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ily-that is to say, the chorus girls--welcome him with a vociferous Columbian yell. The usurping villain is utilized also as a comic character. His favorite gesture is to stroke the forks of a long black beard, displaying beneath his chin a diamond solitaire somewhat smaller than an egg. No gesture could have been funnier than the Yiddish audience thought this. His pet vanity was that he could speken Engleesch.' I jotted down some of the flowers of his speech on my programme. 'Ich danke dir, dear, dear Mr. Blumenfeld. Tankaiou [thank you]." "Oh du, my swittest. Oh du, meine lufly goil," and other like phrases. When his foolish son makes love to a poor tenement girl instead of to the Fifth Avenue heiress, he storms at him: "Was ist de matter mit you?" "Gunnisht [gar nicht]," answers the son, defiantly. "Shut up!" the villanous father retorts; "I break your nuis [nose]." Once, when hungry, he exclaims, rubbing his waistcoat, "Kom on, und let's have a little lunch-room!" On another occasion he says, urbanely: "Ah, there! Was willst du, Mister High-tone Sport?" At all of these essays the audience howl with laughter, for they talk the English of the Bowery fluently, and, in addition to their Yiddish newspapers, read the yellow journals.

of the life about them is in the play of Trilby. The plot is from the American play, and many passages are almost identical. The local color and character, however, have suffered as complete a translation into Yiddish terms as the language. Trilby's name easily becomes Tilly. Taffy is Herr Gottlieb, and Little Billee is Herr Werner. Svengali is Herr Hartmann, and the racial distinction of which Du Maurier made so much is perforce ignored. The characters seem all to belong to one family, and Svengali is Little Billee's uncle. Yet the permanence of stage tradition crops out in his nose. Not content with what nature had lavished on him, he built it a story or two higher on the bridge.

I hoped to see all the best Yiddish plays, and asked my friend the cashier to book me and let me know whenever Herr Adler, the leading man at the Windsor Theatre, was to appear, for I was helpless before the Yiddish announcements. He failed me; and when I spoke of my regret, he said he had been so interested in the stories he had been writing that the matter had quite slipped his mind. planation was more than adequate, and I make no apologies for the fact that I can speak of some of Herr Adler's best plays only by name. Kabale und Liebe, Der Schwartze Yid, and Die Rauber are all,

The ex

Solo

plays. Der Odessa Bettler is an adaptation of the Rag-Picker of Paris. mon Caus, or Cardinal Richelieu, turns on the theft of Caus's invention of the mechanical use of steam. The Russian Jew in America explains itself. I was especially sorry to miss it, because it is said to be full of local color, many of the scenes being presented in English. There is also a Yiddish adaptation of King Lear, which, from all I could find out, is most interesting. It is a tragedy in four acts, and, as in Trilby, not only the language, but the scenes and characters have been translated into terms of modern Yiddish life. King Lear wears a long Yiddish beard and gown. Herr Adler considers Lear his best part. In the first act, he explains, Lear is a king; in the second, he has given away his throne; in the third, he is an outcast; in the fourth, he dies a beggar, and blind. "Every act is worse than the other," he "When I give it, there is sobbing and weeping all through the house. It is better than Shakespeare."

says.

Uriel Acosta is founded on the life of Gabriel da Costa, a Portuguese philosopher,

"IF I HAD MY FIDDLE, I COULD PLAY IT."

whose romantic love story Mr. Zangwill has told in Dreamers of the Ghetto. The heart of the situation is in the strife between the philosopher's loyalty to freedom of thought and action, and the lover's necessity of bowing to rabbinical power. The play is taken from a Ger

man classic; the lines are largely classical German; as Herr Adler renders them, they are full of the fire and dignity of intellect; his interpretation is broad and simple, and every effect springs directly from the heart of the dramatic situation. I found that the play had been several times acted during the winter, and always to audiences rapt in enthusiasm. I know of no American theatre where so nobly intellectual a theme would meet with so keen an appreciation.

gestive of the æsthetic medium of the Yiddish theatres. The theme bears a resemblance to the theme of Hamlet, which is all the more curious because quite unconscious. The father of a family marries a young woman who deceives him in the face of his children. A daughter is driven into the streets by her bad influence; and a son, a student, remains with the utmost abhorrence. There is a third child, an idiot son, who, despised because of his infirmity, witnesses the step-mother's full guilt. In spite of the incoherence of his reason he has a certain fulness of nature and flashes of intuition that make him instinctively rebel against his step-mother and her accomplices, and strive to bring them to justice. Like Hamlet, fate has given him a task too great for his powers. His mind is incapable of grasping the of fence, and when he tries to report it to his elder brother he is tortured by his inability to speak coherently. In its outlines the tragedy has a simplicity and breadth that is Elizabethan; and though it differs widely from Hamlet in the circumstances of the sin, as also in the fact

A LEADING LADY AT THE THALIA.

