Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance

Nahma Sandrow

Description

Yiddish theater was first and foremost fine theater, with varied repertory and actors of high quality. The three stage-ready plays and nine individual scenes collected here, most of them well-known in Yiddish repertory but never before translated, offer an introduction to the full range of Yiddish theater. Fresh, lively, and accurate, these translations have been prepared for reading or performance by award-winning playwright and scholar Nahma Sandrow. They come with useful stage directions, notes, and playing histories, as well as comments by directors who have worked in both English and Yiddish theater. In the three full-length plays, a matriarch battles for control of her business and her family (Mirele Efros; or, The Jewish Queen Lear); two desperate women struggle over a man, who himself is struggling to change his life (Yankl the Blacksmith); and, in a charming fantasy village, a poetic village fiddler gambles on romance (Yoshke the Musician). The nine scenes from selected other plays are shaped to stand alone and range in genre from symbolist to naturalist, operetta to vaudeville, domestic to romantic to avant-garde. In her preface, Sandrow contextualizes the plays in modern Western theater history from the nineteenth century to the present. Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance is not nostalgia—just a collection of good plays that also serves as an informed introduction to Yiddish theater at its liveliest.
Preface: Yiddish Theater in Theatrical Context

Plays

Mirele Efros; or, The Jewish Queen Lear by Jacob Gordin

Yankl the Blacksmith by David Pinski

Yoshke the Musician (The Hired Bridegroom, The Rented Bridegroom, The Singer of His Sorrow) by Osip Dimov, reworked by Joseph Buloff

Scenes

From Uncle Moses by Sholem Asch

From Homeless by Jacob Gordin

From Safo by Jacob Gordin

From Carcass by Peretz Hirschbein

From Between Day and Night by Peretz Hirschbein

From Mishke and Moshke; or, Europeans in America (Mishke and Moshke; or, The Greenhorns) by Joseph Lateiner

From Khantshe in America by Nahum Rakov

From Riverside Drive by Leon Kobrin

From The 2,000 (The Big Prize, The Big Lottery, The Jackpot) by Sholem Aleichem

Appendix: How to Pronounce Yiddish Words and Names

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438481913
• Langue: English

Extrait

Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance
SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY J EWISH L ITERATURE AND C ULTURE
EZRA CAPPELL, EDITOR

