Yente Serdatsky Reviews Ida Badanes’s Der eyntsiger veg (The Only Way)

July 10, 2025 by Dalia Wolfson

A search in the Yiddish press for Ida Badanes (1874-1946) largely returns two types of results: regular advertisements for her medical office (first in the East Village, and later on the Upper East Side), shared with husband, Alexander (Jacob) Ravnitsky, and many hundreds of columns published in the Forverts, Der Tog and the Jewish Ladies Home Journal’s “Di froyen velt” feature.¹ Born in the Belarussian town of Smorgon, Badanes earned her MD in 1897 at the Boston University School of Medicine and continued to practice in New York. Badanes’s many articles covered health topics such as child-rearing and personal health, as well as women’s social and political issues.²

Less is known, however, about Badanes’s dramatic writings. In her late thirties, Badanes began to put out plays. Her first play was submitted for copyright in 1909, with an M. Katz: Princess Irina: Drama in 4 Acts, after Turgenev’s novel, Smoke.³ In 1913, another four-act play would follow: Dem doktors refue: a drame in 4 akten (The Doctor’s Remedy: A Drama in 4 Acts), a possible precursor to the subject of this piece.⁴ 1915 was a productive year: she copyrighted two plays co-written with Miriam Shomer Zunser, Nokhum Mayer Shaykevitsh’s daughter: Fire: Play in 1 Act and Goldenlocks and The Bears.⁵ The latter appeared on Broadway.⁶ At some point over the next few years, Badanes worked on a play that had a single run in a small theatre.⁷ In 1919, that work would have its moment in the limelight, taking up the bulk of Zalmen Zylbercweig’s biography for Badanes in his Leksikon: a four-act play at the People’s Theatre called Der eyntsiger veg (The Only Way).⁸ In this “literary comedy” (as it was advertised), an idealistic young Russian-Jewish couple living in New York City experiences marital troubles. As the wife’s homemaking duties consume her, her husband, bored at his job and seeking a diversion, turns to cards and stays out late. The play revolves around the wife’s efforts to win her husband back, stirring his jealousy through a prank affair with their family friend, a doctor. 

Der eyntsiger veg played for three days, January 24-26, 1919, and in that time it was visited by (at least) three personalities who quickly reviewed it: Folksbiene founder and prolific theatre critic Yoel Entin, a writer named “Der Kritiker,” and a fellow playwright, Yente Serdatsky.⁹ The reviews are curiously split in their reactions. Entin and Der Kritiker run, somewhat dryly, through the relevance of the plots: the disillusionment and depression of once-young Socialist Russian radicals on the one hand, and the common marital distance between two overworked adults on the other. Der Kritiker remarks that the plot is “very old and a bit naive,” the comedy funny enough (for a first or second try), and some of the conversations truly authentic. Entin is less generous, finding Badanes’ treatment of Russian-Jewish intellectual disappointment to be too late; this thematic focus, Entin claims, is preceded by Jacob Gordin’s older plays, as well as more recent ones by [Hillel] Solotaroff (Far ire kinder, For Her Children, 1917) and Leon Kobrin (Dem doktors vayber, The Doctor’s Wives, also 1917). He observes that the four-acter could easily be played in two acts; that the play lacks skillful comedic techniques, conflict and clarity. 

Serdatsky’s approach to reviewing this play contrasts quite starkly with that of her peers. Serdatsky had her own dramatic streak, including several plays in Geklibene shriftn, and a few short scenes published in the Yiddish press.¹⁰ Though her main position upon moving to New York in 1918 was as a writer for the Forverts (with a weekly belletristic spot running from 1919-1921), in 1919 Serdatsky reviewed another play (Brothers Karamazov) for the Fraye arbeter shtime’s occasional “In teatr” feature. Her private letters to Yiddish actress Sarah Kindman-Mestel, praising the latter’s performances, indicate that Serdatsky was enthusiastic about the stage. 

Rather than plunging into analytical feedback as Entin and Der Kritiker do, Serdatsky invites the reader into the theatre, varying sentence length and rhythm to heighten the scenes, her wry tone implicating both husband and wife in their marital disillusionment. She is, moreover, the only one to focus on the audience’s reaction; where Entin and Der Kritiker largely record their own observations, Serdatsky listens to the public, watching them roar with laughter and be carried by the drama with an enthusiasm that goes undocumented by the other two critics. Serdatsky, who has a number of stories dedicated to rocky marriages between working husbands and their worn-out housewives, does not read Badanes’ plot as outdated and overwrought: the problem is emotionally distressing, its social message as relevant as ever. For Serdatsky, the play is received not as a repetition of performances and plots past, but a challenge for the audience itself to rehash and rehearse as they walk out of the theatre. 

