poster,
Boston, 1938 The 1883 Russian ban on Yiddish theatre (lifted in 1904) effectively pushed it to
Western Europe and then to America. Over the next few decades, successive waves of Yiddish performers arrived 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 Juvelier's troupe was the only one that remained in Romania, where Yiddish theatre had started, although Mogulesko sparked 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." 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 without 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 literature 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 theatre troupes in the United States. At many times, a dozen Yiddish theatre groups existed in New York City alone, with the
Yiddish 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 two 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 theatre 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 theatre. 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 Fischel 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 Theatre 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 theatregoers has been evident for a long time, and for many years at least three theatres, 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 theatre at the time. Around the same time,
Lincoln Steffens wrote that the theatre being played at the time in Yiddish outshone what was being played in English. Yiddish New York theatregoers 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 theatre is really in America and that here in Poland and Russia the Yiddish theatre 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 theatre 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 theatre 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 theatre was for lighter fare. The Adlers and
Keni Liptzin hung on doing classic theatre, but
Boris and
Bessie Thomashefsky returned to the earlier style, making a fortune off of what the Adlers despised as
shund ("trash") theatre. 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 theatre persisted. As Lulla Rosenfeld writes, "Art and
shund alike would find their audience." ("Mr. Second Avenue") and his
Yiddish Art Theatre. The area was known as the "Jewish Rialto" at the time. After four seasons it became the Yiddish Folks Theatre, It was designated a
New York City landmark in 1993. The Yiddish theatre 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... [the] 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. It has been translated into many languages and performed thousands of times all over the world, on stage and on television; there have been several movies. It is now regarded as the crown jewel of the Jewish theatre. Operas, ballets, symphonic suites and other musical compositions have been based on The Dybbuk. In earlier years it was considered so significant that parodies about The Dybbuk were written and performed in Europe and the United States. After the rising popularity of Yiddish theatre in the Americas, shows such as
Fiddler on the Roof, created by
Joseph Stein and
Sheldon Harnick, brought the tenets of Yiddish theatre to the Broadway stage. An-sky wrote a number of other plays, four of which are included in his
Gezamelte shriften, long out of print. One (“Day and Night”) is, like
The Dybbuk, a Hasidic Gothic story. The other three plays have revolutionary themes, and were originally written in Russian: “Father and Son.” “In a Conspiratorial Apartment,” and “The Grandfather.” All four have recently been republished in a bilingual Yiddish-English edition. Also notable are
The Golem by
H. Leivick (1888–1962), as well as the plays of
Sholem Aleichem. Yiddish theatre after the Second World War was revived with the writing and performance of
The Warsaw Ghetto. Many ground-breaking performers were Jewish-American individuals; Ben Furnish in his work
Nostalgia in Jewish-American Theatre and film, 1979-2004 notes that Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe were both of Jewish-American descent. 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.
Argentina Buenos Aires,
Argentina figured prominently in Yiddish theatre between the wars. While pre-war Yiddish theatre 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 theatre in the 1930s and 1950s, becoming "the second city of the world history of Yiddish theater." Four theatres presented plays in Yiddish regularly: the
Soleil and the
Excelsior (in the
Abasto), the
Mitre (in
Villa Crespo), and the
Ombú (which is where the
AMIA is today). Argentina began experiencing a progressive decrease in Yiddish plays by the 1960s. The season was short and performances were held only on weekends and several theatres closed. In 1972, the Mitre Theatre, the last standing playhouse of the Yiddish theatre scene, was shut down. ==Soviet Union==