Resistance (7 page)

More than any other creative medium, the Jewish theater spoke to the masses, its productions arousing intense emotions among devoted theatergoers. Historians of the theater credit Abraham Goldfaden as the father of the Jewish theater with his establishment of a company in Iasi, Romania, in 1874. In 1885, when Warsaw was under the Russian sphere, Goldfaden brought his Jewish German theater to Warsaw and performed for two years (the company's production of
Shulamith
was greeted with much enthusiasm). The city was also host to occasional appearances by acting troupes who would perform in a German dialect similar to Yiddish, as plays in Yiddish were forbidden. Jewish theater had to cope not only with limitations imposed by the Russian authorities, but also with taboos from within the community regarding language, topics for theatrical performances, and modesty.

Jews inclined toward assimiliation considered Jewish theater a backward step that distanced the Jewish theatergoer from the Polish art theater. Indeed, historical sources note that the development of the Polish theater and music in Warsaw in the nineteenth century owed much to the patronage of wealthy Jews and Jewish audiences.

In 1905, establishment of the Literary Company brought permanent, officially sanctioned Yiddish theater to the Jews of Warsaw. The company relied primarily on the dramatic works of Jacob Gordin and performances by a number of outstanding actors and actresses, including the brilliant Esther Rachel Kaminska, who fascinated and delighted Jewish audiences in Poland, Russia, and the United States. According to connoisseurs of the theater, her forte was her ability to portray the personalities and lives of heroines in a manner that enchanted her audiences. The material was generally tear-jerking melodrama, burdened with moralistic instruction. It was a style that appealed to a public confident that their fate was largely within their own control.

Many writers, especially Y. L. Peretz, showed a marked interest in the development of the Yiddish theater. A society was formed to encourage the theater, and funds were raised to support theater on a high artistic level, with Peretz and Sholem Asch active in fund-raising. Though their efforts were not always successful, the theater maintained a reputation for quality through the performance of works by well-known writers.

Warsaw's Yiddish theater was noted for its enthusiastic audiences. Traveling companies and actors from the United States and other countries were frequent visitors. In 1917 the Vilna Troupe visited Warsaw, introducing a higher level of theatrical achievement with its modern treatment of Yiddish drama. The troupe met with great success in Warsaw, and some of its members remained in Warsaw to establish what became the city's foremost theater during the period between the wars.

 

T
HE INFLUENCE
of Warsaw's Jews during the period between the wars also increased as a result of the disruption and decline in status experienced by the Jews under the Bolshevik regime in the U.S.S.R. and the horror that descended on the Jews of Germany with the rise of Nazism in 1933. In Europe, this period began with great hopes and expectations engendered by the legitimization of national self-determination and the recognition of the rights of national minorities promised by President WoodroW Wilson, and by the promise proclaimed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which stated: "His Majesty's government looks favorably upon the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine."

However, the greater the hopes, the greater the disappointments. This era saw the escalation of aggressive nationalism, the growth of totalitarianism, and the predominance of an unrestrained antisemitic racism. In these two decades of naive expectations and short-lived hopes, Warsaw, with its variegated texture and contrasts, became the focus of unlimited and wide-ranging Jewish activity. In those days of confusion on the brink of the abyss, it was virtually the capital of the Jewish people, particularly because of the isolation and disconnection of the Soviet Jew.

Many—perhaps the majority—economists, political leaders, writers, artists, journalists, publishers, historians, leaders, rabbis, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidim who reached prominence in Warsaw between the wars were not natives of the city but arrived there in response to its magnetic attraction and promise, in much the same way that other Jews were drawn to Paris or New York. Many Jews came to Warsaw from the provinces and many others from the eastern border of Poland and parts of Russia and Lithuania. Jews arriving from the eastern towns encountered strong opposition on the part of Polish circles who viewed the arrival of the "Litvaks" (Lithuanian Jews) as an invasion of aliens who spread the use of the Russian language and culture and were responsible for the "Russification" of local Jewry, much as New York's Jews bemoaned the arrival of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants between 1881 and 1920. Considerable criticism of the "Litvaks" also came from more established members of the community who ridiculed the Yiddish dialect of the new arrivals. Yet Warsaw not only served as a refuge for outcasts, it also gave those who arrived at its gates the feeling of home and provided them with ample opportunity to participate in cultural and communal life. Common folk who wandered toward Warsaw or escaped to the city from afar quickly acclimated to the ways of the city and the local Jewish community, becoming true citizens of Warsaw in every respect.

