Now here are some things I bet you didn\u2019t now about Sidney Lumet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was a child actor in the Yiddish theatre<\/a>. His father, Baruch Lumet, was a Yiddish theatre star who was briefly a member of the famous Vilna Troupe<\/a>, before he got into trouble with the law and ran away to America; en route, he nearly had an affair with a nun (more on that later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n On stage and on screen, Sidney and Baruch Lumet were great collaborators. Each helped the other in his career: Baruch schmoozed with other entertainers in cafes and got young Sidney his first Broadway auditions; Sidney, in turn, helped his aging father with a heavy Yiddish accent get cast in several mainstream American films<\/a> after his Yiddish theatre career dried up \u2013 perhaps most bizarrely as a Rabbi who is also a bondage fetishist<\/a> in Woody Allen\u2019s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Offstage and offscreen, they were a father and a son who owed each other everything and yet drove each other crazy. In interviews after Sidney\u2019s rise to fame, Baruch openly told interviewers that he was very disappointed when his wife became pregnant with Sidney, and that he hired someone to abort the pregnancy but it didn\u2019t work. \u201cWhat do you think of that? I didn\u2019t want him, we didn\u2019t want him.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sidney, in turn, told reporters that his father was \u201ca terrible man\u201d<\/a> who was only likable when he was on stage. Only his talent redeemed him in his son\u2019s eyes: \u201cNothing admirable about him, until he went to work,\u201d Sidney told Rolling Stone<\/em> in a 2008 interview<\/a>. \u201cAnd then he was admirable.\u201d Offstage, he might not have been the best father, but onstage \u2013 he was the perfect father-figure that young Sidney was searching for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, who was this Baruch Lumet? Deadbeat father? Yiddish actor extraordinaire? Sidney Lumet\u2019s inspiration, or his greatest fear? And what did he pass down to his son, other than a love for the magic that actors can create and a brewing mistrust of what might lie beneath the ruse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baruch Lumet (1898-1992) \u2014 who went by the nickname \u201cBulu\u201d \u2014 was a man with with a colorful life that his son could have easily made into a Hollywood movie (the closest Sidney Lumet came to immortalizing his struggles with his father in film was perhaps the final scene in his last feature film, Before the Devil Knows You\u2019re Dead<\/em><\/a>). Born in 1898 outside of Warsaw, the elder Lumet became a child actor on the Yiddish stage at the age of six after his father died. Ostensibly, he was employed as a tailor\u2019s apprentice, but he snuck out of work constantly to spend time watching rehearsals in the the theatre around the corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To a young boy who had never encountered the arts before, theatre was magical. \u201cAnd then the scene changed to another place!\u201d he marveled upon seeing his first scene changes, \u201cI mean, my God, how can they do it? Everything was like magic to me.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Theatre and music became his obsession. For months he saved all of his earnings to buy a piano for his house; never mind that he lived on the second floor and the building wasn\u2019t stabile enough to support a piano. Bulu learned to play the piano outside underneath a tree, while neighborhood kids threw rocks onto the soundboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the First World War raged, Bulu went to Polish drama school, got a theatrical education, and made friends with other young Jews eager to join the Yiddish stage. Eventually, they ended up joining the Vilna Troupe for a few months \u2014 until Bulu was captured after rehearsal and forced to dig trenches around Warsaw, in case the Bolsheviks returned. A few weeks later, a friend advised him that he was in trouble for his political activities and that he ought to disappear \u2014 and without a word to his castmates, wife, or month-old baby, he fled to America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between Germany and London, Bulu met a beautiful nun who saved him from having his passport confiscated by the authorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In comes a very fancy lady, very tall and beautiful. A sister with a white hat, you know, the pointed hat. A nun. Blue, beautiful blue coat. Packed, a lot of people, and she didn\u2019t have a \u2026 I start to move and made room for her. [\u2026] Finally through the night, little by little she got more comfortable\u2026and I felt her head is leaning against\u2026on my shoulder. Before she fell asleep she took the quilt, covered my thighs and her thighs, you know, to keep warm and her hands were very cozy. And we rode the whole night.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a short-lived love affair: the nun wanted to marry him in order to get a visa to come to America, but according to Bulu\u2019s retelling, he suddenly remembered his wife and child and refused to bring her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a year or two working as a piano salesman in New York, Baruch Lumet was able to bring his mother, wife, and infant daughter Fay to America. It was around this time that Bulu met the infamous Maurice Schwartz<\/a>, who offered him a contract at the Yiddish Art Theatre over lunch (when Bulu insisted on a legally-binding paper contract, Schwartz reportedly scrawled out a few lines on the corner of a bag full of grapes). \u201cHe was such a mamzer <\/em>(bastard),\u201d Bulu would later say, but \u201che could get anything he wanted from anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just at the moment when a career on the American Yiddish stage was finally within his reach, Baruch learned that his wife was pregnant with a son. He paid $50 for his wife to have an abortion at home, but to their surprise it didn\u2019t work. And Sidney Lumet was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Sidney grew, Bulu realized that his son had a talent for acting. He began to invite Sidney to perform alongside him – first in Yiddish radio shows, then on the Yiddish stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n He talked friends on Broadway into giving Sidney auditions for children\u2019s roles, and co-acted with his son in The Eternal Road<\/em><\/a> directed by Max Reinhardt and composed by Kurt Weill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bulu may have not been planning on having a son, but in the end, he was proud of his achievements (and even claimed some of them as his own).<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he became a director, I told him, \u2018Sidney, remember one thing, the most important thing a director has to think about are his actors. Love the actors even if you hate the script.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sidney Lumet may have had a love-hate relationship with his dad, but he learned this lesson well and became an \u201cactor\u2019s director\u201d<\/a> through and through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photos of Sidney and Baruch Lumet are from the Archive of the National Center for Jewish Film<\/a>. Baruch Lumet quotes are from an oral history conducted by Anita Wincelberg in December 1976 for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library<\/a> of the American Jewish Committee at New York Public Library. Full transcript<\/a> of the interview.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sidney Lumet was a legendary director. He was also a child actor in the Yiddish theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":69,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[12,46,30,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-directors","category-early-20th-century","category-film","category-north-america"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/562\/2022\/01\/ncjf-boy-630x1024.jpg\")
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