Indecent

The actors are released after spending a night in jail. Lemml and Reina anxiously await them. Esther exits the jail first; she tells Reina that Dorothee is coming soon. Virginia’s parents have already paid her bail, and she is on her way home to North Carolina. Esther tells Lemml that she met a few sex workers during her night in jail. She was struck by the fact that though “their words weren’t so dainty […] their English was perfect” (66); she wishes that she could speak English without her Polish accent.

Dorothee and Reina are reunited. Dorothee has not slept much in the weeks since they fought. Reina begs Dorothee to come home to their bed and admits that she said things she should not have during their fight. Dorothee insists that Reina was right. She is ashamed to have been arrested for acting in a play that she does not believe in. She would much rather have been arrested for acting in the original play.

Dorothee has bed bugs after spending the night in jail. Reina insists that she still wants Dorothee to come home; in English she explains that she will take off their clothes at the threshold. She will wash their clothes, draw a bath, and wash Dorothee’s hair. Dorothee tells Reina that they should only speak Yiddish together. 

Lemml meets the Irish playwright Eugene O’Neill in a bar. O’Neill wanted to testify in the actors’ defense, but the court dismissed him and the other witnesses because they had seen the original version of the play before the script was changed. Sholem’s work is not on trial; the Broadway production of the play is. O’Neil suggests that Sholem take the stand to defend his play. He admires the hopeful love story between Rifkele and Manke. He also tells Lemml that the charge of obscenity because of the lesbianism of the play is “bunk”: The play is on trial because it “shows that every religion—even Jews—sell God for a price” (68).

At their home on Staten Island, Madje tells Sholem that Lemml has asked him to testify in defense of the play. Sholem worries how he will sound; Madje insists that Weinberger can translate what he says into English. Sholem cannot bring himself to go to the court; he is too preoccupied with the knowledge that Jewish people are being massacred across Europe to care about a play he wrote years ago. Madje wishes that he had never gone back to Europe and wants him to tell her what he saw there. Sholem feels like his life is now “like a photographic negative” (70); the only thing that feels vivid and real are the things he saw back in Europe. He cannot get the images out of his head. When he told the State Department what he saw, they simply responded, “These things happen” (70). The horrors he witnessed were not enough to sway the government to action. Sholem decides to write a letter to be read at the trial. He is consumed by the need to change the way that gentiles see his community. He worries that the violence against Jewish people in Europe is coming to America. Madje tries to assure him that they are safe. 

The actors are found guilty of obscenity. The judge who delivers the verdict decrees that “drama must be purified of Eastern exoticism, its sexual pollution and its corruptive attitude towards the family” (71). 

One morning, Madje finds Lemml sitting on her front porch. She invites him inside for coffee, but Lemml refuses, saying that he “might be a dybbuk. A dead soul inside a stage manager” (72). Sholem joins Lemml and tries to apologize for failing to defend the play in court. Lemml insists that he did not expect Sholem to defend the play, but rather to defend him and the actors. Schildkraut’s American career is over; now, “the best he can hope for on American stages is to play the ‘Stage Jew’” (73). Lemml is upset with Sholem for agreeing to cut the love between Manke and Rifkele. Sholem insists that it is his play; Madje interjects that it is her play also. Lemml refutes both of them: The play belongs to the actors and the audiences who take the time to watch it. 

Finally, Sholem admits that he never checked the cuts, because he cannot read English. He could not testify in court for the same reason: He does not want to be ridiculed and laughed at for sounding like Lemml. In English, Lemml declares that he is done living in a “country that laughs at the way [he] speak[s]” (73). In Europe, they were able to perform The God of Vengeance everywhere they went and were never shut down. Tickets to plays were cheap, and everyone could afford to go to the theater. He is leaving America. Madje and Sholem try to stop him, saying that Europe has changed, but Lemml is firm. He takes the original Yiddish script with him and returns to Poland.