Night In The Old Market

over his shoulder. The bitchy lady at the entrance told us, without pity, that the show was sold out.

The

Rootless Cosmopolitan Rokhl Kafrissen

Demons and Darkness: Interpreting Peretz and Margolin

Y.

L. Peretz worked on his epic play, Bay Nakht Afn Altn Mark (“At Night in the Old Marketplace”) for almost ten years. It was first published in 1907, and revised multiple times until his death in 1916. The play has almost a hundred characters (many with only one line), barely any dramatic arc, and framing devices within framing devices within framing devices. It’s a sprawling modernist collage that picked up all the big themes of Peretz’s work, with stage directions that require million-dollar budgets. It’s what I might colloquially refer to as an Attention Deficit Disorder mess. Bay Nakht has been produced only five times, but it’s catnip to the most ambitious and avant-garde Jewish artists of each generation. It’s no surprise to find that Bay Nakht has a new life in the hands of three of the most interesting Jewish artists of our generation. Composer Frank London, writer Glen Berger and dramaturge Alexandra Aron have been working on their version for almost as long as Peretz revised the original. I remember when it first came around in the fall of 1997. I was new to New York and circled the listing in the paper. If you’d ever been to Fez, you’d recall its location on Great Jones Street, a spot that’s cute and charming when you’re strolling, but not so cute when you’re still new to the area and hoping to get into a show and it’s 7:55 and you realize you didn’t call to find out if there might be tickets left. I inched into the packed anteroom of Fez with about fifty other Jews. Shmushed against each other, we were pushed back against the wall as the artists swept past, down the hall and then downstairs to the club. I recognized Frank London (He’s famous, he’s in the Klezmatics!). Then he was gone, trumpet case slung

May-June, 2007

That was ten years ago. Just a few weeks ago, I made up for that night by attending the premiere performance for the new CD, A Night in the Old Marketplace, featuring words and music by Frank London and Glen Berger. I even got press tickets for me and my date. It took ten years, but at least I didn’t have to pay! This new Bay Nakht exists for the time being only as a song cycle; it hasn’t been produced as a full stage production. What I saw a few weeks ago at the Barrow Street Theater were singers playing different roles, with Glen Berger as the Narrator. It was an incredible performance that featured not only London’s frequent collaborators (like Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics) but also amazing Broadway talents like LaTonya Hall, who blew everyone away with her version of “Meet Me in the Old Marketplace.” Over the course of ten years of work on this production, the concept of how it would be presented changed, too. (One version compressed all hundred characters into one, with the badkhn, or master of ceremonies, taking center stage and singers as mere accompaniment.) The new production provides a more coherent narrative, while still focusing on the major themes of the text: the conflict between tradition and modernity, between faith and rationalism, and between free will and fatalism. Can human beings challenge the ineffable plan of God? Is true revolution, political, mystical or religious, ever a viable option? Those conflicts, in Peretz’s original text, are cloaked by the freewheeling “tragic carnivalspiel” (as Peretz termed it) created by the unstageable stage directions and the huge cast of characters, both living and dead, including talking buildings and a gargoyle. According to Nahma Sandrow’s study of Yiddish theater, Vagabond Stars, Peretz’s friends begged him to make the play “less a poem and more a play, with a tighter plot and more distinguishable characters. Peretz insisted that the truly Yiddish style, which would one day be acknowledged as such, was all in cryptic hints, and in interpretation of what is hidden.” While I sympathize with the stubbornness and avant-garde spirit of Peretz, the impressionist poetry of Bay Nakht meant that after devoting so much of his life to working and reworking the text, Peretz died without seeing it come to the stage. One of its most famous productions was by the Moscow Yiddish Theater. According to Sandrow, it “recre45

