Everything about Yiddish Theater totally explained
Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by
Jews in
Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European
Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad:
operetta,
musical comedy, and
satiric or nostalgic
revues;
melodrama;
naturalist drama;
expressionist and
modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before
World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of
Eastern and
East Central Europe, but also in
Berlin,
London,
Paris, and, perhaps above all,
New York City.
Yiddish theatre's roots include the often
satiric plays traditionally performed during religious holiday of
Purim (known as
Purimspiels); other
masquerades such as the
Dance of Death; the singing of
cantors in the
synagogues; Jewish
secular song and dramatic improvisation; exposure to the theater traditions of various European countries, and the Jewish literary culture that had grown in the wake of the Jewish enlightenment (
Haskalah).
Israil Bercovici wrote that it's through Yiddish theatre that "Jewish culture entered in dialogue with the outside world," both by putting itself on display and by importing theatrical pieces from other cultures.
Precursors and early influences
Noah Prilutski (1882-1941) noted that Yiddish theatre didn't arise simultaneously with theatre in other European "national" languages; he conjectured that this was at least in part because the Jewish sense of nationality favored
Hebrew over Yiddish as a "national" language, but few Jews of the period were actually comfortable using Hebrew outside of a religious/liturgical context. Nonetheless, the culture of the Eastern European Jews was permeated with music, song, and dance. These elements were to figure prominently in the Yiddish theater.
As with
ancient Greek drama, many elements of Yiddish theatre arose as an artistic refinement of religious practice. In a Jewish context, unlike a
Christian context,
psalms to the glory of
God were almost always sung rather than spoken. Religious services involved what was known in Hebrew as
menatseach, essentially call-and-response. Traditional dances were associated with certain holidays, such as
Sukkot, but above all there were the Purim plays.
Often satiric and topical, Purim plays were traditionally performed in the courtyard of the
synagogue, because they were considered too profane to be performed inside the building. These made heavy use of
masks and other theatrical devices; the
masquerade (and the singing and dancing) generally extended to the whole congregation, not just a small set of players. While many Purim plays told the story in the
Book of Esther commemorated by the Purim holiday, others used other stories from Jewish scripture, such as the story of
Joseph sold by his brothers or the sacrifice of
Isaac. Over time, these well-known stories became less a subject matter than a pretext for topical and satiric theatre.
Mordechai became a standard role for a
clown.
Purim plays were published as early as the early 18th century. At least eight Purim plays were published between 1708 and 1720; most of these don't survive (at least some were burned in
autos da fe), but one survives in the
Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten (1714), a collection by
Johann Jakob Schudt (1664–1722).
Another similar current in Jewish culture was a tradition of masked dancers performing after weddings. The most elaborate form of this was the
Dance of Death, a pageant depicting all layers of a society, which had originated among
Sephardic Jews in
Spain in the 14th century and had spread through Europe among both Jews and Gentiles. 16th century
Italian Jews had taken music and dance to an even more refined level of art: at that time in Italy there were Jewish virtuosi and dancing masters in
Mantua,
Ferrara, and
Rome, and the first known troupes of Jewish performers in Europe. Less refined versions of the same also occurred in 18th century
Germany.
Additionally, there was a rich tradition of dialogues in the Jewish poetry known as
Tahkemoni, dating back at least to
Yehuda al-Harizi in 12th century Spain. Al-Harizi's work contained dialogues between believer and heretic, man and wife, day and night, land and ocean, wisdom and foolishness, avarice and generosity. Such dialogues figured prominently in early Yiddish theater.
The origin of theatre in
Christian societies in Europe is often traced to
Passion Plays and other religious pageants, similar in some ways to the Purim plays. In the
Middle Ages, few Jews would have seen these: they were often performed in the courtyards of Christian churches (few of which were near the Jewish ghettos), on Christian holidays, and they often had significant
antisemitic elements in their plots and dialogue. However, in later times, the
Romanian Orthodox Christmas tradition of
Irozii — minstrel shows centered around the figure of
Herod the Great (Rom:
Irod), which were the origin of
Romanian-language theater — definitely influenced Purim plays and
vice versa.
Jews had far more exposure to secular European theater once that developed.
Meistersinger Hans Sachs' many plays on Old Testament topics were widely admired by the Jews of the German ghettos, and from the 16th century through the 18th, the biblical story of Esther was the most popular theatrical theme in Christian Europe, often under the
Latin name
Acta Ahasuerus.
First rumblings
Although professional Yiddish theatre is generally dated from 1876, there are earlier claimants to the title.
Although there was briefly some professional Yiddish-language theatre in and around
Warsaw in the 1830s, it left no immediate heirs. There is a contemporaneous record of there being 19 amateur Yiddish-language theatrical troupes in and around Warsaw at that time, and of one professional company performing, with a large and receptive audience of both Jews and Gentiles, a five-act drama about
Moses, written by A. Schertspierer of
Vienna, with "well-drawn characters and good dramatic situations and language". The same report indicates that a play about Esther, written in Hebrew, was rejected by this same company on the basis that Hebrew would be incomprehensible to most of its audience. According to the same account, the theatre had a military general as a "protector", suggestive of why such theatre didn't long prosper.
Around the same time, there are indications of a traveling Yiddish-language theatre troupe in
Galicia, organized along the lines of an
English or Italian theatre troupe.
In 1854, two
rabbinical students from
Zhytomyr put on a play in
Berdichev. Shortly afterward, the
Ukrainian Jew
Abraham Goldfaden, generally considered the founder of the first professional Yiddish theatre troupe, attended that same rabbinical school, and while there's known to have played (in 1862) a woman's role in a play,
Serkele, by
Solomon Ettinger. Shortly after that (1869, according to one source), Goldfaden wrote a dialogue
Tsvey Shkheynes (
Two Neighbors), apparently intended for the stage, and published with moderate success. A shortlived Yiddish theater in
Odessa in 1864 performed dramas
Esther and
Athalia.
Abraham Baer Gottlober's
Decktuch, like Ettinger's
Serkele, was written between 1830 and 1840, but published much later;
Israel Aksenfeld (died
circa 1868) wrote several dramas in Yiddish, which were probably not staged in his lifetime. Another early Yiddish dramatist was
Joel Baer Falkovich (
Reb Chaimele der Koẓin, Odessa, 1866;
Rochel die Singerin, Zhytomyr, 1868).
Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch's
Die Takse (1869) has the form of a drama, but, like
Eliakim Zunser's later
Mekirat Yosef (Vilnius, 1893), it wasn't intended for the stage.
Hersh Leib Sigheter (1844–1933) wrote satirical Purim plays on an annual basis and hired boys to play in them. Although often objected to by rabbis, these plays were popular, and were performed not only on Purim but for as much as a week afterwards in various locations.
Another current that led equally to professional Yiddish theatre was a tradition resembling that of the
troubadours or
Minnesänger, apparently growing out of the music associated with Jewish weddings, and often involving singers who also functioned as
cantors in synagogues. The first records of the early
Brodersänger or
Broder singers are the remarks of Jews passing through
Brody, which was on a major route of travel, generally disapproving of the singing of songs when no particular occasion called for music. The most famous of the singers from Brody was the itinerant Berl Margulis (1815–1868), known as
Berl Broder, "Berl from Brody"; 24 of his 30 surviving songs are in the form of dialogues. Another influential performer in this style was Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkrantz (1826–1883), known as
Velvel Zbarjer. Bercovici describes his work as "mini-melodramas in song".
Such performers, who performed at weddings, in the salons of the wealthy, in the summer gardens, and in other secular gathering places of the Eastern European Jews, were not mere singers. They often used costumes and often improvised spoken material between songs, especially when working in groups.
Israel Grodner, later Goldfaden's first actor, participated in an outdoor concert in
Odessa in 1873 with dialogues between songs comparable to much of what was in Goldfaden's earliest plays. Goldfaden himself was already a noted poet, and many of his poems had been set to music and had become popular songs, some of which were used in that 1873 performance.
Finally, at the time Yiddish theatre first evolved, the Jews were among the most literate people in Europe and Yiddish was establishing itself as a literary language. Most educated Jews were comfortable in as three or four languages. Some Jews with secular interests were familiar with the dominant theatrical traditions of their respective countries, but, as the
New Yorker Yiddishe Ilustrirte Tsaitung wrote in 1888, for most Jews prior to the advent of Yiddish theatre, "Books were our stages, their letters our actors." As a result of a strong literary intellectual culture, within a year or two of Goldfaden founding the first professional Yiddish theatre troupe, there were multiple troupes, multiple playwrights, and more than a few serious Yiddish theatre critics and theoreticians.
Early years
Abraham Goldfaden is generally considered the founder of the first professional Yiddish theatre troupe, which he founded in
Iaşi,
Romania and later moved to
Bucharest; his own career also took him to
Imperial Russia,
Lvov, and
New York City. Within two years of Goldfaden's founding of his troupe, there were several rival troupes in Bucharest, mostly founded by former members of Goldfaden's troupe. Most of these troupes followed Goldfaden's original formula of musical
vaudeville and light comedy, while Goldfaden himself turned more toward relatively serious
operettas about biblical and historical subjects, especially after his own company left Bucharest for an extended tour of the cities of
Imperial Russia.
Goldfaden's troupe began as all-male; while they soon acquired actresses, as well, it remained relatively common in Yiddish theatre for female roles, especially comic roles, to be played by men. (Women also sometimes played men's roles:
Molly Picon was a famous
Shmendrick.)
Many early Yiddish theatre pieces were constructed around a very standard set of roles: "a
prima donna, a
soubrette, a comic, a lover, a
villain, a villainess (or "intriguer"), an older man and woman for character roles, and one or two more for spares as the plot might require", and a musical component that might range from a single fiddler to an orchestra. This was very convenient for a
repertory company, especially a traveling one. Both at the start and well into the great years of Yiddish theater, the troupes were often in one or another degree family affairs, with a husband, wife, and often their offspring playing in the same troupe.
At its high end, early Yiddish theatre was noted for its pageantry. A pageant about the coronation of
Solomon, presented on the occasion of the 1881 coronation of
Carol I of Romania was described by
Ion Ghica as "among the most imposing things that paraded the coronation"; he acquired the costumes for the
Romanian National Theater, which he headed at the time.
One can get a sense of both the nature of early professional Yiddish theatre, and the directions it subsequently took, from these 1877 remarks by Moses Schwarzfeld: "If we write only comedies or if we only imitate German, Romanian and French pieces translated into Yiddish, all we'll have is a secondary Jewish stage... just making people laugh and cry is an
evil for us Jews in Romania" and calling for serious and "educational" Jewish theatre. Goldfaden himself agreed with these sentiments; he later described his views at the time, writing "If I've arrived at having a stage, I want it to be a school for you... Laugh heartily if I amuse you with my jokes, while I, watching you, feel my heart crying. Then, brothers, I'll give you a drama, a tragedy drawn from life, and you'll also cry — while my heart shall be glad."
B. Nathansohn, correspondent of the
Warsaw-based Jewish newspaper
Hamelitz visited Romania in the summer of 1878 and wrote, "When a Jew enters a Yiddish theatre in Bucharest he's thunderstruck hearing the Yiddish language in all its splendor and radiance", and called upon Goldfaden to create similar theatres in Warsaw,
Lublin,
Vilna, Berdichev, and
Balta.
While Yiddish theatre was an immediate hit with the broad masses of Jews, was generally liked and admired by Jewish intellectuals and many Gentile intellectuals, a small but socially powerful portion of the Jewish community, centered among
Orthodox and
Hasidic Jews remained opposed to it. Besides complaints about the mingling of men and women in public and about the use of music and dance outside of sacred contexts, the two main criticisms from this quarter were (1) that the Yiddish "jargon" was being promoted to the detriment of "proper" Hebrew and (2) that satire against Hasidim and others wouldn't necessarily be understood as satire and would make Jews look ridiculuous. Bercovici quotes an anonymous 1885 article as responding to these criticisms by saying (1) that all Jews speak
some modern language and why should Yiddish be any more detrimental to Hebrew than Romanian, Russian, or German, and (2) that the Gentiles who would come to Yiddish theatre wouldn't be the antisemites, they'd be those who already knew and liked Jews, and that they'd recognize satire for what it was, adding that these criticisms were "nothing" when weighed against the education that Yiddish theatre was bringing to the lower classes.
Writing of
Sigmund Mogulesko's troupe in Romania in 1884, and probably referring to the plays of
Moses Horowitz and
Joseph Lateiner,
Moses Gaster wrote that Yiddish theatre "represents scenes from our history known by only a tiny minority, refreshing, therefore, secular memory" and "shows us our defects, which we've like all men, but not with a tendency to strike at our own immorality with a tendency towards ill will, but only with an ironic spirit that doesn't wound us, as we're wounded by representations on other stages, where the Jew plays a degrading role."
Russian era
If Yiddish theatre was born in Romania, its youth occurred in Imperial Russia, largely in what is now
Ukraine.
Israel Rosenberg's troupe (which later had a series of managers, including Goldfaden's brother Tulya, and which at one point split in two, with one half led by actor
Jacob Adler) gave Russia's first professional Yiddish theater performance in
Odessa in 1878. Goldfaden himself soon came to Odessa, pushing Rosenberg's troupe into the provinces, and
Osip Mikhailovich Lerner and
N.M. Sheikevitch also founded a Yiddish theatre at Odessa, which for several years became the capital of Yiddish theatre.
With the more sophisticated audience — many Russian Jews were regular attendees of Russian-language theatre, and Odessa was a first-rate theatre city — serious melodramatic operettas, and even straight plays, took their place among the lighter vaudevilles and comedies. All three major troupes did their own productions of
Karl Gutzkow's
Uriel Acosta (Goldfaden's was an operetta). What seemed, for a time, a boundless future in Russia was cut short by the anti-Jewish reaction following the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II; Yiddish theatre was banned, under an order effective
September 14,
1883.
Looking back on this period, although acknowledging certain of Goldfaden's plays from this era as "masterpieces",
Jacob Adler saw this as a period of relative mediocrity compared to what came later. "For three years I... wandered in the cave of the Witch and the motley of Shmendrick and what did I really know of my trade?" he describes himself as thinking in 1883. "If someday I return to Yiddish theater let me at least not be so ignorant."
London
Of the next era of Yiddish theatre, Adler wrote, "...if Yiddish theater was destined to go through its infancy in Russia, and in America grew to manhood and success, then London was its school." In London in the 1880s, playing in small theater clubs "on a stage the size of a cadaver" [Adler,1999, 248], not daring to play on a Friday night or to light a fire on stage on a Saturday afternoon (both because of the Jewish
Sabbath), forced to use a cardboard
ram's horn when playing
Uriel Acosta so as not to
blaspheme, Yiddish theatre nonetheless took on much of what was best in European theatrical tradition.
In this period, the plays of
Schiller first entered the repertoire of Yiddish theater, beginning with
The Robbers, the start of a vogue that would last a quarter of a century. Adler records that, like
Shakespeare, Schiller was "revered" by the broad Jewish public, not just by intellectuals, admired for his "almost
socialist view of society", although his plays were often radically adapted for the Yiddish stage, shortening them and dropping Christian,
antisemitic, and
classical mythological references
Heyday
The 1883 Russian ban (lifted in 1904) effectively pushed Yiddish theatre to
Western Europe and then to America; over the next few decades, successive waves of Yiddish-language performers would arrive in New York (and, to a lesser extent, in
Berlin,
London,
Vienna, and Paris), some simply as artists seeking an audience, but many as a result of persecutions,
pogroms and economic crises in Eastern Europe. Professional Yiddish theatre in
London began in 1884, and flourished until the mid-1930s. By 1896,
Kalman Juvilier's troupe was the only one remaining in Romania, where Yiddish theatre had started, although Mogulesko would spark a revival there in 1906. There was also some activity in
Warsaw and
Lvov, which were under
Austrian rather than
Russian rule.
In this era, Yiddish theatre existed almost entirely on stage, rather than in texts. The
Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901-1906 reported, "There are probably less than fifty printed Yiddish dramas, and the entire number of written dramas of which there's any record hardly exceeds five hundred. Of these at least nine-tenths are translations or adaptations."
Between 1890 and 1940, there were over 200 Yiddish theaters or touring Yiddish theater troupes in the
United States. At many times, a dozen Yiddish theatre groups existed in New York City alone, with a theater district centered on
Second Avenue (in what is now the
East Village, but was then considered part of the Jewish
Lower East Side) that often rivaled
Broadway in scale and quality. At the time the U.S. entered
World War I, there were 22 Yiddish theaters and 2 Yiddish
vaudeville houses in New York City alone. [Adler,1999, 370 (commentary)] Original plays, musicals, and even translations of
Hamlet and
Richard Wagner's
operas were performed, both in the United States and Eastern Europe during this period.
Yiddish theatre is said to have two artistic golden ages, the first in the realistic plays produced in New York City in the late 1800s, and the second in the political and artistic plays written and performed in
Russia and New York in the 1920s. Professional Yiddish theater in New York began in 1886 with a troupe founded by
Zigmund Mogulesko. At the time of Goldfaden's funeral in 1908, the
New York Times wrote, "The dense Jewish population on the
lower east side of
Manhattan shows in its appreciation of its own humble Yiddish poetry and the drama much the same spirit that controlled the rough audiences of the
Elizabethan theater. There, as in the London of the sixteenth century, is a veritable intellectual renascence."
At the time of the opening of the Grand Theater in New York (1903), New York's first purpose-built Yiddish theater, the
New York Times noted, "That the Yiddish population is composed of confirmed theatergoers has been evident for a long time, and for many years at least three theaters, which had served their day of usefulness for the English dramas, have been pressed into service, providing amusement for the people of the
Ghetto." (
For more on the Grand Theater, see Sophia Karp.)
In fact, this was a tremendous understatement of what was going on in Yiddish theater at the time. Around the same time,
Lincoln Steffens wrote that the theater being played at the time in Yiddish outshone what was being played in English. Yiddish New York theatergoers were familiar with the plays of
Ibsen,
Tolstoy, and even
Shaw long before these works played on
Broadway, and the high calibre of Yiddish language acting became clear as Yiddish actors began to cross over to Broadway, first with Jacob Adler's
tour de force performance as Shylock in a 1903 production of
The Merchant of Venice, but also with performers such as
Bertha Kalich, who moved back and forth between the city's leading Yiddish-language and English-language stages.
Some of the most important Yiddish playwrights of the first era included:
Jacob Gordin (1853–1909), known for plays such as
The Yiddish King Lear and for his translations and adaptations of Tolstoy,
Solomon Libin (1872–1955),
David Pinski (1872–1959), and
Leon Kobrin (1872–1946).
This first golden age suffered a setback when the period from 1905 to 1908 brought half a million new Jewish immigrants to New York. Once again, as in the 1880s, the largest audience for Yiddish theater was for lighter fare. The Adlers and
Keni Liptzin hung on doing classic theater, but
Boris and
Bessie Thomashefsky returned to the earlier style, making a fortune off of what the Adlers despised as
shund ("trash") theater. Plays like
Joseph Lateiner's
The Jewish Heart succeeded at this time, while Gordin's late plays like
Dementia Americana (1909) were initially commercial failures. It would be 1911 before the trend was reversed, with Adler's commercially successful production of Tolstoy's
The Living Corpse (also known as
Redemption), translated into Yiddish by Kobrin. [Adler,1999, 361-364, 367] Both the more and the less serious Yiddish theater persisted. As Lulla Rosenfeld writes, "Art and
shund alike would find their audience."
The Yiddish theater continued to have its ups and downs. In 1918,
Isaac Goldberg could look around himself and reasonably write that, "…the Yiddish stage, despite the fact that it has produced its greatest dramatists only yesterday"… is already, despite its financial successes, next door to extinction." [Goldberg,1918, 685] As it happens, it was on the dawn of a second era of greatness: a 1925
New York Times article asserts that "...the Yiddish theater has been thoroughly Americanized... it's now a stable American institution and no longer dependent on immigration from Eastern Europe. People who can neither speak nor write Yiddish attend Yiddish stage performances and pay Broadway prices on Second Avenue." This is attributed to the fact that Yiddish theatre is "only one of... [the] expressions" of a New York Jewish cultural life "in full flower".
Famous plays of this second golden era were
The Dybbuk (1919), by
S. Ansky, considered a revolutionary play in both Yiddish and mainstream theatre,
The Golem by
H. Leivick (1888–1962), as well as the plays of
Sholem Aleichem.
Yiddish theater after the Second World war was revived with the writing and performance of
The Warsaw Ghetto.
Several of America's most influential 20th century acting teachers, such as
Stella Adler (daughter of Jacob and
Sara Adler and sister of actor
Luther Adler) and
Lee Strasberg, had their first tastes of theatre in Yiddish. Though some of the
methods developed by them and other members of the
Group Theatre were reactions to the often melodramatic and larger-than-life style of Yiddish theatre, this style nonetheless informed their theories and left its stamp on them. Yiddish theatre was also highly influential on what is still known as
Jewish humor.
Effect of the Holocaust
Like the rest of Yiddish-language culture, Yiddish theatre was devastated by the
Holocaust. The major portion of the world's Yiddish-speakers were killed and many theatres were destroyed. Many of the surviving Yiddish-speaking
Ashkenazi emigrated to
Israel, where many assimilated into the emerging
Hebrew-language culture, since Yiddish was discouraged and looked down upon by the
Zionist belief.
Although its glory days have passed, Yiddish theatre companies still perform in various Jewish communities. The
Folksbiene (People's Theatre) company in New York City is still active 90 years after it was founded. The
Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre of
Montreal,
Quebec,
Canada has been active for over 49 years. The
State Jewish Theater in Bucharest, Romania also continues to perform some plays in Yiddish, with simultaneous translation into
Romanian. Although Yiddish theater never truly caught on in the state of Israel, the Yiddishpiel Theatre company (founded in 1987) is still producing and performing new plays in Tel-Aviv. The longest running Yiddish production in Israel, which was also one of the few commercial Yiddish theatrical successes post Holocaust, was
Pesach Burstein's production of
Itzik Manger's
Songs of the Megillah (Yiddish: Megille Lider). It also released on Broadway in 1968 to favourable reviews as
Megilla of Itzik Manger. The career of the Burstein troupe has recently been documented in the documentary film
The Komediant.
The 1987 musical
On Second Avenue is an
off-Broadway musical theater and looks back at Yiddish theatre in New York's Yiddish theatre district on
Second Avenue. It had a successful revival in 2005, with a cast led by
Mike Burstyn, and was nominated for two
Drama Desk Awards.
Further Information
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