
The Ragpicker
. But the audience, primed to see a great new tragedian, took the play seriously (as Lamb had done at his first plays), leaving themselves and their would-be new star performatively strand- ed at evening’s end. On other occasions, the “confusion” functioned as part of the compact between artists and audience; Carl Van Vechten recalled in 1920 having seen, years before, a fine production of Gorky’s
The Lower Depths
, a “sordid tragedy, unredeemed by a single ray of humour . . . played for come- dy” at the popular actor David Kessler’s theater.
38

More often, it seems, the “confusion” was the consequence of neither a special understanding nor a misunderstanding on the audience’s part, but of a general, although by no means universal, appreciation—shared by audi- ences, playwrights, and performers alike—of the intensely “mixed” and fertile origins of the Yiddish theater in the popular hybrid theatrical mode of shund, “trashy,” “something-for-everybody” theater. Theater historians offer various folk etymologies for the term
shund
; some say the term is related to
shande
, Yiddish for “shame,” while others trace the word back to
shindn
, “to flay a horse.”
39
Unqualified to judge the merits of these, I want to hold onto shame and horse flaying while adding a third possible etymology: Nahum Stutchkoff suggests that the word
shund
may be related to the phrase
miesse meshina
, “ugly or unfortunate fate or death.”
40
Leo Rosten writes, “The phrase is wide- ly used by Jews either as a lament (‘What a
miesse meshina
befell him!’) or as a curse (‘May he suffer a
miesse meshina
!’).”
41

What the great tragic
and
comic performance traditions of Yiddish and queer theaters remind us is that in this new millennium impulses to curse and lament and impulses to laugh and play do not necessarily arise at any safe dis- tance from each other. Impulses toward grief and toward mockery and self- mockery disorient our ordinary sense of distance and difference between the playhouse (an archaic term for theater) and scenes of death and loss—be- tween the house of mirth and the house of mourning.

Rosten notes that the Yiddish
meshina
(“ugly or unfortunate”) derives from Hebrew
meshuna
, meaning “unusual, abnormal.” Weird, wicked—queer? “Ah, what queer fates befell them.” “May I (you, s/he) die a queer death.” At the start of the twenty-first century, Jews and queers of all kinds are (un)fortu- nately richly well-equipped to understand the varied performative valences of that utterance—as curse, as lament, as blessing, as wish.

Notes

1. Henry James,
   The American Scene
   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968 [1907]), p. 139.
   

2. Nahma Sandrow,
   Vagabond Stars: A World History of the Yiddish Theater
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1977; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 135.
   

3. My brief account of Gordin’s career depends throughout on Sandrow, “Jacob Gordin,”
   

   Vagabond Stars
   , pp. 132–63.
   

4. The resemblance of this scene to that of Hamlet and the players suggests that this kind of conflict, between a more improvisatory actors’ theater on the one hand and a more script-bound one on the other, or between a folk theater and a courtly one, has been a sta- ple of the history of the stage in the West since the beginning of the early modern period.
   

5. Quoted in Sandrow,
   Vagabond Stars
   , p. 157.
   

6. Leon Edel,
   Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916
   (Boston: Lippincott, 1972), p. 293.
   

7. Henry James,
   The American Scene
   , p. 199.
   

8. Yiddish theater historian David S. Lifson also mentions the Windsor as the site of a performance of a Hurwitz play in 1917. See Lifson,
   The Yiddish Theater in America
   (New York: Yoseloff, 1965), p. 270.
   

9. Henry James,
   The American Scene
   , p. 194. 10. Ibid., p. 199.
   

11. Ibid., p. 205.

1. Edel,
   Henry James
   , pp. 293–94.
   

2. For a thorough account of James’s relation to the Jewish question, see Eli Ben- Joseph,
   Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race
   (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996).
   

3. Itzkovitz reexamines the work of Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Fannie Hurst, and other writers, as well as some extremely signifi court cases (Leo Frank, Leopold and Loeb), in his forthcoming study of queerness and Jewishness in the twentieth-century United States.
   

4. George Chauncey, “The Bowery as Haven and Spectacle,”
   Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940
   (New York: Basic, 1994), pp. 33–45. The passage cited appears on p. 33.
   

16. Ibid., p. 37.

1. Fred Kaplan’s biography of James,
   Henry James: The Imagination of Genius
   (New York: William Morrow, 1992), has opened up some space for considering the role of male homoerotic desire earlier in the author’s life by telling the story of James’s infatua- tion with the Russian dilettante Paul Zhukovsky (or Joukowsky). Sheldon M. Novick, in his
   Henry James: The Young Master
   (New York: Random House, 1996), suggests James may have had an affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1865, when they were both young men. In attempting to understand the significance of queerness for James’s writ- ing, I suspect that the search for the supposedly “missing” male object of James’s desires (whether William James, Zhukovsky, Holmes, or whomever) is substantially less impor- tant than acquiring an understanding of how mobile, various, and in some ways not de- finitively object-directed the desires of someone like James may have been. See, on this point in general, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s remarks in
   Epistemology of the Closet
   (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 8: “It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differenti- ated from that of an other . . . precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as
   the
   dimension denoted by the now ubiq- uitous category of ‘sexual orientation.’”
   

