Page - 51 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 | 51 Kohn’s friends, the Zionist Samuel Pinkeles, succeeds in convincing Bauchfett that he puts Judaism at risk with his plan to have the baron marry his daughter. At the end, Bauchfett supports the marriage between Rebecca and Albert. Unlike Th e Soldier of Plevna, Jüdaly with His Traveling Bag depicts Jewishness through the construction of a sense of responsibility toward the Jewish commu- nity, specifi cally through Zionist sentiment. It communicates an appreciation for Zionism while simultaneously calling for a reformulation of traditional Jew- ish life. We see this in the play’s criticism of the arranged marriage. To be sure, interconfessional marriage, as portrayed in Jüdaly with His Traveling Bag, was anything but common practice among Jews, determined neither by the parents of the bride or groom nor by the couple of their own free will. But an arranged marriage involving only Jewish partners, which failed to consider the young peo- ple’s feelings, was widespread. Liberal-minded Jews had been fi ghting against this practice since the Haskalah.32 Jüdaly with His Traveling Bag situates itself within this critical tradition. Th e performances of the “Polish” thus showed audiences an alternative to the lifestyle with which many Jewish immigrants from Galicia were accustomed. Th e “Polish” introduced new rules of conduct and acquainted their public with values that prevailed in Vienna at the time. “Jargon” Replaces Yiddish Although the actors who were members of the Lemberg Singspiel Society origi- nally came from a Yiddish-language ensemble, they probably adapted quickly to local demand in Vienna and abandoned the Yiddish language in favor of “Jewish jargon.” Th is is why one can categorize the “Polish” as a part of the Viennese Volkssänger scene rather than assigning them to the Yiddish theater tradition, as many Yiddish sources do.33 Th ere are various reasons for not including the “Pol- ish” in the Yiddish tradition. I discuss some of these reasons in the following section, because they shed light on Viennese cultural specifi city. We see the fi rst indication that the “Polish” were not a Yiddish theater group in the reaction that the Viennese public had to guest appearances of Jacob-Ber Gimpel’s Yiddish ensemble from Lemberg. Not long after the Lemberg Sing- spiel Society was established in Edelhofer’s Leopoldstadt Folk Orpheum, Gim- pel came to Vienna with his troupe. Gimpel organized his own performances in the hotel Bairis cher Hof, located in the Ta borstrasse mentioned in Joseph Roth’s quotation and thus not far from the performance venue of the “Polish.”34 It is possible that Gimpel moved his performances in order to benefi t from the lively popularity that the “Polish” enjoyed in Vienna.35 Th is interpretation of events would imply that they performed pieces in the Yiddish language. But there is also evidence to suggest that Gimpel came to Vienna to compete with the “Pol- ish” and thereby compromise their success. Dalinger argues that the manager of Edelhofer’s Leopoldtstadt Folk Orpheum went to Lember g (Lvov) to entice This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.