that the hero is actually mad, the similarities in the situation are striking. The madman's reverence for his dead mother is as strong as that of Hamlet for buried Denmark. He holds deep and agonized discourse with his student brother, questioning him as to life and death, the past of the soul and its future. Most striking of all, the hero's madness, like Hamlet's, is made the theme for grotesquely comic relief, which the audience gave ample evidence of relishing, and which Mr. Hitchcock and I found it impossible not to laugh at. This treatment of madness is more nearly related to the lost Hamlet, presumably by Thomas Kyd, than to Shakespeare's play; but there are passages in the text as it stands to-dayfor instance, Hamlet's incoherent passages with the ghost ("truepenny," "old mole") and with Ophelia ("to a nunnery")-which cannot be rightly read without remembering that such incoherences could not fail to strike an Elizabethan audience as grotesquely amusing. Altogether Der Wilde Mensch, like the Italian Otello, is more nearly related æs

thetically to the crude strong youth of the English drama than to modern English or American plays.

Adler's conception of the leading part was at times illuminating. He told me that when studying it he haunted mad-houses and mimicked the inmates; and when he produced it, he had in the physicians and medical students of the Yiddish community to criticise him. As first acted, I was interested to find, he conceived the part as wholly tragic. He found, however, that the audience was disposed to laugh at the madness, and that when they did so they were more appreciative of the tragic scenes. Little by little he has developed passages of genuine comedy.

he was only the more American. His account of the company was loud, and so broadly satirical that I feared he might give offence. He laughed at my fears, and let me see how he got on with the Yids. Alone and unabetted he assailed the entire chorus with Rabelaisian opprobrium, to all of which they had only the old reply that he could not be of their people if he wanted to. In the end he routed them, every mother's girl of them. It was not nice, but it was very funny, and it gratified my Saxon pride to feel that this derelict of our people had through all these years maintained his racial pride in the face of the immigrating people. It is almost compensation for our lack of the sympathies and the assimilative powers that make up an artistic people.

There were other respects in which these chorus girls were under American influences. They mostly spoke English; and those who have grown up in the country had been to our public schools. They are to be seen at Coney Island in swarms as great as the swarms of their richer kinswomen who resort to the roof gardens of Fifth Avenue hotels. One of them evinced such a mingling of the traits of her native and adopted countrypeople while Mr. Hitchcock was sketching

her that I jotted down a word or two of what she said. She had taken a position square in front, and Mr. Hitchcock moved about so as to get the eyelids, nose, and lips more in profile. 'What's the matter with taking all of my face?" she objected with primeval vanity, and was quieted with difficulty. When the sketch was finished she tossed her shoulder in a way worthy of Lise of old, and said, "Come again to-morrow and take the other side." For the life of me I could not say whether her tone held more of the ancient irony of the Bowery or its modern instinct for getting all there is in a transaction.

He

The leading actors and singers were all from the old country, and some of them had not yet learned English. The story of their lives is, in a general way, the story I heard of Adler's wanderings. His first theatre, in Odessa, was closed by reason of the Russian hatred of the Jews. opened it again as a German theatre, was discovered, and again put down. As a last resort he engaged a Russian to manage him and secure him against persecution. The shift succeeded, but the Russian laid hands on so large a proportion of the proceeds that the company rebelled, and left the country. After wandering through the Continent, he brought up in

the London Ghetto, where he made his longest stand. Six years ago he came to America, and travelled through the West as far as Denver and San Francisco, playing chiefly in Chicago. In New York he began at the modest theatre lately occupied by the Italians, prospered, and took the Windsor. Every year in the early summer he travels about among his people in the cities of the Atlantic States, and even in those of the middle West, so that his reputation is virtually national. It was not unnatural to suppose that Adler is recognized as the leading Yiddish actor

in America, but, though he may be, I could not make certain that this is the case. There are Yiddish theatres also in Philadelphia, Chicago, and spasmodically in San Francisco, in any one of which, I suppose, much the same kind of plays and acting are to be found. It is Adler's ambition to come out in an uptown theatre before American audiences. I cannot imagine a more amusing experiment; and it would be interesting to discover whether it would teach us more of Yiddish art or of the limitations of an American audience. The manager of the Thalia, which is

the rival theatre of the Windsor, has written some fourteen plays and operas, among them The Aristocracy of a Province. He has translated the leading tragedies of Shakespeare, and gives them at intervals every season. The new plays are written by Gordin, who wrote Der Wilde Mensch, by Latainer, and by Horwitz. Much of the music for the operas is adapted from operas well known in New York by the conductors and some of the actors. Both of these Yiddish theatres are in effect stock companies. At the Windsor, where the talent is on the whole greater and more varied, there are, besides Herr Adler, nearly a dozen actors of distinct artistic power; and at least one of the singers, Mrs. Kalisch, has a voice not unworthy of the Metropolitan stage.

The importance of the theatres of the Yiddish colony are best seen in their auditoriums. The Windsor is the equal of most of the theatres of Broadway. The Thalia, which is directly opposite in the Bowery, is one of the very best in the city; the prices of the seats range from a quarter of a dollar to