2. Although there is as yet no discussion in English that I am aware of that takes up the question of the significance of any but heterosexuality in the Yiddish theater, the ques- tion has at least been raised in relation to the history of Yiddish film. Film curator and his- torian Eve Sicular has initiated the discussion of queer presences in the history of Yiddish film with her articles on the substantial significance of cross-dressing and playing tomboys in the film career of Molly Picon and on the sexualities of some key male figures in the Yid- dish film industry. See her “Gender Rebellion in Yiddish Film,”
   Lilith
   20, no. 4 (Winter 1995–96): 12–17; and also her “Outing the Archives: Adventures from the Celluloid Clos- et of Yiddish Film,”
   Davka
   1, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 46–47.
   

3. See Richard Dyer,
   Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
   (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), chapter 2; and Miriam Hansen,
   Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
   (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), chapters 11 and 12.
   

4. Thomashefsky quoted in Sandrow,
   Vagabond Stars
   , p. 78.
   

5. Ibid., p. 96. On Thomashefsky’s audience’s perception of his sex appeal, see also Lif- son,
   The Yiddish Theater in America
   , p. 147.
   

6. See Adeline R. Tintner, “Photograph versus Cinematograph: Dark Versus Light in ‘Crapy Cornelia,’”
   The Museum World of Henry James
   (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 188.
   

7. Henry James,
   The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872–1901
   , ed. Allan Wade (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957 [1948]), p. 157; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
   

8. James’s admiration for Bernhardt and his disapproval of her powers of publicity are of course related to his treatment of such matters as women’s access to the public sphere and the question of whether an actress can be a genuine artist—subjects he explored in some of his fiction, especially in
   The Bostonians
   (1888) and
   The Tragic Muse
   (1890).
   

9. Sander L. Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” and Carol Ockman, “When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bern- hardt.” Both articles appear in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds.,
   The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity
   (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995).
   

10. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale tell the story in
    The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt
    (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 179.
    

11. Gertrude Stein, “Plays,”
    Lectures in America
    (New York: Random House, 1935), pp. 115–16.
    

12. Quoted in Joe E. Jeffreys, “Ethyl Eichelberger: A True Story,”
    Dragazine
    , no. 8 (1995): p. 23. Jeffreys published a fuller version of the same article in
    Theatre History Stud- ies
    14 (June 1994): 23–40. Students of Eichelberger’s career, myself included, are deeply in- debted to Jeffreys, whose maintenance of a full archival record of Eichelberger’s performanc- es constitutes in itself an act of queenly extravagance and devotion in the grand tradition.
    

13. Ludlam gives his account of his conversion experience (“I saw the Garbo film [of
    Camille
    ] when I was in college and was destroyed by it”) in “Confessions of a Farceur,” in Charles Ludlam,
    Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly
    , ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), p. 36. See also Gregg Bordowitz, “The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous,” in Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson, eds.,
    Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video
    (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 208–24. I wish to acknowledge the inspiration Bordowitz has given me, through both his writing and his video,
    Fast Trip, Long Drop
    , for thinking about queerness and Jewish- ness together.
    

14. Charles Ludlam,
    The Artificial Jungle
    (1988), in
    The Complete Plays of Charles Lud- lam
    (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 888.
    

15. Neil Bartlett, “Speaking Your Mind: Ethyl Eichelberger and Lily Savage,” in Rus- sell Ferguson et al., eds.,
    Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture
    (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston: MIT Press, 1990), p. 267.
    

16. Ibid.
    

17. Ludlam,
    Ridiculous Theatre
    , p. 41.
    

18. James remembers seeing
    Uncle Tom’s Cabin
    in the theater in chapter 12 of
    A Small Boy and Others
    .
    

19. Ludlam, “Confessions of a Farceur,” p. 8.
    

20. Bartlett, “Speaking Your Mind,” p. 266.
    

21. Marvin T. Herrick,
    Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England
    (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1955), p. 321.
    

22. Carl Van Vechten, “The Yiddish Theater,” in
    In the Garret
    (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 330–31.
    

23. The latter is in Sandrow,
    Vagabond Stars
    , p. 110.
    

24. Nahum Stutchkoff,
    Der oytzr fun der yidisher shprakh
    [Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language] (New York: YIVO, 1950).
    

25. See Leo Rosten, entry for “miesse meshina,” in his
    The Joys of Yiddish
    (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 338–39 and 244, respectively.