Serdatsky’s interest in the affective potential of the play on its public can be seen especially in the closing lines of the review, in a moment of flânerie that is characteristic for the narrating protagonists of many of her stories. At first she notes the disappointed glances of women emerging from the theatre, and is herself depressed by the play’s dead end. Suddenly, she glimpses a group of girls, animatedly discussing the play, descending down the balcony; Serdatsky follows them, but walks too slowly to quite keep up. Watching them recede, Serdatsky is buoyed by the girls’ poise and conversation, imagining how they might find an “other way” besides the one way comically, tragically, posed by the play. 

Over the three days of showings, Der eyntsiger veg held a Ladies Free night, provided the ladies came by with a man. But for Serdatsky, it seems, the hope lay in the ladies first being free, without male accompaniment, and in sisterhood, to think up their own solutions. 

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“At the Theater” by Yente Serdatsky

The Only Way, a literary comedy, written by Dr. Ida Badanes. Played at the People’s Theater. 

The contents of the literary comedy are as follows: 

One Mister Rosenson (Mr. David Kessler), an intellectual young man, courts an intellectual young lady (Madam Malvina Lobel) and they get married. 

They’ve made themselves a home and have a kid that’s already eight years old. Others milling around the house include: her parents (Mr. Rubin and Mrs. Vayntroyb), a family friend and doctor (Samuel Rosenstein), and a nuisance who visits too often (Louis Heyman). And inside the house, there’s a boarder (Miss Lubritsky). In a word: a house like all others. 

Mr. Rosenson makes a living as an insurance agent. Tedious work. Like all intelligent young people, he grows bored by the job and the house. But because one must work to make a living, he takes things up with the house instead: he starts staying out all evening, sometimes all night. He gets into cards and becomes a passionate player, neglecting his wife and child—though of course he loves them completely. 

The wife, like all intelligent wives, doesn’t know what to do with him. She cleans and cleans the house, cooks the food, watches the child; but there’s nothing for her to nourish an inner life, a pastime. She can’t go to lectures, to meetings, to friends—she needs to put the child to bed on time, and watch over him. She stays at home, alone, fretting, thinking. Perhaps the solution to her hard life lies in something about the meals or the house more broadly, but she can’t think it through, can’t do a thing about it. Her intellectual capacity has been sapped by years of small worries and housework. She clings, sickly and feverish, to her love for her husband. And she looks for all sorts of tricks to keep him at home. 

A silly comedy ensues—the house-friend, the doctor, helps her plot it out and perform it—and she stokes her husband’s jealousy. He stays home for one night: but we ought to all pity him, and send him back out, even back to the card-playing dungeon—

This is the cruelty of tenement living for an anxious person: there’s singing coming from one window, piano-playing from a second; fighting from a third; and even one’s missus is not very good in her role as a housewife. Instead of delicious foods, lively conversation, a little gossip, a bit of easy reading, some light politics of the day—the things that pull a man into the house and keep him there—she can’t provide a single one, and instead she wanders around the house like a lost soul. All that remains of her intellect are a few trite phrases that she uses, effortfully, to amuse her restless husband. 

In the end: he broods, starts roving around the house, and runs about—if not to the card table, then off to the bedroom, where he sinks into sleep. 

This also doesn’t work. She turns things up with the doctor to make him jealous. And so he goes out of his mind. Things come to a head—crisis: he shoots an empty revolver, and he runs around in a rage; and she’s furious, and her parents are fuming, and so too the boarder and that old nuisance, the doctor. But in the long run all ends well, and the curtain descends.

The house, the family, and this broken, sad life—all these bother the woman (the author) and the women (the spectators); and it’s for this reason that the boarder is such a welcome character. She, the boarder, is a kind of symbolic continuation of the other woman’s wretched existence. Sitting on a trunk, beautiful, charming and preoccupied, she evaluates her future life, and it looks sadder, worse than the other’s: she wants many children, and children make women fat and uninteresting.

She sits, pondering, wondering, and decides: she will not get married. And yet. When put to the test, seeing the outstretched arms of the man that she loves—she throws herself into them, like into an abyss, and the problem remains unresolved.

Does this comedy have strengths and weaknesses? Not a question. But it doesn’t matter to us. An audience member wouldn’t care if he’d read the comedy in novel form; the main thing is that it should hit a nerve and disentangle a problem that is so, so difficult to solve. 

