Yiddish Theatre - First Rumblings

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 did not 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 is 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 short-lived 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 c. 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 was not intended for the stage.

Hersh Leib Sigheter (1844–1931 or 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.