In his saga
The Family Moskat,
Isaac Bashevis Singer revealed the thoughts of a rabbi from a small town who came to Warsaw:

 

R. Dan Katznellenbogen now comprehended the full significance of the Talmudic phrase "In big cities life is difficult," yet Warsaw had other merits. Here he found books he could not find in his own townlet Binuv, or even in Lublin. The city was a place of study: wherever one went, there were synagogues, houses of learning, shtieblach, ritual baths. Collectors made the rounds and gathered the weekly tax for yeshivas. From the
heders
and the religious schools, one hears the voices of schoolchildren, by virtue of whose very breath the world exists. It is true that there are also many secular things here, modern things: clean-shaven men, women who retain their natural hair, students who study in the gymnasia, all sorts of Zionists, strikers, and just plain riffraff who have abandoned their Jewishness. But R. Dan did not take this into account. Gradually he became known to the scholars of Warsaw and they came to welcome him. In his own little townlet, R. Dan did not receive a tenth of the respect he received here in alien Warsaw: it happened just as it was written: "Get thee out of thy country ... and I will ... make thy name great."

 

The opportunity to enter Jewish life was not limited to religious Jews alone. A leading member of the socialist Bund, Bernard Goldstein, paints another sort of picture on returning to Warsaw from his travels in the east at the end of World War I:

 

I was drawn to the wide public of the Bundists ... and went to the "Club."...It was like a bee-hive. Already evening and the club was packed. They were all over the place, in every corner. There were meetings going on in all the rooms, the choir was rehearsing, the reading room was filled with people; one could hardly pass through the hallways. Different people confronted me. I recognize old friends from illegal work and new friends, youngsters, unrecognizable faces ... one of my first jobs was to help the strike of Jewish community employees and teachers at its schools. They already had a professional organization, but they were typical white-collar workers ("proletariat of the starched cuffs" as they were called) and completely helpless as to how to conduct a strike.

 

Entire streets and neighborhoods in the suburbs of Warsaw were inhabited mainly by Jews, with the greatest concentration inhabiting the northern sectors of the city. In certain streets, all the buildings were occupied by Jews, except for the janitor, who was not a Jew. Religious and secular Jews lived side by side as neighbors, often within the same family. In many families, the father would observe the religious precepts and conform to all the traditional rules in his dress. The mother would wear a wig and fastidiously see to the kashrut of her kitchen. Some adolescents followed in the footsteps of their parents, and others became Zionists, Socialists, and even Communists, who had "gone astray." Young people were avidly devouring fiction, theoretical books, forbidden newspapers, and periodicals, smoking on the Sabbath, and filling their homes with endless and noisy political arguments.

The religious life of Warsaw's Jews was expressed in the style of their home life, in the keeping of the commandments, in the many institutions and services, such as ritual baths, kashrut, the network of rabbis and
dayans
(judges), and the many houses of prayer. In the synagogues and the
shtiebels,
the religious and traditional Jews congregated for prayer on the holy days, the Sabbath, and weekdays, and for endless hours of study and discussion with friends. In the 1930s, there were three hundred such houses of prayer and almost everyone who came there had a permanent place. On the holidays, especially Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur, the style of worship was considered important and cantors with sonorous voices were in great demand. The great synagogue on Tlomacka Street, which was actually evolving into one of the more enlightened places of worship, attracted worshipers inclined toward assimilation. They introduced certain re-forms, such as holding sermons in Polish, when this was permitted by the government.

