Generational Shifts in American Jewish Theatre1

GENERATIONAL SHIFTS IN AMERICAN JEWISH THEATRE1 Linda Ben-Zvi Ellen Schiff, in her study From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contempo- rary Drama, and in her two anthologies of American Jewish plays, uses as her yardstick for inclusion those works in which personae are Jews, either self-determined, as David Ben-Gurion broadly defi ned the Jew, or societally marked, as Jean Paul Sartre argued, that is “one whom other men consider a Jew”.2 However, she omits from consideration plays in which characters “may be Jews” but do not “proclaim their Jewish identity, whether by boast, lavent or resignation”.3 What I am interested in interrogating in this essay are precisely the areas which Schiff’s study and anthologies omit, particularly those social and cultural forces that, during the period of composition, may have shaped the works of specifi c Jewish playwrights and determined the writers’ deci- sions to focus on, camoufl age, or completely efface Jewish characters and ethnic markers in the worlds they create. Such omissions of Jewish elements in one period may be as telling of about ethnicity concerns as are the overt signs of Jewishness in another epoch, and thus central to the study of American Jewish theatre. I will be discussing specifi c examples, culled from American theatre practice since the middle of the last century, but these tendencies and trajectories have application for other international theatres and Jewish playwrights’ deracinations or celebrations of Jewish elements in their writing. My starting point is Arthur Miller, the most distinguished Jewish playwright America has produced, honored in his own country and abroad. He is the author of what is arguably the greatest American drama of the past century, Death of a Salesman, a play which has been 1 A version of this paper appears under the title “‘The Sins of the Fathers’: Third Generation American Jewish Playwrights Settle Accounts”, in Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, special issue on Jewish theatre (2008). 2 Quoted in Ellen Schiff 1982, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama (State University of New York Press, 2008) x. 3 Ibid. 189. 216 linda ben-zvi translated into over fi fty languages and has been staged around the world. Schiff, naturally, cites Miller in her studies, but given the param- eters she sets out, only three Miller plays qualify as Jewish. They are: No Villain, his fi rst work, written while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan in 1936, and given three performances at the University Hillel Association and one performance by the Jewish Community Center of Detroit, Michigan under the title They Too Arise; Incident at Vichy, written twenty-eight years later and performed in New York in the fi rst season of the Lincoln Center Theatre in 1964; and The Price, mounted by the same theatre in 1968. This is the list of plays Miller himself cited in a 1969 interview, when asked to identify those plays which had “Jewish content”. He omitted After the Fall, despite its Holocaust theme, because its protagonist Quentin is not a marked Jew.4 Since that date, only one other Miller play, Broken Glass (1994), which deals specifi cally with Kristallnacht in Germany and growing Jewish fear of anti-Semitism,5 would thus qualify as a Jewish work. And what of Death of a Salesman? Miller scrupulously avoided any overt, demarcating signs of ethnicity in the work. The Lomans live in Brooklyn; they are of Brooklyn, residents long enough to have memo- ries of a more pastoral moment, before the “bricks and windows” of the surrounding apartment houses engulfed their home and lives. The only sign of European tastes or lineage is Willy’s preference for Swiss cheese, not the “new kind of American-type cheese”,6 hardly an Eastern European or specifi cally ethnic culinary preference. Miller does provide his hero with antecedents, or at least a fl eshed out male progenitor, but this forefather is one-hundred-percent American, a mythic pioneer vividly described by Willy’s specter brother, Ben, as “a very great and a very wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he’d toss the whole family into the wagon, and then he’d drive the team right across the country; through Ohio, and Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Western States”.7 The state names resonate, becoming a paean to 4 Robert Martin, “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview,” Con- versations with Arthur Miller, ed. Matthew C. Roudané ( Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1987) 183. 5 In a 1994 interview with Tzipi Shochat, reporter for the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz, Miller said of Broken Glass, “I always write as a Jew, but the Jewish issue may be more emphasized here. Sylvia must be a Jew.” 6 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Critic- ism, ed. Gerald Weales (New York: Vintage Press, 1967) 17. 7 Ibid. 49..

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