by Allan M. Jalon
[The story below, about a movie actor Paul Newman produced and directed in 1962 but never released, ran just under two weeks ago in New York’s The Forward (formerly The Jewish Daily Forward) on 26 January 2021. (An earlier version of this article was published in The Forward on 25 November 2016.) In the article, journalist Allan M. Jalon, a longtime writer and critic on literature, the visual arts, classical music, theater, and film, recounts this remarkable story in detail, demonstrating extensive research, both in records and files, and in interviews with people who still survive since the events of the tale.
[I would never say that I’m especially knowledgeable about any of the personalities involved in this story, but nonetheless, I was surprised by many of the facts Jalon reveals. There was a great deal that I didn’t know or would even have suspected; I imagine it’ll be the same for most of you. It is a fascinating tale.
[Jalon’s report is full of references to people, some more important to the story than others, as well as documents, movies, and plays, that I felt it would be useful to identify a little along the way. So I have taken the liberty (forgive me, Mr. Jalon) of adding in brackets bits of information, mostly dates, to the text of The Forward’s article. In some cases, this has necessitated meddling with Jalon’s punctuation (forgive me again), but I hope I haven’t disturbed the context.
[Because of its length, I’m posting Jalon’s article in three installments: today (5 February), 8 February, and 11 February. Please return to Rick On Theater for the rest of the account.
[Now, get ready to be surprised and edified.]
Editor’s Note: Paul Newman would have celebrated his 96th birthday today. To commemorate that date, we’re taking another look at this essay about the Anton Chekhov film he directed on the stage of a Yiddish theater.
Paul Newman [1925-2008] directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and you’ve probably never heard of it, much less had a chance to see it.
It was never released beyond a short run, in 1962, for an Oscar nomination that it never got. Newman’s biographers apparently have never seen it or been sure of its fate. Lionel Godfrey [b. 1932], in his 1979 book “Paul Newman, Superstar,” seemed pained to call it “the only Paul Newman film of any kind that the present author has not seen,” and “a lost movie.”
But the film, based on a bleakly lyrical Anton Chekhov [1860-1904] play called “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” [first published in 1886; best known from the revision of 1902], has resurfaced. The Turner Classic Movies channel plans to air it for the first time, early next year, according to Charles Tabesh, TCM’s senior vice president of programming and production. [That would be 2017, the year after the original publication of this article. There are several time references in this essay that are keyed to 2016 rather than 2021.] “I was drawn to it very quickly,” Tabesh said. “That Paul Newman directed it makes it very interesting to us. But if you were to credit anything with the way it draws you in, you must credit Michael Strong’s [1918-80] intriguing performance.
Strong was a lesser-known fellow actor whom Newman made the star of his film. After seeing him perform the one-act Chekhov monologue at the Actors Studio in 1959, Newman was so captivated that he decided it must be shared. Strong began life as Cecil Natapoff, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who immigrated to New York. He grew up in the Bronx and got his performing start on Yiddish radio.
Working in theater, film and TV, Strong had a career that many actors would envy. He became a founding member of the exclusive Actors Studio and had smaller parts in well-known films, including “Patton” [1970] and “The Great Santini” [1979]. Elia Kazan [1909-2003] gave him supporting or ensemble roles, twice in premieres of plays by Arthur Miller [1915-2005]. Many more famous friends and colleagues — Kirk Douglas [1916-2020], Karl Malden [1912-2009] — regarded Strong as an actor’s actor — and it’s hard not to wonder if he might have joined their ranks if this film had been released.
Strong, Newman and most other people tied to the 25-minute movie are gone, but a few survive. Their memories and archival records have led me through the making of Newman’s lost film, his mysterious decision to abandon it, and how it passed from hand to hand.
The saga includes an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor and film director, his much-younger, Russian-born Chekhov-loving fiancée, a dying actor’s wish, a friend of [Beat poet] Allen Ginsberg [1926-97], a one-line New York Times review, and the deep, dark closets in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, where the coffee-colored, bruised-looking box holding the film languished for more than 50 years.
I learned of the film from Jack Garfein [1930-2019], the survivor-director, whom I met one day on upper Broadway, and who revealed that, in his apartment, he had the only print of an abandoned Paul Newman film. I showed a DVD made from his print to people I hoped might have clues about its story. Newman’s survivors, despite three attempts through a family spokesperson, would not talk to me.
