December 14 2008

Broadcast Date: 
Dec 14 2008

With the shadow of the Great Depression hovering over discussions of the current economic crisis, a program of readings from Jewish writers of that era, from Mike Gold to S.J. Perelman to Anzia Yezierska.

Episode segments
  • Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets
    Theater, Arts & Culture
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Clifford Odets, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, was arguably the most successful Left playwright of the 1930s.  He joined the Communist Party in 1935, but in 1952, when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), he disavowed his party affiliations and cooperated by "naming names" and thus was never blacklisted.

    Waiting for Lefty, first staged in 1935, was based on a 1934 strike of New York City cab drivers. Produced at the height of the Great Depression, it was a critical and popular success and was performed throughout the U.S., sometimes in local union halls. The main setting for the play is a union hall where the members are about to take a hotly contested strike vote, opposed by the union's corrupt leadership. In a spot-lighted area of the stage a series of vignettes sketch out the stories of individual workers.  We read from the first of these.

     

     

  • Waiting for Santy by S. J. Perelman
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Jenny Romaine is a member  of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok.

    Joseph Dobkin, a native of Queens, is widely considered to be the most enigmatic of all the hominoid primates. Compared with other apes, he is largely solitary, and highly arboreal, traveling slowly though the forest canopy in search of fruit. In the event of a glaciation, Joseph would hope to be trapped on an inland island with a copy of "Howl and other Poems" and a large stick. He is the acting under secretary for coolness in the alternative world government. 
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    S. J. Perelman, was a humorist, screenwriter and author born in Brooklyn in 1904.  He is best known for his writings in The New Yorker and for co-writing scripts for the Marx Brothers' films Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. During the 1930s, Perelman was fairly radical, and even did a stint as a columnist for The New Masses, but he loved to skewer the left as well. We read from Waiting for Santy, his parody of Odet's Waiting for Lefty, published in The New Yorker magazine in 1936.


  • Jobs in the Sky by Tess Slesinger
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Jenny Romaine is a member  of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok.

    Joseph Dobkin, a native of Queens, is widely considered to be the most enigmatic of all the hominoid primates. Compared with other apes, he is largely solitary, and highly arboreal, traveling slowly though the forest canopy in search of fruit. In the event of a glaciation, Joseph would hope to be trapped on an inland island with a copy of "Howl and other Poems" and a large stick. He is the acting under secretary for coolness in the alternative world government.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Tess Slesinger was born in 1905 and grew up in New York City, in a progressive assimilated family of Hungarian Jews.  Her only published novel, The Unpossessed, was a celebrated satire of the East coast left-wing milieu in which she then lived – it had fallen out of print, but was recently reissued by the NYRB Press.

    This short story, Jobs in the Sky, was first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1935.  It takes place in a Department Store on Christmas Eve, 1934, and brilliantly captures the insecurities, fears and intense class resentment felt by workers during the Great Depression.

  • Soul of A Landlord by Mike Gold
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Jenny Romaine is a member  of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok.

    Joseph Dobkin, a native of Queens, is widely considered to be the most enigmatic of all the hominoid primates. Compared with other apes, he is largely solitary, and highly arboreal, traveling slowly though the forest canopy in search of fruit. In the event of a glaciation, Joseph would hope to be trapped on an inland island with a copy of "Howl and other Poems" and a large stick. He is the acting under secretary for coolness in the alternative world government.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Mike Gold, born in 1893, was the pen name of Itzok Issac Granach, a lifelong Communist and a combative Left-wing literary critic. He was a founder and for many years the editor of The New Masses, In 1933 he became a columnist for The Daily Worker, a role he maintained until the end of this life. He is best known for this literary memoir about growing up in the impoverished world of the lower East Side of Manhattan, a book that was wildly popular during the Depression.

    This reading is from a chapter in that 1930 book, Jews Without Money, called The Soul of A Landlord. You'll note a reference here to an earlier financial panic--probably The Panic of 1907.

     

  • The New Poor by Anzia Yezierska
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Jenny Romaine is a member  of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok.

    Joseph Dobkin, a native of Queens, is widely considered to be the most enigmatic of all the hominoid primates. Compared with other apes, he is largely solitary, and highly arboreal, traveling slowly though the forest canopy in search of fruit. In the event of a glaciation, Joseph would hope to be trapped on an inland island with a copy of "Howl and other Poems" and a large stick. He is the acting under secretary for coolness in the alternative world government.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    An immigrant from Pinsk on the Russian Polish border, Anzia Yezierska, born in 1885, grew up on New York's Lower East Side; her father was a talmudic scholar, her mother supported the family through menial jobs.  During the 1930s, Yezierska worked for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project.  Her best known novel is Bread Givers  (1925) which follows the story of a young woman struggling to live day to day while searching to find a place in American Society.

    This reading is from her fictionalized autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, which was published in 1950—from a chapter entitled  The New Poor in the final part of the book where she describes the impact of the stock market crash of 1929 and her character's inability to find employment.

     

  • The Day Santa Claus Fainted
    Arts & Culture, Literature

    Jenny Romaine is a member  of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok.

    Joseph Dobkin, a native of Queens, is widely considered to be the most enigmatic of all the hominoid primates. Compared with other apes, he is largely solitary, and highly arboreal, traveling slowly though the forest canopy in search of fruit. In the event of a glaciation, Joseph would hope to be trapped on an inland island with a copy of "Howl and other Poems" and a large stick. He is the acting under secretary for coolness in the alternative world government.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    "The Day Santa Claus Fainted," was unearthed by one of our readers, Jenny Romaine, during her years as an archivist at Yivo: The Institute for Jewish Research. Its provenance is unknown.