over his shoulder.
The bitchy lady at the entrance told
Rootless Cosmopolitan
The
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 char-
acters (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 art-
ists 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 Al-
exandra 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 art-
ists 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
us, without pity, that the show was sold out.
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, featur-
ing 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 produc-
tion, 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, tak-
ing 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 sym-
pathize 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 Mos-
cow Yiddish Theater. According to Sandrow, it “recre-
45
 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 pro-
claiming 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 Jew-
ish. It just is.”
At the turn of the century, Warsaw was the interna-
tional capital of Yiddish literature, and Peretz sat in the
center, writing, teaching classes, encouraging young
writers and generally creating a sense of possibil-
ity 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 be-
hind. 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 devastat-
ingly 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 uncer-
tainty, 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/com-
poser 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 root-
less cosmopolitans, continues to inspire Jewish artists in
their struggles for full and genuine expression.
Jewish Currents