Published: 5 February 2021
Last updated: 5 March 2024
WHEN THE COUNTY SHERIFF arrived at the site of a head-on collision on Route 65 about two miles north of Iowa Falls in the early evening of June 11, 1935, she found, amid the twisted steel and broken glass, little bodies strewn about the scene, motionless. They were Jewish characters and famous politicians—not real people, but puppets.
In the passenger seat, there was a human being who had been injured in the crash—so severely, in fact, that he died in the hospital shortly thereafter. That man was Yosl Cutler, the artist who created the puppets and had been on a tour of the United States, performing Yiddish puppet shows in far-flung Jewish communities.
Three days later, 10,000 people attended his funeral in New York, a testament to the popularity of this artist, puppeteer, and performer, who was active on the Yiddish cultural scene from 1919 until his untimely death.
Together with his artistic partner, Zuni Maud, Cutler created a Yiddish puppet theatre that fused traditional Jewish folklore, modern politics, and a searing satiric left-wing sensibility.
Both immigrants from Eastern Europe, Cutler and Maud met in the New York offices of a Yiddish humour magazine called Der groyser kundes (“The Great Prankster”), where both worked as cartoonists and writers of often surreal short stories. They became fast friends and opened a small studio on Union Square, where they sold artworks and painted furniture.
Both were tangentially involved in theatre set decoration; when Maurice Schwartz, the founder and director of the Yiddish Art Theatre, asked the two to create puppets for a scene in a play he was staging at the end of 1924, they jumped at the chance.
FULL STORY The life and death of a Yiddish puppet theatre (Smithsonian)
Photo: Three of Yosl Cutler’s surviving puppets: two Jewish characters and one Russian. These were constructed circa 1933 (Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
