PERFORMANCE: Tanglewood and the Thomashefskys

When Michael Tilson Thomas takes the stage in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, on August 19 and 20, to pay tribute to Yiddish theater impresarios Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky in The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, he will be completing a circle of familial and artistic legacy that began in the late nineteenth century in the Ukrainian shtetls where his grandparents were born. From those small villages, the two, like millions of fellow Jews, emigrated to the United States to escape persecution and carve out a new life in the goldene medina, the Promised Land where, as legend had it, the streets were paved with gold.

For most immigrants, that promise proved false; the streets of the New World were paved with the same hard work and backbreaking toil as the dusty dirt roads of the Russian countryside. But for these two unlikely heroes, who arrived as young teenagers with talents yet to be revealed, the American Dream would prove to be real, as they eventually became the first couple of the Yiddish theater—as Tilson Thomas describes them, the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their day.

Tilson Thomas never knew his grandfather, who died in 1939, before he was born. But he grew up with his grandmother, who lived until 1962, and absorbed many of her stories as well as the personality of “a major, original eccentric.”

“Imagine that your grandmother was Elizabeth Taylor; that’s kind of what it was like,” Tilson Thomas recalls. “She was a major star. The kinds of things that she said, her perspective, were, I think, quite different from most people’s grandmothers’ perspectives.”

When Bessie Baumfeld was fourteen, she attended a touring performance of Yiddish musical theater that was passing through her hometown of Baltimore. Taken with a particular actress, she went backstage to meet her to tell her how much she enjoyed her performance, only to discover that the woman was actually a twenty-year-old man in drag by the name of Boris Thomashefsky. A few years later, the two were married, and Bessie joined the theater company.

Together, the Thomashefskys pioneered the populist entertainment known in shorthand as “Second Avenue,” named for the New York City byway where many of the Yiddish theaters were located. The performances of this era served as vital communal get-togethers for the flood of new immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side, whose lives were wrenched by the culture shock brought about by the move from the insular, Yiddish-speaking world of the rural shtetl to the crowded, urban tenement life in their English-speaking new home.

“The Yiddish theater was where people went not only for entertainment but for education, for emotional support, for techniques and guides for assimilating in this country,” says Zalmen Mlotek, executive director of New York’s Folksbiene; nearing the century mark, it’s the longest running professional Yiddish theater in America. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of displaced persons coming to America and facing this new world. What the Yiddish theater offered them was a home, a place where they could see and re-live and learn about ways of assimilating into American culture,” says Mlotek, who, like Tilson Thomas, is a former Tanglewood conducting fellow, and who assisted Tilson Thomas in the early stages of orchestrating some of the Thomashefskys’ numbers.

Mlotek’s mother, Chana Mlotek, a folklorist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, performed exhaustive research about the Thomashefkys for Tilson Thomas—little of their work was readily accessible in any kind of recorded form. In the process, Chana Mlotek confirmed what legend had already assumed. “Immigrants spent their free time at the Yiddish theater, learning from it, being inspired in this culture, moved by the scenes of the old country, and yearning for home and loved ones,” she says. And in their shows that combined drama, music, comedy, and improvisation, the Thomashefskys were uniquely positioned to provide all of this to their adoring fan base.

“Boris developed large audiences for the theater: writing, producing, directing, and starring in his many productions,” says Chana Mlotek. “He was one of the patriotn—the glamorous stars who inspired fans to proclaim and to support their favorite stars. Boris was flamboyant, handsome, a matinee idol whom the public adored.”

Among Boris’s unique creations were the Yiddish Parsifal and the Hasidic Hamlet, retitled Der Yeshive Bokher (The Yeshiva Student). His Uncle Tom’s Cabin was relocated to Czarist Russia, and this son of a cantor also created Yiddish adaptations of Faust and works by Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.

While the Thomashefskys were superstars of their day, heroes to the immigrant Jewish population, their renown extended beyond that world and crossed over into the American mainstream, according to Michael Wex, an historian of Yiddish culture and author of bestselling guides to Yiddish, Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu.

“They helped inaugurate the celebrity culture,” says Wex, who translated Boris’s autobiography for the Thomashefsky project. “People followed them around. Gossip about what they did, every minute of the day, that stuff circulated. The one thing about Yiddish theater was although it was in Yiddish, other people went. Yiddish theater got reviewed in the English press. Groucho Marx mentions him in one of the Marx Brothers movies, so people would’ve recognized the name.”

Tilson Thomas’s program, on which he has been working for more than a decade, takes attendees on a journey through the lives and times of the Thomashefskys and their audience, from the Old World shtetls to the New World theaters, through song, slides, and narration. The cast features vocalists Judy Blazer, Eugene Brancoveanu, Neal Benari, and Ronit Widmann-Levy, directed by Patricia Birch. Tilson Thomas handles piano duties.

[In addition to his Thomashefsky program, Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein and music director of the San Francisco Symphony who held a conducting position with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) from 1969 to 1974, will  conduct the BSO in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with special guest Yefim Bronfman, on August 14. He will also help bring the curtain down on the BSO season, leading the orchestra through the paces of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on August 23.]

The program grew out of the Thomashefsky Project, founded in July 1998, in an effort to rescue and preserve the story of Tilson Thomas’s grandparents and early American Yiddish theater’s contribution to American cultural life. Preservation efforts have included discovery and restoration of disintegrating scores and the reconstruction of as many original works as possible, some of which are included in the program.

In addition to a work of musical history preservation, the project has been personally meaningful for Tilson Thomas, enabling him to rescue his family’s legacy from the realm of anecdote and determine how much of what he was told growing up could be backed up by actual historical fact. “A lot of these stories were first told to me when I was a kid,” says Tilson Thomas. “When adults are telling a kid about something, they don’t necessarily tell the entire picture of what happened.”

In fact, says Tilson Thomas, what he has since learned has often been more outrageous than what he had been told. “What surprised me is that some of the stories that seemed the most improbable and exaggerated—those stories all proved to be true,” he says. “Only the few occasions that they tried to make things appear to be more normal and ordinary turned out to be fabrications.”

Tilson Thomas also discovered that the nature of his grandparents’ art and talent was surprisingly modern. “What both were very gifted in doing was improvising couplets, which meant that the orchestra could lay down a vamp and you could improvise a song, make up your own little melody, your own little words, according to what happened that week,” he says. “It was satirically topical, something like what we see on Saturday Night Live or other improv shows.”

Adds Michael Wex, “The Yiddish theater was infamous for actors not following script, much to the despair of the playwrights. There was a lot of improvisation.”

Eleanor Reissa is one of only a handful of performers working in the Yiddish theater today. The singer and actress is very conscious of the legacy of and debt owed to the Thomashefskys for the art she practices, including dramatic roles and cabaret performances. “They were leaders in this country of an art form that was thick and rich with personality and passion and skill,” she says. “Broadway is deeply impacted by the Yiddish theater. This is not only about where the Yiddish theater came from, but about where Broadway came from.” [AUGUST 2009]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and critic-at-large. He is the author of The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, the all-time bestselling guide to klezmer music.

THE GOODS

The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater
Aug 19-20
Tanglewood
Route 183
Lenox, Mass.
888.266.1200

Photos, top, Michael Tilson Thomas by Stefan Cohen; poster of Bessie Thomashefsky; Tilson Thomas in performance; Boris Thomashefsky; Bessie Thomashefsky; Tilson Thomas; and Judy Blazer and Eugene Brancoveanu as the Thomashefskys. All photos courtesy the Thomashefsky Project.