But others I contacted were responsive, including the Oscar-winning actress Lee Grant [b. 1925] — the stage name for Lyova Haskell Rosenthal — who acted with Strong and knew both him and Newman as fellow members of the Actors Studio. She didn’t know that the film existed until I told her about it.
“It’s beautiful,” Grant said after we watched it on a wide-screen TV in her art-filled Upper West Side apartment, beneath a shelf displaying several Emmys and her two Oscars (for her performance in “Shampoo” [1975] and as the director of a documentary, “Down and Out in America” [1986]). “Doing work like this is why we got into the theater,” she added, saying that the film embodied the artistic ideal pursued by her and her fellow members of the Actors Studio: the priority of exploring the dramatic possibilities of human truth. “That’s the word for it — explore” she exclaimed joyously.
A BROADWAY MEETING
In the 1960s, when I grew up, Newman was such a given part of the cultural landscape that I never thought of him much. I had an uncle from Cleveland, and once heard that he’d known Newman’s Jewish father, Arthur Newman [1893-1950], who ran a sporting goods store there. Newman’s mother [Theresa Garth, 1894-1982] was a Catholic raised in Europe, but her son’s role as the Jewish independence warrior Ari-Ben Canaan [sic] in “Exodus” [1960] cemented his Jewish tie for many viewers. My favorite Newman film, hands down, is “The Verdict” [1982]. I remember going on a date with my future wife and seeing him play a middle-aged lawyer who skirts the fatal edge of disappointment.
Otherwise, the closest I came to the star was using salad dressings bearing his face, until I went to Barzini’s market on the Upper West Side last October to shop for fruit. I paused on the sidewalk to talk with Iraj Abde, the owner, and he pointed to an elderly man making his way toward us with a kind of floating walk, a white fedora tilted above his pale, dream-enveloped face. Iraj, a Persian-born Jew, said, in his deep voice, “This is Jack Garfein, a film director and survivor of concentration camps.”
Garfein looked up at me, barely leaving his dreamy thoughts, and Iraj told him I wrote pieces for the Forward. I asked what camps he’d survived, and he put short fingers to his square chin, stroking it in musing silence. In a soft voice that dared me to believe him, he noted, “I was in 11 concentration camps.”
It sounded like something you’d hear in a bar, yet I felt the tug of reality. I asked what films he’d directed, and he named “Something Wild” [1961]. Amazingly, I’d chanced on the last half of the film on late-night TV not long before. Featuring a dynamic score by Aaron Copland [1900-90], the film made plausible, then powerful, the story of a rape victim who tries to commit suicide and forms a romantic bond with the mentally disabled man who stops her.
Garfein and I had another chance encounter, at Columbia University, where he told me The Criterion Collection would be bringing out its DVD of “Something Wild” in January 2017. After we met for the third time, he let on about having the Newman film, adding that he’d known Newman and the film’s star. I asked if I could see it, and he sent an e-mail inviting me to his apartment. By then, I’d Googled Garfein and knew that he had a (very) long career and a (very) complicated life. He was a twice-divorced father of four, having two children with each woman; both of his wives were actresses. He had lived extensively in New York and Paris. His first wife was Carroll Baker [b. 1931], the blonde-haired actress-turned-sex goddess who won acclaim in the film “Baby Doll” [1956; based Tennessee Williams’s 1955 play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton]. Garfein directed Baker as the rape victim who discovers tenderness in “Something Wild.”
Soon, I was sitting in a cozy one-bedroom apartment whose walls bore posters of plays and films Garfein directed, along with several photos of Copland conducting his score for “Something Wild,” and a drawing by playwright Sean O’Casey [1880-1964] for Garfein’s 1958 production on Broadway of O’Casey’s “The Shadow of a Gunman” [1923]. The New York Times’ [theater reviewer] Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984] praised him for bringing the work to “such vivid life” [“Theatre: A Prologue to Greatness,” 21 Nov. 1958].
Garfein invited me to sit next to him before his wide-screen TV as he inserted a disc of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” into his DVD player.
Next to us, a worn brown film box with black canvas straps leaned against a wall.
I asked, “Is that the print?”
He nodded and said, “Yes, and what you will see now, few others have seen in 50 years.”
