Calling Joseph Mandelkern

 

“Famous for his artistic eye,” the early-twentieth century theater agent Joseph Mandelkern liked to boast that he discovered the ethereal prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. 

This was not true. However, between 1900 and 1924, the New York-based impresario sailed to Europe dozens of times and always returned clutching a bunch of contracts for Russian performers to tour the United States.

Perpetually wielding a cigar, Mandelkern was “Mephistophelian,” “fast-talking,” and “wily,” according to reports.* I bet that his rivals, and perhaps some of his friends, occasionally felt the urge to punch him or sue him. He landed in court at least a few times.

Yet he did help to ignite the American passion for classical Russian ballet. In the fall of 1911, many U.S. newspapers ran this story: 

 

RUSSIA FORBIDS IMPERIAL DANCERS TO LEAVE COUNTRY

 

The ranks of the imperial artists have been so depleted that Chief Director Krupensky is at his wit’s end to provide a suitable ballet to be given before the Tzar at Krasnoye Selo, the famous “red village” near St. Petersburg where Russia’s ruler spends the summer.

At the center of the controversy stood Lydia Lopokova, one of Mandelkern’s prize catches. Beautiful and independent, Lydia possessed an extraordinary presence although she was only sixteen years old.      

Three dancers—Lydia, her brother Feodor, and Alexander Volinine—signed with Mandelkern in Paris during the summer of 1910. At the time, Lydia and Alexander were performing with the avant-garde Ballets Russes. 

Then Lydia disappeared. After a few days, during which detectives dashed madly around Paris, she emerged on the arm of a nobleman of Polish descent. He had been following her around for months and finally persuaded her to marry him. Now they would return to Russia for the wedding.

Mandelkern must have twisted her arm hard because Lydia changed her mind and boarded the ship. When they arrived at Ellis Island a few weeks later, she said, “I like New York very much.”

During the next two years, Lydia earned a lot of money and fame. Mandelkern booked her all over the country, including Buffalo, N.Y., where a producer arbitrarily cut Lydia’s appearances in half.

Irate, Mandelkern lost control and shouted at the audience from a private box. The police arrested him and led him from the theater. The producer followed, delivering a few body blows along the way.

After paying a $25 fine, Mandelkern was released on $300 bail. Lydia returned to Europe, married the economist John Maynard Keynes, and left Joseph Mandelkern behind.

 

 "House in the Pines," located in Jamesburg, N.J., 
was owned by a Russian couple. Mandelkern
often visited there during the 1920s. 

After World War I, the business of artist representation saw considerable change, and there may have been less room for Joseph Mandelkern. Besides, he wanted a different life back in the old world.

In 1922 he applied for a new passport. In his photograph, Mandelkern appears wizened, half-hidden by large glasses and a straw boater. Six months after the passport was issued, Mandelkern wrote to the Department of State to request that the headshot be swapped for another picture in which he looked much younger.

 

Passport photo, Joseph Mandelkern, 1922 

Then he went off to Wiesbaden, where he married Therese Jung, a woman nearly 30 years younger than he. In June 1925, they moved to Merano, Italy, just south of the German border.

In May of 1938, Hitler visited Italy for the second time and enjoyed, in the words of historian Paul Baza, “a massive display of fascist spectacle in three cities: Rome, Naples and Florence.”

Soon after, Mussolini ordered the enforcement of severe antisemitic laws. Unsurprisingly, Therese and Joseph Mandelkern were marked “di razza ebraica” on a census of Jews conducted in Italy in August 1938.

Hitler and Mussolini, 1938

There is evidence that Joseph tried unsuccessfully to return to the U.S. He suffered a stroke in December 1939, died soon after, and is buried in Merano’s Jewish Cemetery. In the official report of his death, no known relatives were listed besides Therese.

Few acknowledge that Joseph Mandelkern played a major part in shaping the cultural tastes of Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Really, he must have been insufferable.

 

*Quotes from Bloomsbury Ballerina by Judith Mackrell, an excellent biography of Lydia Lopokova.

**https://www.jamesburg.net/jhistory.html 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/11/calling-joseph-mandelkern.html

Joseph Mandelkern's Return to Russia

 

Tolstoy and Gorky, 1900

On July 4, 1905, the Polish-born impresario and real estate man Joseph Mandelkern landed on page two of the New York Times.

The 41-year old hotshot had arrived in Europe a few weeks earlier. He toured Warsaw, Lodz, and Bialystok. In the small town of Dzialoszyce with its majestic synagogue, Mandelkern visited his widowed mother, whom he had not seen since 1884 when he immigrated to America.

