Page - 49 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 | 49 doing so, Isidor hopes that August will treat Helen disdainfully, assuming that she is a prostitute, and thereby discredit himself as potential husband. August and Menasse arrive at the Boleslav’s home, which Isidor has purposefully misidenti- fi ed as a house of ill repute, and August proceeds to treat Helen and Eulalia in a vulgar manner. He ends up in a fi ght with Boleslav, tossing the man out of his own home. When August’s father arrives on the scene, they sort out the misun- derstanding. Isidor’s deceitfulness is made known, and he is forced to apologize. Ultimately, he cannot prevent August and Helen from marrying. We should emphasize that Family Pschesina does not portray the Jewishness of its characters on the basis of a criterion as conventional as religious affi liation. Instead, Jewishness is indicated through the names of the protagonists, such as Menasse Pfeifendeckel, as well as the play’s use of Yiddish terms such as mishpoche (family), punim (face), a nd schmooze (talk, chatter). But both of these kinds of in- dicators are only of limited use for identifying a person’s Jewishness. Th e Yiddish expressions are to some degree a part of the Viennese idiom and can also be used by non-Jews. And both Pfeifendeckel and Lerchenfeld are not exclusively Jew- ish names. Th e reverse is also true: in turn-of-the-century Vienna, only “ethnic” Czechs were referred to as Brzezina/Pschesina, but the farce uses it as a Jewish family name. Language and names are thus extremely unreliable indicators of national and ethnic identifi cation and their usage is largely dependent on context. Family Pschesina demonstrates how some performances in the Viennese singspiel halls questioned ethnic categorizations and the perceived unambiguity of cultural affi liations. Th e Lemberg Singspiel Society Not far from the Halls of Nestroy, in the Rotensterngasse, was Edelhofer’ s Leo- poldstadt Folk Orpheum, which served in 1901 as the home of the Lemberg Singspiel Society.25 Th e actors in the troupe had previously been active in Galicia with the Yiddish theater group led by Jacob-Ber Gimpel (1840–1906).26 Brig itte Dalinger, who discusses the “Polish” (as the Lemberg Singspiel Society was also called) in her dissertation, argues that we must classify this group of actors some- where along the spectrum between the Singers of Brod, a precursor of Yiddish theater in eastern Europe, and Viennese folk singers.27 As a result, Galician and other eastern European Jewish immigrants in particular made up the audiences that attended the performances of the “Polish.” Th ese “Polish” actors represented an important source of cultural mediation between the traditional Jewish world in the eastern European provinces and modernity, which these immigrants en- countered in Vienna. We see prime examples of this form of cultural mediation in two plays that the Lemberg Singspiel Society performed in 1903 and 1904. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.