Elka Schumann, a pivotal figure in Bread and Puppet Theater and the wife of the theater company’s founder Peter Schumann, died yesterday at North Country Hospital in Newport after a massive stroke. She was 85. Her death was confirmed by her son Max Schumann, who was in the room with her when she died along with his father and four siblings.
“She embodied the spirit of the theater, this combination of great sympathy and hospitality and openness,” said John Bell, a longtime Bread and Puppet company member. “Her commitment to radical betterment of humanity was very deep and consistent.”
“Her life was a historical adventure novel,” Max Schumann told VTDigger.
She was born Elka Scott in Magnitogorsk, Russia, in 1935. Her father was an American sympathetic to the communist cause. Her mother, Masha Dikareva, was Russian.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Elka was a young girl and escaped with her parents on a boat to Japan, sailing again to Hawaii and San Francisco. Her family moved to New York but spent the post-World War II years in Berlin, where her father was a journalist for Time-Life.
Elka came back to the U.S. and settled in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She spent her final year of high school at the Putney School, where she would later teach Russian and her husband would perform his first puppet shows.
She attended Bryn Mawr College and traveled to Munich for her junior year abroad where she met Peter Schumann. The first time they actually met, according to an oral history she recorded for The Vermont Historical Society’s Digital Vermont archive, was when she visited Peter Schumann in the hospital after he got hit by a motorcycle.
The Schumanns moved to New York after they married but long before they moved permanently to Vermont in 1970, her connection to the state had been established by visiting her grandfather Scott Nearing, who with his wife, Helen, became famous authors and advocates of agrarian self-sufficiency. They lived in Jamaica, Vermont, for a time.
“She was very close to Scott [Nearing] as a kid,” Max Schumann said. “She was much more politically close to him than her own father, who drifted rightward after being a radical in the 1930s.”
When she was in high school, her grandfather inspired her to go to work in Harlem and other low-income areas of New York City during the summer. Elka inherited the idea of growing your own food and was involved in the nonprofit that runs The Good Life Center at the Nearing’s former home in Harborside, Maine.
On the Bread and Puppet farm in Glover, which her parents bought as a retirement home and then gave to the Schumanns after the theater troupe’s residency at Goddard College ended in 1975, Elka made apple cider, ran a sugaring operation with 2,000 taps, raised sheep and spun her own wool.
Bread and Puppet’s finances have always been shaky, but its press has provided a substantial financial foundation by producing books, calendars, banners and posters.
“It was her project, mainly,” said Helen Rabin, a retired baker in Plainfield. “That was where she really came into her own. The Bread and Puppet Press really became a very important financial prop for the theater. Nobody expected that.”
It was Rabin’s husband Jules, a professor at Goddard, who urged the Schumanns to move the theater company out of New York and take up residence at Goddard’s Cate Farm, which it did in 1970. The Rabins kids, now all grown, grew up with the Schumann clan in New York and Vermont.
Jules Rabin remembered Elka as “somewhat conservative” and “serious almost to the point of solemn.”
“She would raise her eyebrows at some of Peter’s art and some of Peter’s hijinx [but] always yielded to Peter,” Helen Rabin said. “She was a gyroscopic kind of personality keeping the Schumann ship of state as steady as she could.”
Elka was known to thousands of visitors to the Glover farm for conducting tours of its cavernous puppet museum.
“She was just so full of the lore of the theater and all of the puppets and everything going way back to the beginning,” Rabin said, “and the museum has it all.”
Because her husband is such a colorful character, Elka did not garner as much attention, but she was Peter Schumann’s “first and best critic and adviser,” said Bell, now an associate professor of puppetry at the University of Connecticut. “She was in a position that not all of us were [in] to say, ‘That’s a bad choice.’ She had a highly developed critical sense.”
Bell credits Elka with providing him his first serious introduction to puppetry in 1973 when the company was touring in Europe. He worked with her Dancing Bear Children’s Theater doing hand puppet shows at local schools and libraries.
The Schumann matriarch had a musical side, too. Bell said she played “The Internationale” on a recorder at a Bread and Puppet performance on Saturday. She learned to play saxophone late in life and is credited with playing an important role in the revival of sacred harp music in the Northeast. The theater company started employing it in performances when it was at Cate Farm.
In a post on Facebook, the Vermont Arts Council called Elka “a leading cultural figure and a generous, creative spirit.”
“Her generosity to all us puppeteers was consistent and grand,” Trudy Cohen, another longtime Bread and Puppeteer said.
Son Max Schumann said, “she just supported the family and the whole thing in every imaginable way.”
A private wake is being held at the Bread and Puppet farm Monday and Tuesday. A sacred harp sing will close the wake at 5 p.m. Tuesday. The burial will take place Wednesday morning in the farm’s pine forest where other puppeteers and their loved ones have been memorialized. A memorial will be held at an unspecified future date.
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