FOUND ANARCHY IN POLAND

JOSEPH MANDELKERN OF NEW YORK

TELLS OF HIS OBSERVATIONS

 

He saw a parade of 20,000 people carrying red flags. Revolutionaries in blue shirts. Everyone armed with pistols and knives. 

It is intriguing that Mandelkern chose the summer of 1905, a scant six months after the First Russian Revolution, to make a three-month trip into political and social chaos.

Days before Mandelkern arrived in St. Petersburg, the officers of the battleship Potemkin had been overcome by revolution-minded mutineers who were enraged by their treatment during the Russo-Japanese War.

As famously portrayed in the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, Cossacks murdered 1,000 men, women, and children who stood cheering the mutineers from the Richelieu Steps in Odessa while the ship was anchored offshore in the Black Sea. 

 

Famous scene from Battleship Potemkin, directed by 
Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein 

It was a dangerous, bloody time but Mandelkern felt confident about navigating through the Russian Empire because he possessed a “release from allegiance” signed by a consul general named Count Ladyzhensky. Mandelkern had paid 800 rubles for the document.

A supply of Havana cigars also greased the wheels.

Crossing the border between Germany and Russia, Mandelkern became aware of a new word, “Uligani,” derived from the English word “hoodlum.”

 

It entered into every conversation he held, with friends or strangers, in his home city. He heard it uttered in terror at the bier of a murdered friend. When he looked for his dead father’s gravestone, the same word was whispered into his ear by the gravedigger as a warning. When he wanted to seek rest and recreation in a public park he heard it again on the lips of a gendarme.  

The Uligani preyed on everyone.     

Now here was Mandelkern, a Jew, making his way through Russia as if he were an old friend of Nicholas and Alexandra. He also visited two anti-Czarists, famous writers both—Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky.

 Mandelkern boarded a train in Helsinki to reach Gorky, a 37-year old Socialist Realist author and Bolshevik sympathizer who spent his summers in a villa in Kokkola, Finland. After lunch, two messengers brought news of the Potemkin.

 “What have we to be afraid of?” Gorky mused aloud. “The time for secrecy is past. The change must come soon. Everybody knows it.”

Then Mandelkern went off to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate a few hours by train from Moscow. After lunch, Mandelkern learned that the Okhrana—the Czar’s secret police—regularly harassed Tolstoy. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks demanded that he relinquish his property to divide among peasants. 

Returning to the U.S. in August, Mandelkern met with a Times reporter to share grim tales of corruption, deprivation, and violence.

Nonetheless, Mandelkern told the reporter, he detected courage among the Russians, a willingness to speak out against the Czar’s tyranny and the waste of the Russo-Japanese War.

***

By the time of his 1905 visit, Mandelkern had established himself as a stealthy theater agent who nabbed gifted performers. His fluency in English, Russian, and Polish enabled him to execute contracts before anyone else in the room knew the details.  

Always in motion, Mandelkern traveled through the Midwest and to Europe. His wife Pauline and their five children—at least two of whom were already superb musicians—watched him come and go.

One senses he was aloof and finicky.

He certainly had no time for his family in 1906, when Maxim Gorky accepted an invitation to come to America. Mandelkern even hinted at the possibility of a visit with President Theodore Roosevelt.

On a sparkly April day, Gorky arrived at Hoboken on a German steamship. A crowd of 1,000 greeted him. At the end of the gangplank, a delegation of socialists stretched out its hands: Abraham Cahan, editor of The Forward; Morris Hillquit, a labor lawyer; Gaylord Wilshire, a California entrepreneur; Leroy Scott, a writer and settlement worker; and Joseph Mandelkern. 

Thus began Gorky’s high-flying adventure with Mandelkern at his elbow. Lunch at the St. Regis. A visit to Grant’s Tomb. Watching children feed the squirrels in Central Park. The circus at Madison Square Garden.

“In a Russian city almost every other man one meets is either a soldier or a policeman,” Gorky told Mandelkern. “I haven’t seen a single soldier all day, and only two policemen. Marvelous!”

That evening, he was driven down Fifth Avenue to “Club A,” a brownstone owned by a group of revolutionary-minded New Yorkers. Here would occur the highlight of Gorky’s visit: dinner with Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and other American writers who supported the movement to overthrow the Czar. 

A few days later, however, Gorky was beset by scandal.

It turned out that the writer had left his wife Katharine and two sons back in Russia. The woman who accompanied him to the U.S. was actress Maria Feodorovna Andreyeva, his mistress of several years.

Now Gorky ran into an American problem: relentless prudishness about an issue that would have been irrelevant in Russia.

Hotel Brevoort, Fifth Avenue & Eighth Street

Tossed from the Hotel Rhinelander to the Hotel Brevoort to the Hotel Belleclaire, denounced by the press and pushed away ever so gently by Twain et al, Gorky and Andreyeva found themselves begging for a place to lay their heads.  

 

Joseph Mandelkern, who was very enthusiastic at first in his eulogies of Gorky, said to a reporter for the Eagle that he had known it for a long time and that others on this side knew of the relations with the actress.

It does not appear that Gorky and Andreyeva went back uptown to stay with the Mandelkern family.

 

 

To be continued.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/10/joseph-mandelkerns-return-to-russia.html

Interrogating Joseph Mandelkern

 

In 1886, Joseph Mandelkern left his desk job in Bialystok City Hall and immigrated to America. His plans were far grander than many an Eastern European newcomer. He already knew that he would become an impresario. 

After settling in New York City, Mandelkern placed a newspaper announcement that he had established a “New Yiddish Theatre.” Then he sailed off to London to recruit famous Yiddish-speaking performers. He had his eye on Jacob P. Adler, once a juvenile delinquent; now a renowned European actor.^*

Wackily, the trip was funded by two wealthy Chicago clothiers named Rosengarten and Drozdovitch who thought that New York had no business staking a claim on Yiddish theater.

But the deal fell apart and Mandelkern came home instead with the team of Moishe Finkel and Sigmund Mogulesko, who had been a smash hit on the Romanian stage.

It didn’t bother Mandelkern that they were not a hit in New York. He had bigger fish to fry.   

In 1889, Mandelkern traveled to Russia, Rumania, and Austria in search of more performers. Until the early 1920s, he would visit Russia recurrently through pogroms, war, and revolution.

Most Jews who fled Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century did not intend to return to the land of persecution. Joseph Mandelkern’s ambition left no room for fear. Armed with a document which took two years to obtain, he managed to dodge reprisals—to put it mildly—from Cossacks and “Uligani,” as hoodlums were known.

In June 1910, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported:

 

It appeared yesterday that while Oscar Hammerstein, the impresario, had been barred out of Russia, it is said, because of his Jewish parentage, and also because it had become known that he was seeking to persuade Russian singers and dancers, favorites of the Czar, to leave Russia, Joseph Mandelkern, another Jewish impresario of this city, had been freely traveling through the Czar’s domains. Mr. Mandelkern, who lives at 20 East 120^th Street in this city, just received in Moscow and St. Petersburg, had great success in contracting with popular ballet and operatic favorites of both cities for American tours.

 

Evidently Mandelkern liked to show off, tempt fate, and challenge authority.

That is why I wish the brilliant, effervescent dance critic Ann Barzel were still alive to explain Mandelkern to me. I met Ann in the summer of 1982 when she spent two weeks in Jackson, Mississippi covering the International Ballet Competition for Dance Magazine and Dance News.

At 77 years old, she had been devoted to all aspects of dance since the age of fourteen although she didn’t care for “Twyla Twerp.”   

Since I was the Competition’s director of public relations, Ann and I spoke often even before the competition. In particular, she shared insight and background on the esteemed jury co-chaired by Robert Joffrey.  

Ann Barzel contributed an essay to the program
for the 1982 International Ballet Competition.

Until the last minute, we did not know who would represent the Soviet Union as co-chair. Ann thought it would be Sofia Golovkina, director of the Bolshoi Ballet School, and she was right. 

A few days after the appointment, Miss Golovkina called me to ask about proper attire for the galas to which she had been invited.

“I plan to wear the silk pajama,” she confided.

Ann loved the story.

Born in 1915, Sofia Golovkina would have been too young for Joseph Mandelkern to pluck from the arms of Mother Russia and put on tour in the United States.

But Ann—with her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of ballet and the business of dance—might have been able to explain Joseph Mandelkern’s rapid ascent as an agent and producer.

Was he a Czarist, a socialist or a capitalist? How did he manage to poach all of those Eastern European dancers and actors? And why did he leave the United States so hastily in 1924?

 

To be continued.   

*Jacob Adler’s daughter founded the Stella Adler School of Acting in 1949.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/09/interrogating-joseph-mandelkern.html