Yiddish Theatre - Early Years

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 will 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 have 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 shall 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 is 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 would not 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 would not be the antisemites, they would be those who already knew and liked Jews, and that they would 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 have 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 does not wound us, as we are wounded by representations on other stages, where the Jew plays a degrading role."