There was a countdown on the screen of old movie-style numbers flashing decreasing numbers, 10 to 1, and then the credits began to roll, bright letters against a dark background. The name “Michael Strong” appeared, laid over a still image of his bothered-looking face in character — my first sight of him or his name. The black-and-white print, I noticed, had a watery clarity as it moved to its first scene of Strong as a 19th-century-looking guy walking in a dark suit and stovepipe hat.
He wore a distracted look, a thin goatee (messier than Chekhov’s in late-age photos), and led a small, leashed dog up the sidewalk of a dark street. Music that mixed sadness with comic sparkle sounded as the dog peed on the fellow’s shoe; undaunted, stopping in front of a theater, Strong’s character found his name was misspelled on a poster; he corrected it with scratches of his pencil: Ivan Ivanovich Nyukhin.
He hooked the dog’s leash on a pole, descended spiral stairs and was soon onstage, standing in the merciless glare of spotlights, giving what began as a lecture on the dangers of tobacco — “though I myself smoke” — and unraveled into halting sentence fragments. Strong’s performance moved through moments of deep thought, expressive intensity and sudden shifts to new subjects: “In 30 years without stopping. . . I might even say to the injury of my health. . . I have been working on matters of a strictly scientific. . . well, not precisely scientific contributions. . . by the way, if you don’t mind my saying so. . . they are in the scientific line. . . .”
He told us his wife had directed him to give this talk. I had read a version of the play, and I knew it showed the musings of a henpecked husband, a tirade against a domineering wife, but on screen I could see it was going deeper than that.
Nyukhin lurched in and out of moods, yielded to long silences, then confessed: “I’m a failure at everything. . . a fool, a nonentity.”
It is a sort of pathetic, this film, I thought, but then Strong flipped Nyukhin’s despair into laugh out-loud, really quirky humor. As a writer, I was moved by the grim exactitude and almost submerged lyricism with which the character referred to writing and speaking, his tendency to lose and find his way repeatedly. This was the harmfulness of drift, after his long-term sentence as a submissive husband. “Oh, how I long not to remember — how I long to tear off this coat, which 33 years ago I wore at my wedding,” he said. Then, he tells us what he does when he’s not giving talks that his wife assigns: “I take my wife’s pet dog for a walk. I exterminate bugs. . . . I catch mice.”
Someone in the film’s audience laughed at this. I laughed. I noticed it was a woman’s laughter out beyond the stage. Chekhov had made him a kind of actor, and I sensed that Strong and Newman had made him seem more of one.
His arias of reflection, pleas for oblivion — “I want nothing. . . nothing. . . only to rest. . . rest” — peaked as he recalled his wife’s mocking name for him: “the scarecrow.” Saying the words, Strong twisted himself into a tortured-looking, almost Christ-like figure. His eyes turned up, showing how the scarecrow he imagined stared into the “wide sky” and gave in to the stillness.
Soon she stood behind him, the wife, a looming shadow. Feeling her presence, Nyukhin found complete sentences at last, and wrapped up his talk. The house lights came on, and I gasped: No one was there, no one in the whole theater of empty seats. Nyukhin’s eyes glistened, as he peered into that void. He’d poured out his heart to people who hadn’t stayed. I realized that this film that had gone for decades without finding an audience showed, as its cumulative image, a performer coping with the pain of an absent audience. I also knew that Newman had taken a risk by framing that theatrical emptiness, which Chekhov’s play did not include.
There followed quick scenes in which Nyukhin heard his wife’s fingers snapping hard behind him, and he turned and scurried after her out to the street, where she lifted the dog back into his arms.
Garfein’s screen went dark.
“That’s it,” he said. “Amazing, no?”
It really was, for reasons that I slowly formed into thoughts: for Chekhov’s words of poetry strung through voids, which reminded me of [absurdist playwright] Samuel Beckett’s [1906-89] work; for lighting that evoked German Expressionist films; for the depth-charge impact of the acting. Marlon Brando [1924-2004] admirers extol his way of filling moments in time, never “telegraphing” where he’s going. Strong had felt his way through the time in this piece with an unusual, thoughtful delicacy.
Garfein talked to his empty screen as if to Newman’s ghost: “Jeez, Paul, crazy! Really nuts! What a great thing you did.”
