The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater , livre ebook

THE RISE OF THE MODERN YIDDISH THEATER
JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Mikhail Krutikov
Genevi ve Zubrzycki
Editors
THE RISE OF THE MODERN YIDDISH THEATER

Alyssa Quint
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Alyssa Quint
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03861-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03862-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
Loretta and Morris Gordon (z l)
Jean and Issie Quint (z l)

Oliver, Julia, and Eve
Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration

The Social Life of Jewish Theater in the Russian Empire: An Introduction

1 Goldfaden, Elite (1876-1883)

2 The Rise of the Yiddish Actor

3 The Rise of the Yiddish Theater Audience

4 The Rise of the Yiddish Playwright

5 The Rise of the Female Yiddish Actor

6 The Ban, Cultural Momentum, and the Modern Yiddish Theater

Afterword: Modern Yiddish Theater and the Extravernacular

Appendix I: Synopses of Goldfaden s Operettas
Appendix II: The Sorceress
Appendix III: Excerpt from the Memoirs of Avrom Fishzon
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
D URING THE MANY years I spent writing this book (or thought about writing it), I benefited from the encouragement and good company of many colleagues, friends, and members of my family. I am sincerely grateful for the wisdom and guidance of mentors Ruth Wisse, Jay Harris, Marcus Moseley, and David Roskies. Your valuable scholarship inspired this work. The manuscript evolved into its present form, in part, from stimulating conversation with friends and colleagues. Together we discussed the challenges of seeing the Yiddish theater as embedded in a larger cultural and historical context. For these conversations, and for the many moments of insight and friendship they have shown me, I thank Marion Aptroot, Jeremy Dauber, Elissa Bemporad, Debra Caplan, Glenn Dynner, Stef Halpern, Joshua Karlip, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Rebecca Kobrin, Cecile Kuznitz, Tony Michaels, David Mazower, Ken Moss, Roberta Newman, Eddy Portnoy, Jeffrey Shandler, Vasili Schedrin, Michael Steinlauf, Miryem Trinh, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jenna Weissman Joselit, and Steve Zipperstein. Thank you to Jonathan Brent and the YIVO Institute for their support while I completed the final stages of this book. For their expertise and willingness to help me prepare the book for press, I owe a debt of gratitude to my YIVO colleagues including Fruma Mohrer, Gunnar Berg, Mila Sholokhova, Alex Weiser, Leo Greenbaum, Ettie Goldvasser, Chava Lapin, Marek Web, Vital Zajka, Ben Kaplan, and Sarah Ponichtera. And to Faina Burko and Yaakov Sklar for help with my Russian translations. Thanks to Harriet Yassky and Noam Green for their editorial work on my manuscript and to Alexander Kotik in Moscow for tracking down many of the Russian-language reviews I mention in this book. Thank you to Dee Mortensen, Paige Rasmussen, Rachel Erin Rosolina, and Carol McGillivray at Indiana University Press for your help in preparing my manuscript for press.
While writing this book, I have benefited from the financial and institutional support of the Memorial Foundation, Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I am extremely grateful for this support.
For reading drafts of some or all of this book with enormous patience, generosity, and intelligence, I thank my friends Joel Berkowitz, Shelly Eversley, ChaeRan Freeze, Barbara Henry, Glenn Kurtz, Jessica Lang, Olga Litvak, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Misha Krutikov.
To my parents, Sylvia and Ted Quint, who have forever showered me with love; to my in-laws, Terry and Aron Steinman, for their loving support and babysitting hours; to my sisters, Jody, Shoshana, and Mia; and my sisters- and brothers-in-law, Deb, Marissa, John, Jonathan, Adam, Adam, and Rob: thank you for your curiosity in my work, and thank you for supporting it when it was the farthest thing from the object of your curiosity. Thank you for watching the kids and, at other times, providing me with irresistible distraction. On that note, most especially, my thanks is owed my children, Oliver, Julia, and Eve, who keep me entranced with all they say and do. And thank you Daniel Steinman, my best editor of all and the love of my life.
Note on Transliteration
M OST OF THE sources for this study are in Yiddish, Russian, and, to a lesser extent, Hebrew, French, and German, so I have had to transliterate the names of people and titles of works. I have transliterated Yiddish according to the guidelines of the YIVO Institute except when a name has currency in English that deviates from these guidelines. Many of the people mentioned in this book used different names in different languages (Abram in Russian, Avrom in Yiddish, and even Abraham in English). In most cases, I go with the spellings preferred by the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe . For Russian, I have generally followed the Library of Congress rules without diacritical marks. For Hebrew, I have also followed the Library of Congress rules and avoided diacritics. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
THE RISE OF THE MODERN YIDDISH THEATER
The Social Life of Jewish Theater in the Russian Empire

An Introduction
I N THE EIGHTH of his Eight Octavo Notebooks , Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a perhaps unlikely enthusiast of Yiddish theater, recorded the memories of a Yiddish actor named Isaac Loewy. When they met, Loewy was part of a small professional Yiddish theater troupe from Poland that performed in Prague. According to Kafka s transcription of their conversation, Loewy reports that when he was a young boy, his Hasidic parents considered the theater treyf (literally, unkosher)- for Gentiles and sinners. Nonetheless, he explained, he was so drawn to theater that he would regularly attend non-Jewish performances in Warsaw s Grand Theater. Before visiting the theater, Loewy would buy a collar and a pair of cuffs for every performance in order to blend in with the audience only to throw them into the Vistula on his way home. Later, Loewy discovered theater in the Yiddish language: That completely transformed me. Even before the play began, I felt quite different from the way I felt among them [i.e., the Gentiles]. Above all, there were no gentlemen in evening dress, no ladies in low-cut gowns, no Polish, no Russian, only Jews of every kind, in caftans, in suits, women and girls dressed in the Western way. And everyone talked loudly and carelessly in our mother tongue, nobody particularly noticed me in my long caftan, and I did not need to be ashamed at all. 1
That night, which took place sometime in the early 1900s, Loewy took in a show by one of roughly ten impresarios who had risen rapidly in the wake of the first Yiddish-language theater staged in 1876 for Russian audiences by its first successful theater producer and playwright, Avrom Goldfaden (born Goldenfaden, 1840-1908). It was Goldfaden s works that Loewy would come to know best. After being the first to stage commercially viable Yiddish-language theater in Romania in 1876, Goldfaden was also the first to successfully negotiate the legal protection of Yiddish performance with the Russian government in 1878. Goldfaden s oeuvre was the most performed work throughout the Yiddish theater s cultural ascendancy. Beyond the productions of his operettas that Goldfaden insisted on personally overseeing, his plays were also rapidly disseminated in manuscript copies as well as in published editions that began publication in 1886; they were even transmitted orally from actor to actor. Loewy himself would come to act in productions of Goldfaden s operettas. We know about these productions, in part, from Kafka s diaries. Kafka avidly attended the Yiddish theater performances and believed they put him in touch with a form of Judaism that he insisted was more authentic than any he had so far encountered. 2
It is not Kafka s experience of Yiddish theater, however, in which I am interested; it is Loewy s. And Loewy s cultural encounter with Yiddish theater is significantly different from that of Kafka. Loewy, for instance, did not crave authenticity; rather, he sought out performance. As he describes it, Loewy experienced his first evening of Yiddish theater as the shock of the familiar. As he recounted to Kafka, he had already known Jewish performance, albeit sacred performance. Only at [the Holiday of] Purim was there theater, he recounts, for then, Cousin Chaskel stuck a big black beard on top of his little blond goatee, put his caftan on back to front and played the part of a jolly Jewish peddler-I could not turn my little childish eyes away from him. 3 As a teenager, Loewy came to know the Italian opera company that performed in Warsaw s Grand Theater: I heard from Israel Feldscher s boy that there was really such thing as a theater where people really acted and sang an