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This week Joseph Buloff and Luba
Kadison visited the editorial office of the "Forward" and
delivered a greeting from the Yiddish theatre, and from the
Jewish lives in South America from where they just now
returned.
"The Yiddish theatre in Argentina has a
wonderful public and really great possibilities. The
appetite for theatre is exceptional, like here with us, I
thought, forty years ago, when immigration in the country
was going on with a force," they said.
They played for some thirty or so weeks
in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In Buenos Aires they gave
165 productions, playing night-in and night-out.
For that time they performed seventeen
plays, among them: "Murder" by Langer, Leivick's "Chains"
and "Shop," Pirandello's "He, She and the Ox," Dymow's "The
Singer of his Sorrows," Ressler's "60,000 Heroes" (a new
play), and others. In Brazil Buloff and Kadison spent two
months, and during that time they gave twenty-one
productions.
In Buenos Aires, the guests recall, the
Jewish population is around 125,000 souls. These are
immigrants from Poland and Galicia, from Romania and
Austria, as well as from other countries. And it appears
that they have naturalized themselves to the country and
economically establish themselves. They love theatre and
often visit it, especially when they have a guest with a
name, and they love serious plays, well-performed and
well-acted.
In general, Kadison and Buloff said,
that the Jews are not living badly in South America. The
Yiddish press shines there. There exists two daily
newspapers with quite a circulation and weekly journals. The
condition among the co-workers of the newspapers now is
already more collegial, a condition of professionalism. An
attempt has already been made to organize the newspaper
co-workers into a community union, and it is hoped that in
the near future the writers will consider themselves as
members of one profession, and not as adherents of
particular newspapers.
One should not forget that several
years ago the contributor of one Yiddish newspaper in Buenos
Aires considered the others as deadly enemies. For actors
then there was a very bitter situation. The actors had to
speak with a writer of one newspaper, and the writer of the
other newspaper would look on him as a sold person, and
turned away.
The new situations among the writer of
the Yiddish newspapers are welcomed by Yiddish actors, even
more so by the Jewish public, because the cultural lives
awaken there. There exists there quite a number of Yiddish
schools, Yiddish organizations.
In Argentina there are places even for
a Yiddish newspaper, Buloff and Kadison said. It is expected
that in the near future such a newspaper will start to
appear. They even expect to import a number of Yiddish
writers to the United States.
In their conversation with the writer
of these lines, Miss Kadison tells interesting details about
the women in South America. Its situation is precisely not
any good. Due to the white slavery that left sharp traces on
the social life of the country, the woman there is still
quite fettered and bound. She can't even step out of the
house without her husband. Even in a restaurant she must sit
in the special section for families if she doesn't want to
be thought of as a member of the underworld .... |
