‘The Dybbuk’ again and again

The Little Theater movement of the late 1920s was an effort by community groups to bring cutting edge modern theater to audiences outside of major coastal cultural centers. They were pushing back against the vapid spectacle of the big downtown theaters. Pittsburgh had at least 15 little theaters, including the IKS Players and the Y Playhouse. A robust system of local drama critics covered and promoted this work.

The Y Playhouse mounted “The Dybbuk” in February 1934. It was an ambitious production with a cast of 60. It strove both for artistic daring and historical authenticity.

Genevieve Jones choreographed dance sequences. After studying modern interpretive dance with Martha Graham in New York, she returned to town in the early 1930s to start the Orchesis Club, which is often credited with introducing conservative Pittsburgh to the beauty of modern dance. The YM&WHA was among her earliest supporters, allowing her to teach dance classes for children as early as 1930.

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“The greatness of dance,” she wrote in the Y Weekly in 1930, “does not depend upon the ability of the dancer to kick or leap. Rather it depends upon the breadth of the dancer’s personality — his inner self which he expressed through his physical self.”

A young woman named Jeannette Sukolsky designed costumes in consultation with the beloved local cantor Rev. Julius Bloom. Bloom had seen those shtetl garments firsthand in Eastern Europe before immigrating to Pittsburgh in the early 20th century, leading prayers at almost every Orthodox and Conservative congregation in town.

Edgar Kaufmann jr. (he preferred the lower case) designed the sets. According to articles, he conducted a “special study of the architecture of the Polish villages in which the story has its locale” to produce his “vibrant and sensitive” sets. Based on that description, he was likely studying the “wooden synagogues” of the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Perhaps he even recreated their swirling, penetrating painted interiors. No photographs survive.

Kaufmann jr. had been living in Europe since the late 1920s, first studying industrial design at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna followed by a private apprenticeship at Victor Hammer’s printing shop in Florence. For most of his adult life, he told the world he had returned to Pittsburgh in mid-1934 and left that fall for Wisconsin to study architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin Fellowship.

Wright scholars Donald Hoffman and Pittsburgh’s own Franklin Toker later determined that Kaufmann had returned stateside in July 1933 before joining Taliesin in late 1934. The missing year has long been a mystery. “What is most probable is that he spent the year painting in the studio above the garage in Fox Chapel, which is where Karl Jensen found him ‘dappling with painting’ in September 1934,” Toker wrote toward the end of his bestselling book “Fallingwater Rising.” For at least the early part of that lost year, Kaufmann jr. was spending days in Oakland, working on sets for “The Dybbuk.”

Through interviews, Toker concluded that Kaufmann left Europe largely over his concerns about Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in January 1933.

The best description of Kaufmann’s sets comes from the Jan. 26, 1934, edition of the Jewish Criterion. The lead article in that issue was “Hitlerism’s First Year.” And yet, nowhere in any coverage of the production is the play linked to the events in Europe.

“The Dybbuk” returned to Pittsburgh a few years later in a different form.

Gabe Rubin was the youngest child of Russian Jews who immigrated to Pittsburgh in the early 1890s. He spent six weeks at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law before entering the entertainment business. He started as an usher at the old Nixon Theater on Sixth Avenue and became house manager of the Art Cinema in 1935.

Art Cinema had opened a few years earlier as one of the first movie theaters in towns to primarily screen foreign films. According to an early notice, it showed “German talking pictures” and “Russian photoplays.” The Nazi era greatly complicated this business model, requiring Rubin to enforce a self-imposed boycott of German cinema.

In September 1938, Ruben secured the Pittsburgh premier for the recently released Yiddish film adaptation of “The Dybbuk.” It opened here on Rosh Hashana night to raves from the Jewish press and polite confusion from the general press.

Over the next 50 years, “The Dybbuk” haunted Pittsburgh through no less than 11 screenings of that original Yiddish film adaptation. It was shown at the YM&WHA in 1946, 1950, 1955 and 1956; at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in 1957 and 1964; at Hillel Academy in 1964; at the Carnegie Mellon University Department of History in 1973; at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill in 1972, 1974 and 1983; and at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1990, as part of the “Yiddish Cinema Classics” film series.

In addition to these film screenings, there were two small performances of “The Dybbuk” in Pittsburgh. Alex Segal directed a campus production in February 1942 to earn a master’s degree from the Drama Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. The Scotch ‘n Soda alum went on to a career directing drama for television through showcases such as the Actors Studio, the Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, the Celanese Theater, the Campbell Playhouse and the United States Steel Hour, among many others.

According to an obituary in the New York Times, “[Segal] was credited with producing the spirited and openly expressive style of actors that was characteristic of early television drama. It was a style that led to his nickname by one critic during the 1950’s as ‘television’s shrieking genius.’” From that description, it is easy to understand why he would have been drawn to the wild emotional intensity of “The Dybbuk.”

Rabbi Frederic Pomerantz hosted a reading of “The Dybbuk” in 1971 as part of the Rodef Shalom Congregation “adult coffee house series” with film, drama and music.

Pomerantz was raised in the Jewish community of Jeannette and joined Rodef Shalom a few years after his ordination. He quickly became the leading rabbinic voice for local Jewish youth in Pittsburgh during those culture-changing years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He opened a Greenwich Village-style coffeehouse for teenagers called The Back Door, created the Free High School lecture series, started a college magazine and developed an experimental jazz-rock Friday evening service called “Sim Shalom.”

Each of these figures was utterly of their times. And yet, when it came to finding the cutting edge for Jewish theater, they all came to the same answer: “The Dybbuk.” PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. He can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406.