[On the Harmfulness of Tobacco isn’t mentioned in most biographies of Newman. It’s not listed on IMDb, the internet movie database, either under the title or in Newman’s, Strong’s, or Chekhov’s lists of works. In the Wikipedia entry for On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, the Chekhov play, there’s a one-paragraph note under “Adaptation” that reads:
Paul Newman directed a short film adaptation of On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco [sic] that received limited screening in New York City in 1962. Nyukhin was played by Michael Strong, who had performed the monologue to high praise in The Actors Studio. Despite a favorable mention in The New York Times, Newman removed his name from the credits for reasons that remain unclear. He gave the sole print to Strong, who kept it until his death in 1980. As of November 2016, Turner Classic Movies plans to air the film in early 2017.
[The source for this paragraph is given as the 2016 version of this Forward article. The only other public record of the existence of Newman’s film is a single sentence in the New York Times review of the movie Murder She Said (see Part 2).]
A frequent coach of acting, he mused in his light European accent that “what great actors do is send out images.” He spoke of how Strong “becomes the scarecrow. It’s a living experience.” And Garfein said Newman “didn’t push himself on the performance.” In fact, the open approach he sensed that Newman used with Strong reminded him of Elia Kazan: “As Kazan said to me: ‘Jack, we are just guides.’”
Steve Vineberg [b. 1951], in “Method Actors” [1991], his searching history of modern American acting, called “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” [Eugene O’Neill play, written in 1941-42 and published in 1956; filmed by Sidney Lumet in 1962] “a high point in the history of theater on film.” In the past half-hour, I felt sure, I’d seen another.
Garfein, reluctantly, let me have a copy of the DVD, though it took a promise that I wouldn’t put it on the internet. With his treasure in my hands, I started my Paul Newman lost film road show, sharing the film first with Grant, then with the theater director Gregory Mosher [b 1949; currently artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater], whose long career has included directing the plays of David Mamet [b. 1947].
Mosher watched it with me in his Upper West Side apartment, which was crammed with countless books on theater and film — I noticed one called “An Ideal Theater” [Todd London, Theatre Communications Group, 2013] — and talked about Chekhov. “Before Chekhov, if you were in love, you said, ‘I’m in love.’ After Chekhov, you could say, ‘Do you like the oranges?’ Strong, he said, showed a “powerful” instinct for Chekhov’s indirection, for “subtexts” of buried feeling. He wondered whether Newman’s lighting, extremes of bright and dark, was “very bold or a mistake.”
Laura Collins-Hughes, a journalist friend who reviews theater for The New York Times, called it “a fiercely quiet film.” She said a lot of Chekhov productions turn dry from “too much reverence,” but this one “feels lived in.”
All my viewers asked how the film got made and how Jack Garfein wound up with it.
A FILM IS BORN
The story began in a stolid, 1859 building, a former Seventh Associate Presbyterian Church, on West 44th Street. It still feels, behind its red-brick walls and white-painted wood door, like a kind of church, though one door inside leads to the Paul Newman Library, another to an intimate theater.
This is the Actors Studio, and the theater is where its members have long met in so-called “sessions” with their peers. Marilyn Monroe [1926-62] and Newman (who served as the studio’s president in the 1980s) sat in this theater, as well as Eli Wallach [1915-2014], Jean Stapleton [1923-2013] and Julie Harris [1925-2013]. Theater people still sharpen their skills here. It’s the home of the Method, really several acting methods inspired by Constantin Stanislavski [1863-1938], founding director of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski’s eyes were opened to new approaches when he became the first director of Chekhov’s plays.
Studio actors take on all sorts of plays, but they have had a special regard for Chekhov’s unique interplay between human surfaces and the webs of purpose that lie beneath. The playwright gave birth to a new kind of drama, for which Stanislavsk[i] sought a new way of acting. It used psychology and analysis of actors’ inner lives to shape their characters. That focus filtered into the American Method.
Founded in 1947, the studio remains a members-only place. Elia Kazan, widely regarded as the master director of midcentury America, led sessions until the early 1950s. As he got busier, Lee Strasberg [1901-82], who drew criticism for overstressing an actor’s use of private emotions — and for his controlling nature — dominated.
In 1955 — the year the studio moved to the church — photojournalist Eve Arnold [1912-2012] took a picture of Newman. Though she took many celebrity photographs, Arnold also focused on hard social realities. She clearly posed Newman for this picture, Brando-like in white T-shirt, against a room full of actors in duller clothes. He was in the public eye already, having gotten his first stage break in 1953, in William Inge’s “Picnic.” He’d gotten his Hollywood start in the widely disparaged 1954 epic “The Silver Chalice.”