Are the actors good? 

It seems superfluous to report: all the actors involved are lions of their trade, great artists with well-known names and thousands to testify already that they’re good indeed. 

It’s no more than when a drama or a comedy is exceptionally literary, interesting and new. In those cases, an unusual excitement follows of its own accord: you can’t even tell if it’s coming from the audience, the actors, the walls or the balcony, or even from the artist’s soul wrapped in the work. But if it’s a normal piece of art, the actors will perform it as usual.

But the audience was remarkable. They filled the theater, laughed and were fully engrossed in the comedy. So there’s reason to hope that Madam Badanes’s work will keep going on and on. 

A lot of women came out of the theater, it seemed to me, looking very disturbed. 

“The problem has not been solved. The questions of the house, of marriage, of family life—all these will only continue to cause pain and suffering, pain and suffering….” I was musing, when suddenly I noticed, from above, from the gallery: a group of five girls descending, twenty to twenty-five years old. They wore shoes with wide heels, simple wool dresses, short jackets with pockets (as though they’d been added extra for holding hands). Felt men’s hats covered their short haircuts. I considered them: their pace was sure and proud, their eyes unworried and energetic. Calm and self-aware, they critiqued the comedy’s characters.

They walked faster than me. I looked after them, full of love and hope, and a thought occurred to me: if one day these girls start smoking cigars, if they go in a salon¹¹ to grab a glass of beer and a bite, and then, when a sad thought comes by, if they sit at a card table to play a game, and if they do all this along with the useful labor that they do now for society, then they, these very girls, will solve the intractable problem of marriage. 

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1. Shelby Shapiro, Words to the Wives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 27.  ↩︎
2. On the topic of women’s pages and advice columns, see Ayelet Brinn, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (New York University Press, 2023).  ↩︎
3. While no further information on the co-author’s full name is provided in the records, it is possible this individual would have been the playwright Moyshe Katz.  ↩︎
4. Zachary Baker, The Lawrence Marwick Collection of Copyrighted Yiddish Plays at The Library of Congress: An Annotated Bibliography, Washington DC, Library of Congress, 2004.  ↩︎
5. Existing sources (including the Leksikon and later accounts) cite only two plays by Badanes, Dem doktors refue and Goldenlocks. For more on Shomer Zunser’s own career in playwriting, see Sonia Gollance, “‘An altogether unusual love and understanding’: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre,” In geveb (April 2023) and Emily Wortis Leider, “Postscript by Emily Wortis Leider,” in Miriam Shomer Zunser, Yesterday: A Memoir of a Russian Jewish Family (Harper & Row, 1978), 252–270.  ↩︎
6. Miriam Shomer Zunser’s granddaughter, Emily Wortis Leider, recalls: “Grandma wrote several plays in English, including one, Goldenlocks and The Bears, that was commissioned for Broadway by Arthur Hopkins,” in Yesterday, 264. ↩︎
7. Der Kritiker, “Der eyntsiger veg,” Gerechtigkeit 1, no. 3, January 31, 1919, 17.  ↩︎
8. Zalmen Zylbercweig, Leksikon fun yidishn teater 6 (Elisheva, 1931), 5185-5186. This play should not be confused with a musical of the same name, Der eyntsiger veg, that premiered in 1925. It was written by Louis Freiman and played at the Second Avenue Theatre. Some of the personages involved in Badanes’ production participated, such as actor David Kessler and general manager Joseph Edelstein. See “The Big Ads: How the Yiddish Theatre Publicized Their Productions,” accessed November 1, 2024, The Museum of Yiddish Theatre, https://moyt.org/exhibitions/1/ads/only-way.htm. ↩︎
9. All three reviews are cited by Zylbercweig, see n.6. Yoel Entin, “An erlikhe ober fershpetigte komedye in Pipels Teater,” Di varhayt 14, no. 3215, January 29, 1919, 5; Der Kritiker, “Der eyntsiger veg”; Yente Serdatsky, “In teater: Der eyntsiger veg,” Fraye arbayter shtime, February 19, 1919, 4. ↩︎
10. Yente Serdatsky, Geklibene shriftn (Hebrew Publishing Company, 1913). See Sonia Gollance’s summary of the play Oyf der vakh for the Digital Yiddish Theater Project, published in the same collection.  ↩︎
11. The National Prohibition Act would be passed later that year, on October 28, 1919. ↩︎