Yiddish theatre

Just Like It Was

Source: Harry Blacker, Just Like it Was: Memoirs of the Mittel East (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1974), p. 173

Text: Appreciation of dramatic art was usually confined to the older natives who paid sporadic visits to the Pavilion in Whitechapel Road. Here, the Yiddish theatre flourished in all its sentimental glory, offering the romance-deprived audiences improbable slices of life where virtue always triumphed over vice. At predictable intervals during each performance the actors broke into ballads that wrung the heart and brought tears to the eyes of the audience, already smarting from the pall of tobacco smoke that partially obscured the stage. Upstairs, in the overcrowded gallery, and looking amazingly like an animated Hogarth cartoon, where the mums and dads who watched the action and at the same time consumed gargantuan snacks of schmaltz herring, fish and chips, pieces of cold chicken, oranges, pineapple chunks and monkey nuts, all openly carried into the theatre in shopping baskets. The unconsumed portions of their repast were tossed over the rails onto the heads of the ‘Capitalists’ in the pit below. The remote verbal exchanges that followed the bombardment often provided better entertainment than the advertised play. It was here that the great Joseph Kessler hammed his way through a thousand roles, ably supporting his assorted aged leading ladies through the vicissitudes of Jewish life in the ghetto to the rapturous applause of his many fans.

Comments: Harry Blacker (1910-1999) was a cartoonist and illustrator. His memoirs describe Jewish life in London’s East End in the 1910s and onwards, for which he defines his ‘Mittel East’ as being Bethnal Green, Hackney, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Stepney. Joseph Kessler (1881-1933) was a Hungarian-born star of the Yiddish theatre in London, who appeared at the Paragon and Pavilion theatres in London’s East End throughout the 1910s and 20s.

Posted in 1910s, 1920s, Theatre, United Kingdom and tagged Food and drink, Galleries, Harry Blacker, Joseph Kessler, London, Memoirs, Pavilion Theatre (London), Smoking, Talking, Yiddish theatre on October 11, 2016 by urbanora. Leave a comment

Search for:

Theatregoing is an ongoing survey reproducing eyewitness testimony of seeing theatrical productions, from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Enter your email address to follow Theatregoing and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Venues

Witnesses

John Quincy Adams – Maurice B. Adams – James Agate – Archibald Alison – William Allingham – Hans Christian Andersen – Matthew Arnold – Walter Benjamin – Arnold Bennett – Mary Berry – Laurence Binyon – Harry Blacker – James Boswell – Reginald Brett – William Wells Brown – Hablot Knight Browne – Orville Hickman Browning – Frances Burney – Aaron Burr – John Byng – Neville Cardus – Percival Frederick Chambers – William Rufus Chetwood – Colley Cibber – Thomas Coryat – Samuel Curwen – Richard Harding Davis – Charles Dickens – Leonard Digges – William Dodd – Robert Dodge – John Downes – William Seymour Edwards – T.S. Eliot – John Evelyn – Henry T. Finck – Richard Flecknoe – Violet May Flynn – Simon Forman – Margaret Fuller – Marguerite Gardiner – Edmund Gayton – Francis Gentleman – Kate Terry Gielgud – Mary Gladstone – Oliver Goldsmith – James Greenwood – Catherine Elizabeth Havens – William Hazlitt – Paul Hentzner – C.W. Heriot – Harold Hobson – Thomas Jefferson Hogg – Philip Hone – Horace – Jack Howison – Anna Brownell Jameson – Franz Kafka – Ryszard Kapuściński – Fanny Kemble – Harry Kessler – Mirza Abul Hassan Khan – Karl Kingsley Kitchen – Herbert Kubly – Charles A. Leale – Henry Leigh – George Henry Lewes – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – E.V. Lucas – Eric Lugg – Micheál Mac Liammóir – John Manningham – John Marston – Westland Marston – Henry Matthews – Alice Meynell – Paul Morand – Hannah More – Karl Philipp Moritz – Henry Morley – Gouverneur Morris – Naser al-Din Shah Qajar – Paul Nash – Philipp von Neumann – Sylas Neville – Harriette Story Paige – William Osborn Payne – Henry Peacham – Elisabeth Pepys – Samuel Pepys – Thomas Platter – Channing Pollock – Guy Price – Sydney Race – Henry Reeve – John Rickman – Robert Roberts – Henry Crabb Robinson – C.H. Rolph – William Howard Russell – George Augustus Sala – Ignatius Sancho – Walter Scott – Mihail Sebastian – Frances Lady Shelley – Mary Shelley – Benjamin Silliman – Louis Simond – Robert Southey – Reginald Spurgeon – Sidney H. Stewart – Philip Stubbes – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – Thomas Tegg – Robert Tofte – Wolfe Tone – Boris Uxkull – Queen Victoria – Baron Waldstein – Henry Wansey – Evelyn Waugh – Lupold von Wedel – Edward William Wifen – Orrin Sage Wightman – Ashton Rollins Willard – Henry Wotton – Xenophon – Edmund Yates –

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31