Robbins rehearsing with Patricia McBride, a former dancer at City Ballet. Inset: a poster from an earlier Robbins ballet, also on display in a new Robbins exhibit.Photograph by Martha Swope, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
To the casual observer of Jerome Robbins’ career — if you’ve seen “Fiddler on the Roof,” “West Side Story,” or “Gypsy,” to name a few, you’re one — the weight his Jewish identity bore on his conscience would probably not seem an issue. In fact, if you had an intuitive sense, it’d probably be only that, yeah, he must have been Jewish, even effortlessly so. Who else makes a Broadway musical about the shtetl? Well, you’d be wrong. Robbins, who died 10 years ago and whose life is being revisited with a new exhibit and an upcoming ballet season dedicated to his work, remained deeply conflicted about his Jewish identity throughout his life. While those who knew his public persona — dancers, choreographers and the
countless fans of his work — may detect a certain cultural insouciance towards his Jewishness, not altogether incorrectly, his biographers suggest his private mind was much more troubled by it. “He said, ‘I laid my knife against it,’” said Amanda Vaill, Robbins’ most recent biographer, regarding his difficulty embracing his Jewish background. “So, you know, that’s pretty radical.” Vaill was quoting private tapes Robbins recorded of his thoughts in the 1970s. About his comfort level with his Jewishness, she said, “It was a process that had many modulations throughout his life.” The first happened when he was 5. Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, born in New Jersey in 1918, was taken to Rozhanka, near the present-day border of Belarus and the Ukraine. The trip was at the insistence of his grandfather, Gershin Rabinowitz, who had wanted to see the grandchildren he had never met. (Both Jerome’s parents immigrated to the States in the early 1900s; Jerome’s father left without his parents, whom Jerome was visiting in Rozhanka.) So Jerome’s mother, Lena, took him and his older sister Sonia to the small shtetl back in the Old World. Many decades later, Robbins rhapsodized about the journey in his private journal: “At night after dinner by kerosene lamps, songs were sung. I remember apples, embroidery, mud pies.” The quote, published in Vaill’s biography, ends: “It was all lovely, all lovely. I do not remember one unhappy moment.” But while Robbins was being tutored for his bar mitzvah, kids teased his hunched rabbi and Jerome through the window. “He felt embarrassed by the old man, and because of the old man,” Vaill said in an interview. “At this point you sense a kind of alienation setting in.” On the day of his bar mitzvah, Robbins broke down in tears, unable to finish his Torah portion. “It was a very traumatic experience,” said Deborah Jowitt, another Robbins biographer and influential dance critic. The alienation, his biographers suggest, was never fixed and would shift depending on his environment. For much of his young life — growing up in New Jersey, summer camp in the Poconos, dance classes on the Lower East Side — he was surrounded by secular, assimilating Jews like himself. He felt comfortable there. Moreover, much of the difficulty Robbins had with his Jewishness, his biographers say, was really a veiled antipathy towards his father and the professional ballet world in general. His father did not approve of his son being a dancer — no money, too girlie. He wanted his son to become more American, play sports, go to college, become a doctor, lawyer or take over the family garment factory. Robbins, as it happened, was bisexual, dropped out of college and would become one of the most important dance figures in modern history. As far as the ballet world went, the dance form was still perceived as a high European art when Robbins entered it. Jews, by and large, were not part of that canon. “He said that he whored himself to become a WASP American” in the ballet world, Vaill said of Robbins. “Though there were Jews in the ballet [company],” Vaill added, at mid-century, when Robbins began dancing there, “it was still very Russian, imperial.” Robbins changed that too, bringing an urban, jazzy realism to the increasingly abstract form. “His ballets told stories ... they seemed to say that ballet could be down-to-earth, ours,” wrote Joan Acocella, the dance critic for The New Yorker. Even when Robbins first began dancing professionally, in mostly Jewish companies, he was reluctant to broadcast his Jewishness. The first dance he performed in was “The Brothers Ashkenazi,” a Yiddish musical, with the Dance Center company. The Center was headed by two important figures in the nascent American dance scene: Felicia Sorel and Samuel Gluck-Sandor, both Jews who, like Robbins, often changed their names for professional reasons. Jerome borrowed the last name “Robyns” from his sister, who also used it as a professional