Yiddish Theatre - Heyday

Heyday

The 1883 Russian ban (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.

In this era, Yiddish theatre existed almost entirely on stage, rather than in texts. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901-1906 reported, "There are probably less than fifty printed Yiddish dramas, and the entire number of written dramas of which there is any record hardly exceeds five hundred. Of these at least nine-tenths are translations or adaptations."

Beginning in 1882 and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, amateur theatrical companies presented Yiddish productions in New York City, leading to regular weekend performances at theatres such as the Bowery Garden, the National and the Thalia, with unknowns such as Boris Thomashefsky emerging as stars. The Thalia Theatre sought to change the material of the Yiddish stage to better reform the material that was being produced. “The reformers of the Yiddish stage, Jacob Gordin later explained, wanted to “utilize the theatre for higher purposes; to derive from it not only amusement, but education.” Jacob Gordin himself had numerous times tried to get his plays onto the Windsor stage with no such luck. “Gordin successfully challenged Lateiner and Hurwitz in 1891-1892 when he entered the Yiddish theatre with an avowed purpose of reforming Yiddish drama.” Rather than “pandering to the public's taste for cheap shund (trash) plays, he sought to secure goodwill of the East Side’s intelligentsia with literatur and increasingly incorporated the concepts of “true art” and “serious drama” into their public image.” Professional companies soon developed and flourished, so that 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, sometimes referred to as the "Jewish Rialto", centered on Second Avenue in what is now the East Village, but was then considered part of the Jewish Lower East Side, which 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. 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 19th century, 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 1886 with a troupe founded by Zigmund Mogulesko. 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."

Jacob Dinezon quipped: "The still young Yiddish theatre that went to America did not recognize its father just three or four years later, nor would it obey or come when called." Responding in a letter to Dinezon, Goldfaden wrote: "I do not have any complaints about the American Yiddish theatre not recognizing its father... it is not rare that children do not recognize their parents; or even that the parents cannot travel the road their children have gone. But I do have complaints, though I do not know to whom, that my dear Jewish child is growing up to be a coarse, un-Jewish, insolent boor, and I expect that some day I will be cursed for that very thing that I brought into the world... Here in America ... it has thrown all shame aside and not only is it not learning anything, it has forgotten whatever good it used to know.”"

“In February 1902, Jewish builder and philanthropist Harry Finschel bought a piece of land of about 10,000 square feet, at the south corner of Grand and Chrystie Streets with the intention to erect on the site a theatre for Yiddish performances.” 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 usefulness for the English dramas, have been pressed into service, providing amusement for the people of the Ghetto."

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. 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.

Nina Warnke wrote: "In his memoirs, A. Mukdoni summed up the ambivalent feelings Russian Jewish intellectuals had about the influx of American plays and players onto their soil on the eve of the war: 'The American repertoire--be it the good or bad one--and the American actors--be they the good or bad ones--made us realize that the Yiddish theater is really in America and that here in Poland and Russia the Yiddish theater lives off the fallen crumbs that it collects under the rich American table.'

"Mukdoyni was certainly correct in realizing that the center of Yiddish theatrical production was in New York, and that Poland was turning into its cultural colony. This theatrical expansion eastward, which had begun slowly in the 1890s because of the great need in Eastern Europe to fill the vacuum of repertoire, turned into a conscious American export item during the 1910S. At that time, the immigrant community in New York as a whole, and the Yiddish theater in particular, had matured, and they were confident enough of their power and unique status to begin to actively seek acknowledgement, accolades, and financial gain beyond the local and regional spheres. The war would only briefly interrupt this emerging trend. What Clara Young was one of the first to discover, actors such as Molly Picon and Ludwig Satz would realize during the interwar period: Poland offered not only a lucrative market for American Yiddish actors, but also an environment where up-and-coming performers could more easily achieve a career breakthrough than in New York. In the early years of immigration, Eastern Europe had served as a necessary recruitment pool to feed the American Yiddish theater with new stage talent; shortly before World War I, it began to provide new audiences and marketing possibilities for the creative energies that had gathered in New York."

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 adaptations of Tolstoy, Solomon Libin (1872–1955), David Pinski (1872–1959), and Leon Kobrin (1872–1946).

This first golden age of Yiddish drama in America ended 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's commercially successful production of Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (also known as Redemption), translated into Yiddish by Kobrin. Both the more and the less serious Yiddish theater persisted. As Lulla Rosenfeld writes, "Art and shund alike would find their audience."

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." 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... expressions" of a New York Jewish cultural life "in full flower".

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

Buenos Aires, Argentina figured prominently in Yiddish theater between the wars. While pre-war Yiddish theater in Argentina had bordered on burlesque, shortly after World War I Thomashefsky and others brought their companies to Buenos Aires for the off-season when New York theaters were closed for the summer (the Argentine winter). According to Michael Terry, Buenos Aires experienced a "golden age" of Yiddish theater in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming "the second city of the world history of Yiddish theater." There were also theater performances in Yiddish in many Brazilian cities.

Yiddish theater after the Second World War was revived with the writing and performance of The Warsaw Ghetto.

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