Abstract
When Clifford Odets (1906–1963) finished writing Awake and Sing!—originally titled I’ve Got the Blues—he was still a bit-part actor, unknown and penniless. He had found an artistic family in the Group Theater, that band of (mostly Jewish) brothers and sisters, struggling to bring radical idealism and Stanislavskian realism to Broadway. But of the Group’s three directors, only Odets’s friend Harold Clurman showed any interest in Awake and Sing! Lee Strasberg, another director, later to become the guru of the Actors Studio, told the young playwright, “We don’t like your play. We don’t want to do your play. It has a small horizon.” Only a revolt of the Group Theater’s actors forced the directors to put it into rehearsal.
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Notes
In Odets’s play: Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1980), 80–82.
It is as non -Aryan: Quoted in Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theater and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 208.
In those inner-city Jewish areas: Nathan Glazer, “There and Back Again,” Forward, New York, June 4, 2004, 10.
Immigrant American Jewish: Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat,” in Norman L. Kleebatt, Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New York: Jewish Museum and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 75.
Bessie resents Jacob: Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and other aspects of popular culture, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30–37.
ancient Messianic dreams: Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 157.
O workers’ Revolution: Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1930, repr. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993), 309.
The Jewish true believers: Arthur Hertzberg and Aaron Hirt-Manheimer, Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 1988), 217–19.
I was struggling: Arthur Miller, Timebends, A Life (New York: Perennial Library, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), 70.
he was going to join the Communist Party: Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (instead of an autobiography) (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 162.
Gertrude Berg, Me and Molly (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1948): downtown, 10; a new beginning, 8; a tree, 15; Papa’s life, 10; For years, 23; To me life, 27; My father’s house, 34; A man, 76; what I want, 77.
the United States: Quoted in Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (New York: Athaneum, 1953, 1975), 233.
Molly became a person: Gertrude Berg with Cherney Berg, Molly and Me (New York, London, Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 190–91.
fused Torah and Constitution: Jerold S. Auerbach, quoted in Elliot Abrams, “Judaism or Jewishness?” in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation: Jews and Judaism in America (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 10.
Jewishness, in burgeoning Jewish neighborhoods: See, for instance, Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 4, 11, 16, 64.
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© 2008 Julius Novick
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Novick, J. (2008). The Bronx. In: Beyond the Golden Door. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611832_4
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