Page - 53 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 | 53 Gimpel is unable to recognize deception as such, he appears incapable of living in the modern metropolis and is therefore wise to return to his hometown in Galicia. We also see this on Gimpel’s way from the station to Jacob Beer’s home. He sees a woman whom he thinks waves to him, but he can’t properly interpret the gesture. Th e everyday cultural complexity of the metropolis confuses him, and the imagined blends with reality. Vienna overwhelms him. Why Albert Hirsch chose to write a play that makes fun of Gimpel remains unclear. Various factors may have played a role in his decision. It is possible that Hirsch, a Viennese-born Jew, perceived a strong connection to the local folk-singer scene (see chapter 3) and simultaneously perceived antipathy for the Galician Jewish Gimpel and the Yiddish theater—an antipathy that was not un- common between so-called East and West Jews during this period.39 It may also be that when Hirsch debuted Gimpel (from Lemberg) Is Here! in the summer of 1901, he was toying with the idea of taking over as director of the Lemberg Singspiel Society, which is precisely what he did the following year. If this is true, he may have attempted to position his play as strategy for eliminating Gimpel’s troupe as a potential source of competition. In any case, the Galician theater director did not stay long in Vienna. We cannot defi nitively say whether Hirsch specifi cally contributed to Gimpel’s failure to fi nd success in Vienna. Unlike the two plays that I already discussed, the question of Jewishness has no relevance in Gimpel (from Lemberg) Is Here! In addition to mocking Gimpel, Hirsch’s play off ers a critique of arranged marriages, similar to the one found in Jüdaly with His Traveling Bag and many other textual templates that Jewish Volkssänger groups performed. Th e frequency with which this theme appears in such performances is a sign that it was of great concern to Viennese Jews. In any case, Gimpel (from Lemberg) Is Here! was well received by audiences. We can draw this conclusion from op-ed articles in newspapers, one of which declared that the play’s performance provoked such an “enormous amount of laughter, the likes of which hadn’t been heard for years.”40 As my discussion of its failed performances in Vienna illustrates, the Gimpel troupe did not fi nd a place in the Viennese Volkssänger scene with its Yiddish-language plays. Gimpel and his group ultimately returned to their home city in eastern Gal icia. Th e evidence that I have introduced thus far allows us to deduce that the Lemberg Singspiel Society either gave no performances in Yiddish or quickly dispensed with them upon arrival in Vienna. Instead, this group presented plays in Jewish “jargon.” Th e actors in this troupe, similar to those who performed with the Budapest Orpheum Society or Albert Hirsch’s troupe, used a local Austrian (i.e., German-language) idiom colored with elements of Yiddish and a corre- sponding intonation.41 An announcement in the magazine Das Variété points to this theatrical use of jargon. Th e announcement states that Mr. and Mrs. Kanner, members of the Lemberg Singspiel Society, presented the public with new “things in jargon” (Jargonsachen) .42 Th ere is no mention of performances in Yiddish. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.