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A man stands aboard a ship bound for New York and gazes at the wintry, gray Atlantic . Sea winds whip the blackening clouds, waves crash against the hull of the old steamer and flood its decks with sheets of icy water. But the man grips the railings , eyes fixed on the horizon. The persecution he has suffered, the silencing he has endured, the sacrifices he has made for his ideals will not have been in vain. His eyes are alight with hope for the possibilities that await him on the other side of the sea, far from his Russian homeland. This man is not Jacob Gordin. This is not the “reformer” of the American Yiddish stage, whose plays excited and enraged hundreds of thousands of theatergoers and set off torrents of debate in the Yiddish press. This is not Jacob Gordin, the tireless social activist, journalist, and educator. This man is not Jacob Gordin, but he’d like you to think that it is. The hero of Der shvimender orn (The floating casket, 1892) is a Russian Jew bound for New York on the steamship Devonia.1 But there the similarities end. Gordin’s literary creation has devoted his life to the cause of Russian revolution. He has suffered censorship, arrest, exile, and the distrust of both his own people and those whose liberation he serves. Health broken but spirit unbowed, Gordin’s hero sets off for America, but dies en route. His body is put in a wooden casket and set upon the waves, final resting place unknown. Gordin’s story appeared in the inaugural issue of Di tsukunft (The future) in 1892 as “Di shvimende trune (a fantazye).”2 Despite the parenthetical title, the tale draws deliberate parallels between the life of its hero and that of Yakov Gordin— a Russian writer with rumored revolutionary connections, lately become Jacob Gordin—a Yiddish writer with rumored revolutionary connections. The story is one of the earliest articulations of Gordin’s fictive biography, and while it veers widely CHAPTER 3 Jacob Gordin in Russia: Fact and Fiction Barbara Henry Jacob Gordin in Russia 65 from the historical record, in one respect it remains true to the circumstances of the writer’s immigration. The passage from Russia, a journey across water with mythic connotations of transformation and rebirth, did mark the death of one Jacob Gordin , and the birth of another. But who was Yakov Gordin before he became Jacob Gordin? The latter’s elision of the former was so successful that the specifics of his life and work in Russia have largely eluded four biographers: names are garbled, dates uncertain, events muddled and occasionally fabricated.3 Clarification was hindered for most of the twentieth century by Soviet-era restrictions on Jewish research, but the mystery of the first thirty-eight years of Gordin’s life also reflects his own efforts to shape the narrative of his Russian past into both a story of origins and a blueprint for the future. That future, as a quasi-socialist intellectual and splenetic “reformer” of the Yiddish theatre, derived its authority in part from the reputation that Gordin had earned as an activist, journalist, and prose writer in his native Russia. The usual accounts of this career, however, are both strikingly uniform and surprisingly sketchy, and offer little beyond the naming of a few newspapers and some dark mutterings about Russian censorship. What was the nature of Gordin’s life and literary work in his homeland? Was he really fleeing tsarist persecution? Or was he, as his detractors argued, eager to hide something in his past?4 What connection did Gordin’s Russian writing have to his Yiddish drama? This chapter assesses Gordin’s work as a prose writer and journalist in his last decade in Russia, when many of the formal and thematic preoccupations that informed his Yiddish dramaturgy and journalism took shape. It also examines the circumstances of Gordin’s emigration—both actual and poetic—which provided a key element in his dramatic method. The very process of creating a fictional past—of imposing creative control on events and individuals by rendering them as a literary narrative—helped to shape Gordin’s playwriting strategy itself. The malleability of all texts—personal, sacred, literary, historical—and their eternal availability for revision and renewal is a leitmotif of all Gordin’s Russian and Yiddish writing, and was fundamental to his playwriting method. When Gordin arrived in New York in July of...

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