Women's rights in Yiddish theatre

Terry Gross interviews pianist, conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas. The interview is interesting in various ways – getting advice from Leonard Bernstein, backstage with James Brown for a couple of days, and so forth – but I was particularly interested in his remarks on Yiddish theater. His grandfather and grandmother, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, had been important in Yiddish theater in New York City. Here he's talking about how women's right was important in Yiddish theatre.

GROSS: What did she tell you about women's rights and the disparities facing women when she was young?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory in Baltimore and then suddenly finding herself on stage as a star, pretty quickly. But she went beyond that. She wanted to know everything about the structure of the theater, and she became a very effective producer and manager and someone who paid far more attention to the whole business and organization aspect of the theater than my grandfather did, who was the kind of big dreamer and partier. And that was so unusual for a woman of those days.

I have some correspondence of hers where she's writing to some people who put into an ad in some big paper that she was going to be a part of some season they were doing. And she writes to them saying that she absolutely has not agreed to do this, and these are the conditions which they must immediately fulfill in order for this to happen. It's really very tough and straight talk. And there's a lot of stuff about her I didn't have room for in the show, remarkable things, like when she was arrested by Theodore Roosevelt.

This happened in this way - in New York, there were blue laws at the time, meaning that performances were forbidden on Sunday. But of course, in the Yiddish theater, Sunday was a very big day because Saturday was the Sabbath. So they played on Sunday. And at one point, when T.R. was police commissioner of New York, he and some of his men raided one of the Thomashefsky theaters. And he came in and he saw Bessie, who was very young and who looked much younger than she was always. And he said, look out, little girl. And she said, Little girl, my ass; I'm the star here. If anybody's being taken in, it's me.

GROSS: (Laughter) That's so funny. So she got arrested.

TILSON THOMAS: She did. That's exactly the way she told me the story, little...

GROSS: Like she insisted on getting arrested (laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: Yeah, she was going to be in the center of it. And I mean, women's rights, feminism was a very big part of the Yiddish theater, but along with a lot of other social issues. The Yiddish theater plays even the so-called shunts, sort of low, everyday plays, were about issues like women's rights, like about labor, capital and labor, child labor, about degrees of religious observance, about the whole issue of assimilation, about reproductive rights of women and also a lot about the language. Are we going to speak Yiddish? Are we going to speak English? What language at home? What language in the rest of the world?

And what about the much larger issue, which is how can it be that somebody who was such a big shot in the old country became a nobody in America, and some little schlemiel from nowhere in a tiny village has suddenly, in the United States, become such a macher, such a big shot? And what does an immigrant pool of people do to understand where now is honor? Where is tradition?

Some advice:

GROSS: So you mentioned some advice in your show that your grandmother gave you about - when you're on stage, you have to remember that the people in the uppermost balcony are the people who paid the least but are enjoying it the most, and you have to - even if you're whispering, you have to make sure that those people can hear you. How has that affected you as a conductor?

TILSON THOMAS: My way of expressing what she said to me is, what is it like for people beyond the sixth row?

(LAUGHTER)

TILSON THOMAS: That we play in such big halls sometimes in classical music, and they're halls designed to be very rich, which is on the one hand, very nice, the gorgeous sound that's there. But to get the sound to be distinct is difficult. And I sometimes tell my students that playing classical music is like making an announcement in an airport, that you hear someone say, passengers on Flight 391, the (unintelligible)..

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: ...Immediately, please.

(LAUGHTER)

TILSON THOMAS: So you're trying to make every single moment completely distinct. Another way Bessie had of saying that - she said, listen - when you're doing an accent, you've got to watch out for the ninth word. It's the ninth word that's dangerous because you're saying, I was going to the park one day, and I noticed - the most beautiful...

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: And suddenly, you know, around that - you'll suddenly drop the accent. You'll drop it. You've got to keep the contour of it all the way going through. Same thing in music.