The 30-year-old actor wasn’t yet anywhere as famous as he’d soon become — Paul Newman and his blue eyes. A person I know, who’s in a position to know, told me that, as he lay in a hospital, dying of lung cancer, he wore sunglasses because hospital personnel kept taking advantage of his captive state to walk in and stare at those sapphire eyes.
Arnold’s photo also asks a silent question about what will happen to the unfamous, hard-working actors behind him in the rows of the theater. A number of these Actors Studio actors were honored in their time, but their names have faded. How many people today remember Rudy Bond [1912-82] (even though Kazan cast him in smaller roles in films, including “A Streetcar Named Desire” [1951 film based on 1947 play of the same name by Tennessee Williams, 1911-83])?
Or Salem Ludwig [1915-2007]? Or Vivian Nathan [1916-2015]?
Or Michael Strong, sitting just behind Newman?
Looking amused, with loose dark hair, Strong was one of the studio’s original members. At just a little taller than 5 foot 10 inches, he had a masculine softness he lent to the sleepy-eyed, goofy charm of a cat burglar in Sidney Kingsley’s [1906-95] powerful police drama, “Detective Story.” It was a small part that made a sharp impression. He’d acted in the long-running Broadway play in 1949, and appeared in the 1951 screen hit directed by William Wyler [1902-81]. He’d changed his name, as many Jewish actors once did, searching for assimilated success in a time when American life still closed many doors to Jews.
Strong had won parts in some of the early live TV series that Newman had done. He’d been on “The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse” [NBC, 1948-55] a showcase for young actors in the “golden age” of live TV. When he appeared in series with titles like “Danger” [CBS, 1950-55], and “Suspense” [CBS, 1949-54], he was admired for extracting feeling from the smallest gesture.
In 1958, Strong got cast as Aaron, the brother of Moses, in “The Firstborn,” a play [by Christopher Fry, 1907-2005] about the prophet commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Israel’s birth as a state. Katharine Cornell [1893-1974], still a leading actress of the American stage, starred as the biblical brothers’ mother. Anthony Quayle [1913-89] was Moses [and also directed]. Strong never lost his pride of touring Israel with the play after its Broadway run.
Being an actor typically means adapting to roles in which one is cast. Actors Studio members chose parts that nourished artistic growth, and Strong cast himself in “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” Over several studio sessions, in the summer of 1959, he put on the emotional skin of Ivan Nyukhin.
Patricia Bosworth [1933-2020] is a longtime member of the Actors Studio who has written “The Men in My Life” [Harper, 2017], a forthcoming memoir about her path through this era. It doesn’t mention Strong, but Bosworth told me in an interview that she knew him at the studio and he was “very strong” but also “very gentle.” She noted that he’d been working with Kazan since the 1940s, and was “a very striking-looking man and very kind to all of us younger actors.”
His work on the Chekhov piece riveted others at the studio, including Strasberg, Bosworth said. Garfein was watching those summer days. He’d become, at 29, so highly regarded as a director with the Actors Studio — his work onstage and in movies included giving Ben Gazzara [1930-2012] his film debut in “The Strange One” [1957] — that Bosworth called him “almost Strasberg’s protégé.”
Newman was there, a star who’d struggled for years to find a balance between his Actors Studio idea of himself and the lures of Hollywood.
This push-pull was seen by Howard Thompson [1919-2002] of The New York Times, who’d panned Newman in the film “The Left Handed Gun” [1958]: “Poor Mr. Newman seems to be auditioning alternately for the Moscow Art Players and the Grand Ole Opry” [“Screen: A Not-Too-Serious Western: ‘Left Handed Gun,’” 8 May 1958].
He’d given the boxer Rocky Graziano [1919-90] in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” [1956] an Actors Studio grittiness, but had himself called a more recent film, “The Young Philadelphians” [1959] a “glorified cosmopolitan soap opera.” Biographer Shawn Levy [b. 1961] wrote that Newman was unhappy with roles he was getting and wanted to be paid more for doing them.
So, Newman returned to New York and was preparing to appear in Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth” [1959 play by Tennessee Williams] directed by Kazan, while attending sessions at the Actors Studio. Bosworth was in the room when Newman watched Strong develop “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” Like others, she said, he was “enthralled.”
