Page - 5 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Introduction | 5 Poverty was widespread among the artists and performers, and not a few of them lived under oppressive conditions similar to those that the Katz family en- dured. In the summer months, when demand for performance sharply dropped and people traveled into the country (as far from the city as their means would allow them) or amused themselves in t he Prater (Vienna’s principal city park), the homeless shelters were literally stormed by actors.24 Requests for donations for starving families of actors who did not have a roof over their heads were not uncommon.25 But of course not all of these performers were poor. For example, the ventriloquist Franz Donner, one of Mr. Katz’s colleagues, enjoyed a success- ful career in Vienna—so successful, in fact, that he was able to buy property in Moravia and spend his retirement there.26 Th e Katz family, along with their children, may well have represented an average Jewish family, as there were thousands of Jewish families like them in Vienna between the end of nineteenth and the early decades of twentieth cen- tury. Th is normality is probably one of the reasons why historians have thus far only cautiously devoted research to this segment of the population. Nonetheless, by analyzing these kinds of individuals and historical incidents, we may gain insight into the everyday lives of the Viennese Jews who otherwise remain in obscurity. Th e Tradition of Jewish Entertainers in Vienna Th e overall lack of historical engagement with the topic of Jews in the fi eld of popular culture may be largely due to the prevailing research paradigm. Th e scholarly eff ort to trace Jewish adaptation to bourgeois standards has ignored as- pects related to popular culture, commonly associated with the underprivileged. Jews who were active in the non-bourgeois entertainment culture have received little academic attention and appear in scholarly literature only sporadically. Nev- ertheless, they existed as organizers and producers, as well as consumers. Th ey were indispensable to Viennese entertainment culture, and this study endeavors to honor the role they played accordingly.27 Th e lack of historiographical interest in Jews in popular culture is not limited to the Habsburg metropolis, but is also refl ected in the history of the Jews in eastern Europe, especially in G alicia, where many Jews in Vienna traced their origins.28 Moyshe Fayershteyn, for example, was a Galician Jewish entertainer who traveled with circus troupes across Europe. His attraction entailed swallow- ing live frogs and mice and spitting them out again after gargling with water.29 In this context, we should also mention Josephine Joseph. She was originally from K raków and decided to try her luck in America. She made a career at the New York amusement park Coney Island, where audiences marveled at her as a hermaphrodite.30 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.