“The Yiddish stage was a wilderness before he came.”1
On a cold early afternoon in mid-March 1881, Tsar Alexander II, autocratic ruler of Imperial Russia, met his doom in Saint Petersburg. A member of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya or “People's Will” tossed a bomb under his carriage as he was returning to the Winter Palace from a military review. The vehicle’s steel-enforced chassis protected the Tsar from serious injury. But when he stepped out of the damaged carriage to take a look around, a second bomb was thrown directly in front of him. The explosion took off his legs and ripped apart his torso. Carried to the palace, he died soon afterwards.
Although they had nothing to do with the assassination, Russia’s Jews were, as usual, convenient scapegoats. At this time, Russia had the largest population of Jews in the world—a bit over five million—mostly confined to the Pale of Settlement, a region that included much of Ukraine and parts of Poland and Latvia. Their vernacular was Yiddish, a mixture of German, Slavic, and Hebrew that originated in 11th-century German-speaking regions before moving eastwards.2 (“Yiddish” is a shortening of Yidish Taitsh or “Jewish German”.) Hebrew, of course, was the language of worship, so most Russian Jewish males understood enough of the ancient language to follow liturgy and Torah readings. Many could also get by in Russian. But all Russian Jews were fluent in Yiddish.
After the second Alexander’s assassination and the ascension of his notoriously antisemitic son Alexander III,3 a new wave of repression hit Russia’s Jewish population. Cossacks and civilians terrorized Jews, particularly those in the Ukraine, in a series of bloody pogroms. Repressive regulations—including the so-called May Laws—restricted Jews’ access to education and forbade their living in rural areas and small towns.
These measures encouraged a mass exodus of Jews, precisely the effect the Romanovs were shooting for, that continued until the early years of the Soviet regime. Between the years 1881 and 1920, one in three Yiddish-speaking Jews fled eastern Europe and Russia.
One and a half million of them wound up in New York City, many settling in the Lower East Side, bringing with them Yiddish language, culture, customs—and theater.
Yiddish Theater
The Green Tree wine cellar in Jassy, Romania, was the birthplace (or at least so legend has it) of Yiddish theater. In October 1876, a young aspiring author named Abraham Goldfaden was contracted to read some of his work to the Green Tree’s Yiddish-speaking regulars. He chose a piece he was particularly proud of: a long, philosophic monologue entitled Dos Pintele Yid (“The Essential Jew”). But before he got too far into the reading, he was dismayed to notice that his audience’s eyes were glazing over. The performance ended with him being booed off the stage.
Goldfaden realized that what the audience wanted was light entertainment: “a jig, a song, a quarrel, a kiss,” as one commentator puts it.4 So that’s what he gave them. The very next night he returned to the Green Tree with a humorous sketch that brought the house down. Goldfaden had learned his lesson. He turned away from the heavy verse of Dos Pintele Yid to the task of churning out the productions that soon came to be identified with Yiddish theater. I suppose today we would call them musical comedies. They were incredibly lively and often minimally scripted productions, with actors frequently ad-libbing lines in response to laudatory or critical shouts from the audience.
Goldfaden’s career would have its ups and downs, but his operatic play Shulamis; or, The Daughter of Jerusalem (1881), proved an enduring Yiddish classic, as did “Raisins and Almonds,” one of its songs. By the time he emigrated to the United States two years before his death in 1908, he was recognized as the “father of the Yiddish stage.”
In its first few decades, the new genre of Yiddish theater that Goldfaden popularized was largely inspired by traditional Purimspiles or Purim plays. Rabbinic tradition generally disapproved of plays and play-going,5 with one exception: the festival of Purim, which commemorates Queen Esther’s rescue of Persian Jews from extermination.6 During the festival, Jews were encouraged to dress up and perform doggerel-versed, irreverent, and sometimes bawdy skits, loaded with plenty of song and dance, inspired by the story of Esther’s outsmarting the wicked Haman. When late nineteenth-century Russian and eastern European Jews went to the theater, their expectation was that they would be raucously entertained by Purimspile-like performances.7 What they most definitely didn’t want were plays like the ones being written by contemporaneous realists such as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann.
Jacob Gordin’s artistic genius challenged that norm, and in doing so changed the face of Yiddish theater.8 As one of his most perceptive critics puts it, “he helped transform the raw energies of the popular American Yiddish stage into a sophisticated, modern theater.”9
The Gordin Era
Gordin was born in Mirgorod, a Ukrainian town in the Pale of Settlement, in 1853. His father, a relatively prosperous jack-of-all-trades, was a Maskil, an “enlightener,” one of the followers of the Haskalah or eighteenth-century Enlightenment that had worked its way eastwards to central and eastern Europe.10 Maskilim didn’t necessarily renounce religion—Gordin’s father, intriguingly, also considered himself a follower of Hasidism—but they broke with tradition by studying non-rabbinic literature, politics, philosophy, and science.
Educated in a home with Haskalahic openness to Western learning, Gordin read widely as a youth. While still in his teens, he began writing for Russian-Jewish magazines. Influenced by Marx’s critique of capitalism (he translated parts of Das Kapital’s first volume) and Tolstoy’s utopian vision of pastoral communal life, Gordin founded the Dukhovno Bibleyskoye Bratstvo, or Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood, in 1880. Some commentators mistakenly assume it was a religious sect.11 In fact, its name was chosen to deceive Russian authorities. The Brotherhood, as defined by Gordin himself, was a “socialist collective, whose aim was to teach members the communal ideals of friendship and brotherhood, to preach love and respect of each other, and to fight and work for these ideals.”12 Although sensitive to the traditional importance of religion to his fellow Jews, he was more or less secular in his own thinking.
Gordin’s writings and activities soon put him on the radar of tsarist authorities, and he emigrated to the United States in 1891 to avoid prosecution, leaving behind a large family whom he would eventually bring across the Atlantic to join him in New York City. Intending to make a living for himself as a journalist in the Russian-Jewish expatriate community, Gordin soon discovered that the real money to be made was in writing for the burgeoning Yiddish theater, already well-established in New York by the time he arrived there.13 (Alexander III’s 1883 edict outlawing Yiddish stage productions in Russia had resulted in an exodus of Yiddish actors and directors to America.) As an intellectual, he’d always disdained Yiddish theater as shund or “trash,” a particularly low art form. In Ukraine, he’d never even bothered to see a Yiddish play and, truth to tell, felt more at home in Russian than Yiddish. So he was understandably reluctant to associate himself with the Yiddish stage.
But strapped for cash, he decided to plunge in by offering something of a higher caliber than the usual light fare. He would write a pure Yiddish—not the heavily Germanized (and affected) Daytshmerish then fashionable—and his plots would center on moral dilemmas and human tragedies rather than the conventional Goldfadenian mélange of song, dance, and extemporization.
His first play, written the same year he landed in America, was the realist melodrama Siberia. Because it completely eschewed standard Yiddish stagecraft, the actors slated to perform in it, with the sole exception of the great Jacob Adler,14 were convinced it would flop. They were right. On opening night, the bored audience cat-called, whistled derisively, and tossed apple cores. At the end of the second act, a furious Adler strode on stage to rebuke the unruly crowd. It was an historic moment for Yiddish theater. “Believe me, gospoda, citizens,” he told them, “if you would open your hearts, if you would open your mind and your understanding, you would not laugh at this play by the great Russian writer Jacob Mikhailovich Gordin, but would give it your most earnest attention.”15
Adler’s chastisement seems to have broken the ice. Siberia didn’t enjoy a long run. But henceforth, slowly but surely, Gordin’s new style, largely because of the force of his writing, caught on. The next 15 years would be known in New York’s Yiddish theater district as the Gordin era. The Russian émigré, with his broad salt-and-pepper beard, deep voice, silver-topped cane, short temper, and intimidatingly outsized personality dominated the world of Yiddish drama. He would write over 70 plays, in addition to hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and despite the occasional flop—how could it be otherwise, given his huge output?—his work was wildly popular.
When he died in 1909, thousands of Jews lined the streets in the Lower East Side to pay their respects at his funeral procession. The 3,000-seat Thalia Theater, where a score of actors, impresarios, and assorted dignitaries delivered eulogies, was packed with mourners. Jacob Adler broke down in tears, fell upon Gordin’s casket, and had to be helped off the stage. Boris Thomashefsky, the actor who more than any other person introduced Yiddish theater to America, was also overcome. David Kessler, another darling of the Yiddish boards, summed up what they were all thinking: “The Yiddish stage was a wilderness before he came, and we were each gasping for a part.” Gordin had given actor and audience alike something to sink their teeth into.
Gordin’s Genre and Theatrical Themes
The word “melodrama” is in bad odor these days, almost inevitably associated with over-the-top bombast and syrupy sentimentality. In unskilled hands, melodrama can indeed be risibly artificial: moustache-twirling villains, vaporish damsels in distress, and gleaming-toothed heroes who save the day. But it was the perfect vehicle for Gordin, who for the most part handled it deftly. Influenced by playwrights like Ibsen, he guarded against excess by melding realism with melodrama in his theatrical works. Even in our own melodrama-adverse culture, many of his plays still read as thoughtful explorations of the complexity of human relationships.
As a literary genre, melodrama is characterized by escalating suspense, intense interpersonal conflicts punctuated by comic moments—think of Shakespearean clowns—highly strung emotions ranging from noble to base, and a struggle between good and evil which typically, but not inevitably, results in good’s triumph. Commonly, the characters in melodrama are ordinary people coping with crisis situations that can overtake anyone: an unhappy marriage or love affair, sickness and death, loss of reputation or social standing, betrayal, financial failure, and so on. Melodrama, then, is a kind of “everyman” allegory. This is part of its widespread appeal.
In addition to these themes, many of Gordin’s plays understandably speak to the experiences of eastern European Jewish immigrants. Although an assimilationist himself, Gordin recognized that many of his fellow expatriates worried about losing their cultural identity in the great American melting pot. Consequently, much of his work focused on tension between the Old and New Worlds, expressed particularly in the relationship between non-assimilated parents and their hyper-Americanized children. Another aspect of the tension he frequently explored was the difficulty immigrant Jews had in maintaining their religious and moral traditions in the fast-paced secular world of New York City.
Both of these themes are centerpieces of Gordin’s 1902 The Kreutzer Sonata, inspired by Tolstoy’s novella of the same name. The play focuses on the moral collapse of an expatriate Russian-Jewish family whose members lose their way in the New World. Blackmail, adultery, dishonesty, abortion, and finally murder: this is the trajectory of the unhappy family’s descent into chaos. “Obedience and honor in this country are all smoke,”16 observes Raphael Friedlander, the despairing paterfamilias who tries to hold fast to Old World values. But his assimilated son Samuel isn’t impressed. America, he insists, has a new inverted set of commandments: “First, fathers, respect your sons. And the second one is, everybody do what he pleases. And the third is, whatever you learned in Russia ain’t so.”17 By play’s end, Raphael voices a bleak judgment that many of Gordin’s older audience members may well have shared. “Not a tie, not a bond, but it’s loosed here—every good and ancient thing. What in Russia stood out like the eternal rocks, Faith, Family, over here they thaw—yes, thaw, melt, and dance away. Dissolution! Chaos!”18
Not all of Gordin’s melodramas were set in the New World. Three of his best known, The Jewish King Lear (1892), Mirele Efros (1898), and God, Man, and Devil (1900), take place in Russia. All three, like The Kreutzer Sonata, were inspired by other literary works, the first two by Shakespeare’s King Lear and the third by Goethe’s Faust.
True to Gordin’s socialist commitment, all three of these plays denounce the mania for wealth he believes is a continuous human temptation, especially in an economic system like capitalism. The lead characters in the two Lear-inspired melodramas hand over their fortunes to their children, expecting to be supported in their old age. But the sudden acquisition of wealth is morally corrupting, and both Davoidl Moysheles, the “Jewish King Lear,” and Mirele Efros, the “Queen Lear,” like their Shakespearean counterpart, are treated so cruelly that they lose their bearings. Underlying this tragedy is a more foundational one: the self- destructive hubris of both protagonists. In The Jewish King Lear, Davoidl imperiously insists on absolute obedience from everyone in his family: “If I say that it is day, you must all also say that it is day. If I say that it is night, then it must be night. Is this so?”19 Mirele Efros’ arrogance runs just as deep. “I am Mirele Efros,” she says as one point, as if her very name is a obvious signal of superiority. “Nobody brings me, and nobody drives me away.”20 Gordin’s message is that both of their downfalls ultimately trace back to the overweening pride encouraged by excessive wealth.
In The Jewish King Lear, Gordin also addresses a favorite theme of his: the right of women to self-determine. Trytel, Davoidl’s youngest daughter, whose Shakespearean counterpart is Cordelia, is banished from the family by her enraged father when she defies his expectations for her by pursuing her dream of studying medicine and becoming a physician. She and her Haskalahic lover Yaffe eventually return to rescue Davoidl from the clutches of his other two daughters, a tribute to the strength and autonomy of women. Like Cordelia, she’s the real hero of the play.
In God, Man, and Devil, Gordin’s own favorite play and the one often considered his magnum opus, the theme of the morally corrosive effect of wealth is further explored. Hershele Dubrovner, a pious and happy but poor scribe, is tempted by Satan with the promise of great riches. It takes but a few years of wealth to wear away his piety and morality. In quick order he divorces his faithful but childless wife and marries his much younger niece, builds a factory that plunges old friends into penury, and alienates his own family—all because of his never satisfied hunger for wealth.
At one point in the play, while counting stacks of paper money, the pitiable corrosion of Hershele’s moral compass is on full display.
“What is this? It seems to be nothing. Pieces of paper. And yet when you take a look in the strongbox and catch sight of so many little pieces of paper, your heart becomes full of joy, sleep disappears, you forget that you’re tired, you’re hungry. You forget everything. Every hundred note speaks to you like a living thing, every bond strokes you like a warm breeze. Ah, how much pleasure, joy, power, lie in these pretty little bits of paper.”21
By play’s end, Hershele finally realizes the depths to which he’s sunk and remorsefully kills himself. But juxtaposed to his tragic end is Gordin’s hopeful proclamation that seductive as wealth is, it “can never utterly destroy [the] soul.”22 Again, the everyman message is clear: although all of us may be tempted by riches, we need not succumb. There’s something in the human spirit better than that.
These plays all personify Gordin’s central conviction that good theater has a responsibility to teach as well as entertain. “The drama is not for amusement, merely,” he wrote, “but for instruction as well. The greatest educational institution of the world is the theater. The theater socializes great ideas, and brings men of widely different social ranks to one intellectual level.”23 This is a world’s distance from the Purimspile understanding of Yiddish theater which held sway before Gordin arrived on the scene.
Legacy
Jacob Gordin not only revolutionized Yiddish theater by weaning it from its initial period of light Goldfadenesque operetta. He also voiced the anxieties and dreams of tens of thousands of immigrant Jews in New York City and beyond who struggled to adjust to their new diasporic existence. Gordin’s plays were both realistic depictions of the actual issues confronting people in their everyday lives and didactic defenses of the social and moral principles he thought crucial to the well-being of humans in general: economic equality, courage in the face of adversity, esteem for human dignity, respect for but not enslavement to tradition, the value of a simple life, the importance of community, loyalty to family and friends, disdain for superstition and repression, and a tolerant willingness to chuckle, at least occasionally, at the foibles and follies that punctuate every person’s life.
Perhaps no one has better summed up Gordin’s achievements than Irving Howe. Gordin, he wrote, “planted Yiddish drama in the soil of common life,” “enforced a percussive moralism,” and “above all brought discipline to a stage marked by high-jinks and chaos.”24 Indeed he did. His plays, only a handful of which have been translated into English, deserve to be better known, both for their historical importance and their artistic merit. He was der Yiddisher dramatiker par excellence.
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The Yiddish theater actor David Kessler (1860-1920), quoted in Beth Kaplan, Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 4. Kaplan is Gordin’s great-granddaughter.
Western Yiddish seems to have been gradually absorbed into the German vernacular. Eastern Yiddish, spoken by Russian and Eastern European Jews, endured. As the language moved eastwards, it incorporated bits of Slavic languages such as Ukrainian, Polish and Russian.
According to historian Elliott Rosenberg, Alexander III rejected a memorandum from one of his officials urging less harsh treatment of Russian Jews by scrawling this faux-piety on it: “But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master and have shed his precious blood.” Rosenberg, But Were They Good for the Jews? (Secaucus, NY: Carol Publishing Group, 1997), p. 183.
“Introduction: Yiddish Drama in the Yiddish World,” in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation, ed. & trans. Nahma Sandrow (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 5.
Psalm 1’s “Happy the man who has not walked in the wicked’s counsel, / nor in the way of offenders has stood, / nor in the session of scoffers has sat” was often invoked as a biblical warning against theater-going, “offenders” and “scoffers” being identified with actors. For all practical purposes, there was no indigenous Jewish theater until 1876.
There was also a semi-exception: the wedding jester or badkhen, an entertainer who extemporized rhymes at weddings. The badkhen was a regular character in Yiddish theater, analogous to the Shakespearean fool. Leyzer, a retired badkhen, has a large role in Gordin’s play God, Man, and Devil.
For a detailed description of Purimspiles and Goldfaden’s plays, see Nahma Sandrow’s excellent Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (New York: Limelight Editions and Seth Press, 1986), Chapters 1-5.
In The Jewish King Lear, Gordin pokes fun at Purimspiles and, by implication, the early years of Yiddish theater. Yaffe, the Haskalahic Jew, reacts angrily to a Purim play: “Pfui! A disgrace! Is this what you call Jewish theater? This is a play for the people? …. If you bleat like a goat, do you think that is singing? If you jump around like wild horses, do you think that is dancing? Obscene language and coarseness are what you consider witty. Is that the kind of wit that makes a people’s theater?” Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear, trans. Ruth Gay (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 14.
Barbara Henry, Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011), p. 5.
Two books by Shmuel Feiner offer excellent analyses of the Haskalah movement: The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor & Sondra Silverston (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004).
See, for example, Forverts Staff, “Playwright Jacob Gordin Brought Realism into the Yiddish Theater.” Forward (15 May 2023).
Quoted in Kaplan, Finding the Jewish Shakespeare, p. 20.
Irving Howe offers an excellent history of American Yiddish theater in Chapter 14 of his World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
Jacob Adler, by the way, is the great-uncle of actor Jerry Adler who played Hesh Rabkin on The Sopranos.
Jacob Adler, A Life on the Stage: A Memoir, trans. Lulla Rosenfeld (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 2001), p. 323.
Jacob Gordin, The Kreutzer Sonata, trans. Langdon Mitchell (New York: Harrison Grey Fiske, 1907), p. 38.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 72.
Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear, p. 10.
Jacob Gordin, Mirele Efros, in Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance, ed. & trans. Nahma Sandrow (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021), p. 65.
Jacob Gordin, God, Man, and Devil, in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation, ed. & trans. Nahma Sandrow (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 80.
Ibid., p. 95.
Quoted in Irving Howe, World of our Fathers, p. 469.
Ibid.
Thank you, Kerry: An incredibly interesting introduction to Yiddish origins, theatre, and culture. Your detailed notes and references are also helpful additions, providing for many of us valuable signposts and leads for future reading.