He’d long wanted to test his skills as a director, a goal since college, and settled on this play with this actor.
Strong would one day tell an interviewer that actors “have to create their own projects” that embody their sense of creative integrity: “One drop of ocean is still the ocean, and one moment of truth in the theater is still theater.”
To make his film a cup of that truth, Newman reached out to up-and-coming craftsmen such as Arnold Ornitz, who shot the film as his director of photography, and who would later shoot “Serpico” [1973] and “The Chosen” [1981]. He hired production designer Richard Sylbert [1928-2002] who had designed Kazan’s “Baby Doll.”
Newman had been onstage for months in Kazan’s production of “Sweet Bird of Youth” when he went to work on his film.
It was Kazan who referred Newman to the young composer David Amram [b. 1930] for the film’s music, Amram told me. He’d written the incidental score for Kazan’s staging of Archibald MacLeish’s [1892-1982] play “J.B.” [1958], which won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Amram, who just turned 86, still composes and conducts with the energy befitting a musician who played jazz French horn with Charlie Parker [1920-55] in 1952. He wears one of the world’s most distinctive musical necklaces, a rattling mass (when he walks) of who knows how many penny whistles, miniature flutes, kazoos and charms from all over the world. He has curly gray hair and an easy smile, and strides as if, in his mind, he’s already passed the place he’s going and has moved on to somewhere else.
It’s pure coincidence that I found him in the middle of this story. I’ve known Amram for years, and once wrote about the music he composed for another film. He’s a crosser of art world borders, was working with the photographer Robert Frank [1924-2019], and writer friends Jack Kerouac [1922-69] and Allen Ginsberg on the legendary Beat film “Pull My Daisy” [1959] when Newman recruited him for “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.”
He told me in a recent interview that he was in his apartment on Sixth Avenue at 11th Street when “Paul Newman called me and said, ‘David, I’ve never made a film and I’m making one, and I’d like you to do the music. You know what we’re trying to do at the studio.’ Paul wanted to be an artist. He didn’t want to be another celebrity egomaniac.”
He scored it for bassoon and two violas, “and myself playing piano and percussion,” he said, explaining his urge to grasp the “spare feeling” of the play. “By the way,” he added, “Paul loved Chekhov.”
Newman adapted Chekhov’s stage direction that his play take place “on a rostrum in a provincial club” to the stage of the Orpheum, in the Yiddish theater district along Second Avenue.
As Newman got ready to shoot his film, Howard Thompson, the same New York Times writer who’d noted his split personality in “The Left Handed Gun,” interviewed him. Newman spoke of his joy in Strong’s work, adding that the film’s creators were being paid “a minimum.”
He noted “enthusiastic” exchanges among collaborators — “friends,” he said — who had “discarded about a thousand ideas.” He told Thompson that although some friends said he was “crazy” to make a film from “one person in a monologue,” he felt confident. It was, he said, an “emotional commitment,” not “a binding legal one.”
If the film was disappointing, he said, “we’ll burn it.”
In such comments, one can hear subtexts of inner conflict — Chekhovian, one might say —about a film on which he said he was spending $22,000 — about $180,000 today.
The play that drew him had drawn Chekhov twice: First in 1886, when he wrote it as one of the jokey “vaudevilles” he made at the start of his career; then again in 1902, as a married man, two years before his long-endured tuberculosis ended his life. In English, the piece covers about seven pages, with few stage directions.
Strong grew up in a home where he heard Russian and possibly spoke some, and where Chekhov was probably read in Russian and possibly Yiddish. In 1903, the year Michael Strong’s family fled pogroms [riots aimed at persecution or massacre of a particular ethnic or religious group, usually Jews] in Russia for New York, a dying Chekhov wrote to Sholem Aleichem [1859-1916], donating to him the rights for a Yiddish translation of his complete works to benefit the victims of the Kishinev pogrom. [Literary and social critic] Irving Howe [1920-93] has written about the passion for Russian writers that many secular Russian Jews brought with them to America, for Chekhov especially, describing him as “almost a Jewish writer.”
[This concludes the first installment of Allan M. Jolan’s
history of Paul Newman’s 1962 film adaptation of Chekhov’s On the Harmfulness of Tobacco. I think you have an idea what
revelations are contained in this report—and there are more to come. I hope you’ll come back on Monday, 8 February,
for the second part of Jalon’s tale.]
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