ated Bay Nakht in the image of the revolution, chopped out lines, characters, and added new ones.” In a way, the latest production has also been recreated in the image of its producers — not in the apocalyptic spirit of 1925, but in the pragmatic yet revolutionary image of the Jewish avant garde of 2007. Much of the first act has been eliminated, along with the many layers of framing devices. A love story, which appears as just one of many ripples of drama among the original swarm of characters, has been moved to the top of the narrative. Sheyndele and Nosn, the thwarted lovers, are reunited when Sheyndele is one of the many dead brought back to life by the mad badkhn. The dead klezmorim, called up from the otherworldly well in the center of the market (an image from Peretz’s childhood), play for Sheyndele and Nosn’s supernatural wedding. The badkhn hopes to frustrate God’s plan by taking the dead from their graves and, in a key mystical image of the new show, reassembling the shards of the glass broken at the wedding. The familiar plot about thwarted lovers attempting to reunite comes to hold much of the tension and meaning originally created by the sprawl of characters, each proclaiming his or her own conflict (the oppressed worker who died on the job, the poor Jew and the hussar who killed him, etc.). But in straightening out the narrative and performing it totally in English, the new production in some ways resembles the Moscow Yiddish Theater’s more than it fulfills Peretz’s dream of a cryptic Yiddish art. In fact, it was the creators’ intention to make a piece of Jewish art that was not about Jewishness. “The music is totally rooted in Jewish music,” Frank London told me. “The story is a totally Jewish story, the world it’s in is a totally Jewish world, the knowledge you have to have to understand it is a Jewish knowledge, the essential dialectic of the entire work is Jewish. Yet not for one second is what we’re doing about being Jewish. It just is.” At the turn of the century, Warsaw was the international capital of Yiddish literature, and Peretz sat in the center, writing, teaching classes, encouraging young writers and generally creating a sense of possibility around the future of Yiddish art. Yet the world of Yiddish art was in flux. The failed revolution of 1905 threw many into doubt about what would become of any of the revolutionary movements, both political and artistic. For Peretz and the young artists he inspired, revolutionary art was not necessarily being matched 46

by the creation of revolutionary audiences. The Yiddish poet Anna Margolin (1887-1952) was a teenager when she moved to Warsaw with her father at the turn of the century. She became part of the circle around Khayim Zhitlovsky, becoming his secretary, and for a time, his lover. She also began to write Yiddish poetry. Margolin then went to Palestine with her first husband and had a child. When the marriage went bad, she was forced to leave — and to leave her child behind. Writing in an often dark New York apartment (the electricity in her building would be shut off during the day when most were at work), she turned out devastatingly modern Yiddish poetry that reflected her struggle with mental illness and her struggle to be a woman in a man’s world and an artist working in a language that still struggles, today, for legitimacy. Margolin’s scenes are often observed from afar, through a window, a doorway, or in the darkness. The weight of mental illness, and a whole world of uncertainty, lays heavily on her in “Nakht iz arayn in mayn hoyz” (“Night Entered My House,” translation by Adrienne Cooper): And the enormous clouds Came with thunder and laughter Like the dark heads of gods And all whirled heavy and wild and bleak And all rumbled “you are, you are, you are” I lay in darkness. I recently spoke with Adrienne Cooper about her interest in Anna Margolin and the piece she and pianist/composer Marilyn Lerner are bringing to New York this season: a musical setting of Cooper’s translations of Margolin’s poems called Shake My Heart Like a Copper Bell. The settings are gorgeous, a mixture of classical and jazz music that captures the exquisite melancholy of Margolin’s work. Adrienne was one of the first researchers to use Margolin’s papers when they were acquired by YIVO in 1976. Through letters, diaries and other materials, she gained a much deeper understanding of an enormously talented poet who left behind a tragically small body of work. Working with Margolin’s materials, Adrienne told me, gave her “a sense of this person who developed a very full artistic self and had not enough of a world to live in.” The eloquence of Margolin and Peretz, rooted and rootless cosmopolitans, continues to inspire Jewish artists in their struggles for full and genuine expression. Jewish Currents