The educated classes and the assimilationists were convinced that if they were to have any influence they would have to introduce changes into the educational system, in dress and lifestyle, and to refrain at all costs from interfering with strict religious ritual. Thus, they were reluctant to establish Reform or Conservative Judaism, and religious life remained Orthodox. Organs were not introduced into the religious services of the more enlightened synagogues, as this was considered untraditional. On the other hand, services that included a male choir were considered entirely acceptable, and of course an important component of the service was the liturgical vocal music of the cantor. At the great synagogue such well-known cantors as Gershon Sirota, who died in the Warsaw ghetto, and Moshe Kossovicki often led the services.

The
shtiebels
of the Hasidim, in addition to being houses of prayer and study, were also used as quarters for the Hasidic rabbi's followers. Prayers in the
shtiebel
were highly emotional. This was the scene of deliberations over Hasidic literature, homilies given on such feast days as Pentecost (Shavuoth), and spontaneous dancing and singing. The most powerful group among the Hasidic sects in Warsaw was the Hasidim of Ger. The rabbinical seat was in the townlet of Ger, not far from Warsaw. The entire town lived under the patronage of the rabbi's court, and thousands of his followers streamed toward the place, particularly on holidays and feast days. The Admor of Ger, R. Abraham Mordecai Alter, maintained that in order to combat the secularization and erosion of the religious integrity of the Jews, it was necessary to move in new directions. The founding of Agudath Israel, and the leading role filled by the Admor and his followers, actually marked the adoption of hitherto unknown political methods by an Orthodox religious camp. Among the Hasidic rebbes who were seated in Warsaw was Klonimus-Kalmish Schapira of Pia-seczno, who left a collection of his sermons from ghetto days which was eventually published as
Holy Fire.

Members of the free professions and avowed assimilationists lived in streets and houses occupied by Poles or by a combination of Jews and Poles. It is difficult to estimate how numerous they were, but they could not have been more than 20—25 percent of the Jews living in Warsaw. The Jewish wholesale trade and its branches was concentrated on certain streets. Gesia Street was known as the source of textiles and related accessories; Franciszkanska Street was the place for leather stores and tanners; and Swietokszyska Street was devoted to publishing houses, shops for schoolbooks, and antiques dealers with second-hand and rare books. The Jewish quarter itself could be distinguished by its houses and the conditions of its streets.

The tenants' financial status and lifestyle to a large degree determined the appearance of the street: the sidewalks, the crowdedness and the noise, the cleanliness and the smells. Jewish alleys were congested and obviously neglected. Paul Tarpman described the pace of life in a typical alley of this kind:

 

The street is buzzing with activity of a kind one finds only in the Jewish quarter, for it serves as the nerve-center of trade and work. The street was unfamiliar with sleep. Night-time had little meaning here. During the day the shops were filled with customers and porters, who carried sacks, boxes, rolls of fabric, entire households ... on their sturdy shoulders. Sidewalks were crowded with people from daybreak onwards: vendors were selling rolls and soda-water, peddlers carried baskets full of peanuts, sunflower seeds, notebooks, and candles, loans and other bargains were being offered to any passerby in the most seductive tones, beggars in tatters and loafers praised their goods in the highest terms to all and sundry.

Here a Jew from the provinces howled and bemoaned the fact that in a single second, his possessions had disappeared as if they had never existed. And there, a man who had come down in the world begged for a hand-out. Further on, a groom damned a friend with all the biblical curses and rebukes he could muster, and at the corner of the street, a Polish policeman was setting a trap (meta) for a Jewish peddler. Jews wearing the long, traditional black caftans (kapote), others wearing small, black caps with little visors and clean-shaven heads, elegantly dressed women or some in the simplest of garments. Filthy children and clean ones, some well-nourished and others thin as a rail—one could find everything here.

 

David Canaani, a native of Warsaw, described his street and the house he lived in as a youngster: