Yiddish theatre: Encyclopedia II - Yiddish theatre - The heyday of Yiddish theater

Yiddish theatre - The heyday of Yiddish theater

The 1883 Russian ban (eventually 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.

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 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 1882 with a troupe founded by Boris Thomashefsky. 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 uefulness 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. [Adler, 1999, 361 (commentary)] 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 adapatations 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 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." [Adler, 1999, 367 (commentary)]

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 is 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". [Melamed, 1925]

Two of the most famous plays of this second golden era were The Dybbuk (1919), by S. Ansky, considered a revolutionary play in both Yiddish and mainstream theatre, and The Golem by H. Leivick (1888–1962).

Several of America's most influential 20th century acting teachers, such as Stella Adler (daughter of Jacob and Sara 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The heyday of Yiddish theater", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki