Content area
Full Text
Theater for the People, of the People
By EDNA NAHSHON
Ms. Nahshon, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is the author of "Yiddish Proletarian Theater, the Art and Politics of the Artef: 1925-1940" (Greenwood, 1998) and the forthcoming "From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays" (Wayne State University).
The Yiddish theater was the great love of the immigrant Jewish community. One of the luminaries of the modern American stage and the former son-in-law of the great Yiddish actor-manager Jacob Adler, director Harold Clurman, noted in 1968 that "even more than the synagogue or the lodge," the Yiddish theater served as "the meeting place and the forum" of the Jewish community in America between 1888 and the early 1920s. Every aspect of the immigrant experience was presented and debated on its stage: political rifts, labor conditions, acculturation, assimilation, anti-Semitism, women's rights, intergenerational conflicts, Zionism, socialism, communism.
Yiddish theater arrived late in Jewish life. The self-proclaimed father of the Yiddish theater, Avrum Goldfaden, first created it in 1876 in Jassy, Romania. Six years later Yiddish theater arrived in New York City. Within 10 years the city became the undisputed world capital of the Yiddish stage. Supported by a constantly growing Yiddish-speaking immigrant population -- nearly 3.5 million Jews settled in America between 1881 and 1925 -- the American Yiddishtheater world was young, dynamic and bursting with talent. It produced great stars, famous play-wrights, a cadre of supporting actors, throngs of devoted fans and an array of supporting institutions ranging from restaurants to flower shops to gossip columnists to drama critics.
The Yiddish theater in America was a genuine people's theater. Entirely dependent on box-office proceeds, it provided its patrons with the sort of theater experience they craved: high-pitched emotions, melodious tunes, sentimental melodramas, sensational docudramas, broad comedy, realistic problem plays and expressionistic plays inspired by the latest in European and Russian dramaturgy and stagecraft, as well as translations and adaptations of classic and current world drama. The theater was beloved by members of virtually all groups of the immigrant Jewish community -- rich and poor, educated and illiterate, observant, free-thinkers and revolutionaries. In 1927, two years after mass immigration had reached a virtual halt, there were Yiddish theaters across America, 11...