Dan Shiffman, College Bound: The Pursuit of Education in Jewish American Literature, 1896–1944
Eric J. Sundquist, editor, Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader
Noam Pines, The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature
Oded Nir, Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction
Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry
Richard J. Fein, translator, The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever
Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky, editors, New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching
Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Ruthie Abeliovich, Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theater
Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith, editors, The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, editors, Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism
Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, editors, Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making
Patrick Chura, Michael Gold: The People’s Writer
Nahma Sandrow, editor and translator, Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance
Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance
Edited and translated by
NAHMA SANDROW
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Sandrow, Nahma, editor.
Title: Yiddish plays for reading and performance / [edited by] Nahma Sandrow.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Jewish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024718 | ISBN 9781438481890 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481913 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Yiddish drama—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PJ5191.E5 .Y53 2021 | DDC 839/.12008—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024718
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface: Yiddish Theater in Theatrical Context
Plays
Mirele Efros; or, The Jewish Queen Lear by Jacob Gordin
Yankl the Blacksmith by David Pinski
Yoshke the Musician ( The Hired Bridegroom , The Rented Bridegroom , The Singer of His Sorrow ) by Osip Dimov, reworked by Joseph Buloff
Scenes
From Uncle Moses by Sholem Asch
From Homeless by Jacob Gordin
From Safo by Jacob Gordin
From Carcass by Peretz Hirschbein
From Between Day and Night by Peretz Hirschbein
From Mishke and Moshke; or, Europeans in America ( Mishke and Moshke; or, The Greenhorns ) by Joseph Lateiner
From Khantshe in America by Nahum Rakov
From Riverside Drive by Leon Kobrin
From The 2,000 ( The Big Prize , The Big Lottery , The Jackpot ) by Sholem Aleichem
Appendix: How to Pronounce Yiddish Words and Names
Preface
Yiddish Theater in Theatrical Context
Yiddish theater, meaning theater in the Yiddish language, is a Western theater and participated in the developments and styles of Western theater since the Middle Ages. But the history of professional Yiddish theater was unique in that it was drastically compressed. Professional Yiddish theater did not appear till 1876; by 1976 it had lost much of its artists, audiences, and creative energy. In that one century, opera and costume operetta, melodrama, problem play, domestic drama, romantic symbolism, realism or naturalism, expressionism with or without political purpose—all those contemporaneous genres appeared roughly in the order in which they had developed in the various languages of Europe, but telescoped into less than a hundred years.
In addition to formal theater, low comedy (including revues and vaudeville) and musical entertainments have always been universally popular and were so on the Yiddish stage as elsewhere. And, of course, the repertory included not only plays written in Yiddish but also plays, classic or contemporary, translated into Yiddish from other languages. Finally, amateur biblical plays, analogous to those of the Christian medieval theater, were a Yiddish folk tradition long before 1876 and continue to this day. The result was that in the first half of the twentieth century, all kinds of theater were available to Yiddish audiences more or less simultaneously.
(I am aware that my verb tenses keep shifting. There’s good reason for that. Yes, the golden era of Yiddish theatrical creativity was roughly 1895 to 1945. But Yiddish theater remained a lively institution on almost every continent till the end of the twentieth century, when it weakened considerably but did not disappear. Now it still exists and recently has even gathered energy. Shifting verb tenses reflect the historical reality. Besides, play texts endure, so discussing them demands the present tense.)
Yiddish theater never existed in isolation. In the nineteenth century, the mass of Yiddish speakers lived in Eastern European countries and naturally had much in common with their neighbors. Russia, where high culture was revered, produced most of the Jews who shaped Yiddish “fine” drama of the early twentieth century. The dark atmosphere and psychological thunder and lightning of many of the plays of Russian-born Jacob Gordin and Leon Kobrin call to mind Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm (1859) and Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness (1886). Naturalistic so-called cellar plays, like Carcass in this volume, came out of the same vision as did Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths (1902), which in fact was eventually performed in Yiddish translation. Serious Yiddish playgoers appreciated plays that were not so much stories about human characters as an acting-out of philosophical abstractions, the genre of Leonid Andreyev’s The Life of Man (1907). Later, the American Yiddish actress Stella Adler traveled to Russia, birthplace of her matinee-idol father, Jacob, to study acting with Konstantin Stanislavski himself and carry his method home to New York Yiddish actors—who in turn served as conduit to American actors.
Similarly, Romanian Jews, whether in Romania or wherever they immigrated, tended to be reliably enthusiastic ticket buyers for light musical entertainments. And as a final illustration, it is not a coincidence that generation after generation of American Yiddish audiences got bigger and flashier musical shows than Yiddish audiences anywhere else in the world.
Actors, writers, and directors in other languages visited Yiddish theater because they respected the work of Yiddish playwrights and actors. Max Reinhardt’s theater in Vienna and the Theatre Guild in New York presented contemporaneous Yiddish plays in translation, Leon Schiller directed Shakespeare’s Tempest in Yiddish in Warsaw, non-Jewish critics reviewed local Yiddish productions, and Yiddish actors played on non-Yiddish stages. Of course, audiences were free to go back and forth. As one illustration, Sholem Asch dedicated his play The Messianic Era to the actress who created a role in the play’s Russian production: Vera Komissarzhevskaya, star of Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, the same actress who created the role of Nina in Chekhov’s Seagull . More recent examples—all produced off-Broadway in the twenty-first century by David Mandelbaum’s New Yiddish Rep, all directed by Moshe Yassur—have included Shane Baker’s Yiddish translation of Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot , which moved to the international Becket Festival in Ireland and finally, triumphantly, to Paris; Joseph Buloff’s translation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman , which the New York Times praised for the “fineness of the performances”; and Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros , which Theater Pizzazz called “profound and touching.”
On the other hand, Yiddish theaters all over the globe have tended to share certain repertory, production methods and values, attitudes and atmosphere—even individual actors and audience members, who moved from place to place in response to the same historical circumstances. To begin with, characters in Yiddish plays usually, though not always, were recognizably Jewish. Often playwrights were interested in the Jewish experience: pogroms, assimilation, search for identity, loss of faith. Religion itself generally served less as a subject in itself than as metaphor for secular culture or group loyalty. But religion is powerful when wielded onstage. When, at his wedding in act 1, Mirele Efros’s son chants the prayer for his dead father to the traditional haunting melody, the atmosphere darkens, and the marriage seems ominous. When, in Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance , the brothel owner hurls to the floor the Torah scroll that represents his daughter, the sudden sacrilege makes a shocking stage moment. And when Lillian Lux, a popular entertainer in the 1970s, used to light Sabbath candles as part of a musical revue