and Maeterlinck. Cumbered by the natal disqualifications of Yiddish, Madame Kalich lacks life in Florentine drama rendered in English; and Adler speaking Yiddish amid an English company is unintelligible to his audiences. But ours is hardly a function that criticises the actors and actresses as they appear behind strange footlights.
The Future of the Yiddish Stage.
The question really is what will follow if the “stars” in the Yiddish firmament forsake their native theatrical hearths? It seems the business of those primarily concerned. But in truth the Yiddish stage has done more to maintain, simplify, and aggrandize Yiddish as a language than the whole Yiddish literature of -oetry, stories and sketches. It has created a Yiddish patriotism that even now fumes and frets at the desertion of the leaders of the buhne. Is all this to fall in like a house built on sand? Of course there are those who would welcome this—to whom Yiddish is an obstruction to the path of Jewish progress. But it is not clear that even from this view point the swift collapse of the Yiddish stage is desirable.
Already what was a reputation making movement is being replaced in every city by the Yiddish vaudeville, and the Yiddish vaudeville will not, we fear, tend to raise the morale of the Jewish footlights and the audiences that sit before them.
Hope!
It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. So terrible an affliction as that from which our people in Russia are suffering has but one compensation, that under the force of this stress the Jewish people unite to make common cause. Weakness is still our badge for thousands speak in humanitarian tones of "our co-religionists," where they mean a much more human thing: "our brothers and our sisters;" but eventually even this will pass away and no veil will be drawn over the character of our pain. The Jew who
feels this kinship, with whom it is the mainspring of emotions, is not unnaturally wroth with those who cannot feel as he feels—but there is for the soothing of this anguish the hope that out of the community of interests there will grow up a better realization of our kinship. And it is towards that that every effort must be made We are such human beings, members of a huge family wrung with human pain and human passion. Our mood is not to turn the cheek to the smiter, nor to parade any superhuman qualities. We must draw together thread by thread into the mesh of the Jewish blood relationship. And what we do must be done in spirit. It is narrow according to some, it is clannish, it is lacking in a higher morality, but it is intensely human and it is along that road alone that has hope and consolation for Israel.
Seeing History Made.
As we read the accounts in the newspapers of the revolution in Russia we begin instinctively to compare what is happening there with that other fierce uprising of a great people against tyranny, known as the French Revolution. It is a little over a hundred years sinces the French Revolution flamed out and made such a light throughout the world that the memory of it is still vivid in men's minds. No man now in existence could have been alive then, unless possibly one of those century-and-a-half old prodigies of whom we now and then hear. And we have been getting accustomed to the feeling that that wierd drama happened so far away from us, in the dim past, as if it were one of those remote episodes, too strange and wonderful to be true, that we read of in the histories of the nations of antiquity, or in the epics that they wrote. But we are now seeing right before our eyes the beginnings of an event that promises to equal or exceed the great historic Revolution in magnitude. Violence is already abroad and we can only hope that this revolution will not exceed that other in horrors.