dancer. (Jerome standardized his spelling —Robbins — in the ‘40s.) “Robbins didn’t particularly enjoy doing the show,” Jowitt writes in her biography. “Perhaps in part because it stalled his flight from his Jewish heritage.” On view at the new Robbins exhibit, “New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World,” at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, is a rare sepia photograph of Jerome and his sister in “The Brothers Ashkenazi.” Gluck-Sandor, the wall text notes, would later be cast as the rabbi in Robbins’ own production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 1964. The 1940s were Robbins’ breakthrough years. He became famous for his Broadway choreography, considered the first to have the dancing tell part of the story. There was “Fancy Free,” in 1943, his first hit with music by the young Leonard Bernstein. Then came “On The Town,” “High Button Shoes” and “Call Me Madam,” with music by Irving Berlin. The prevalence of secular Jews in the Broadway world quieted Robbins’ anxiety about his own Jewishness, critics say. The world he was in “was liberating, secular, assimilating for the Jews,” said Lynn Garafola, who organized the new exhibit. However, an icy fissure with the artistic community came in the early-1950s. Robbins was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and named several artists, some Jews, who were also onetime Communist Party members like himself. It was a decision that he rued his entire life. Most painful, he wrote in his journals, was not the fear that his homosexuality or Party membership would be exposed at the hearings, but that “the façade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.” In other words, said Vaill, “he felt his naming names was a repudiation of his Jewishness” — selling out his heritage. Feeling disliked by his colleagues at home, Robbins spent a good part of the ‘50s traveling abroad. He toured Europe with Ballet U.S.A. but also went to Israel, on the sponsorship of the American-Israel Cultural Foundation. It has been said that Robbins’ trips to Israel were instrumental in fortifying the country’s fledgling dance scene. He told the foundation to support Inbal, a Yemenite dance group, and his arrival was a harbinger for “the European influence getting superseded by the American one,” said Judith Brin Ingber, a leading Israeli dance historian. Robbins brought over Anna Sokolow to teach Inbal, which later toured the States. In the ‘60s, Martha Graham would arrive in Israel to found a competing Israeli dance troupe, Batsheva. “Robbins was the herald to all that,” said Ingber. In addition to his trips to Israel, Robbins made another visit to his grandfather’s shtetl. It had been demolished during the Second World War, something which, some say, strengthened Robbins’ Jewish identity. When Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for “Fiddler on the Roof,” asked Robbins to direct and choreograph the show, Robbins relished the opportunity. “He said it would give him a chance to bring that shtetl back to life,” Harnick, now 83, said in an interview. He took Harnick and the cast to Orthodox weddings to observe traditional Jewish dances; he gave the dancers fiery speeches, saying dance like hell or risk banishment to synagogue basements and the local JCCs. “To me, he was a man obsessed with it,” Harnick recalled. “Fiddler” became Broadway’s longest-running show, closing after eight years, in 1972. The later movie contract made Robbins a millionaire. But after two decades of Broadway success — there was also “Gypsy” and “West Side Story” in the late-‘50s — Robbins spent much of the 1970s and ‘80s at the New York City Ballet. He choreographed several important dances there, many re-staged in the company’s upcoming season beginning later this month. But, critics say, he often felt overshadowed by George Balanchine, the company’s founder. When Robbins first suggested a dance based on the Yiddish tale “The Dybbuk,” Balanchine told him, “Do it for Inbal.” In 1973 though, Robbins finally choreographed the piece, but to a lackluster response. He quickly took it out of the repertoire, hacking away at it for several years, but it was never seen again in its original form. That changed last year, and will again this season, when the original 1973 “Dybbuk” is performed in full. The other Jewish ballet Robbins tried was “Poppa’s Piece,” a semi-autobiographical work that focused on his troubled relationship with his father, the HUAC hearings and Yiddish culture. Robbins worked on it for more than 10 years, ultimately abandoning the project in 1992, unable to find an ending. He died six years later. If there is any solace, Jowitt writes, it is this: “Out of that struggle to find himself, he created an art that made an enormous contribution to theater and dance almost worldwide.” His struggle, the best we can say, is our reward.
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