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Enthusiastic Amateurs, Hotheaded Saboteurs In December 1914, a performance in Tel Aviv of Avrom Goldfaden’s (1840–1908) opera Shulamis was interrupted by a group of hotheaded high school students from Gymnasia Herzliyah, who were intent on committing acts of sabotage. The Yiddish poet Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden, 1870–1927) recounted in his memoirs how the stridently secular students had first attacked a poor woman working in her garden on the Sabbath, then prevented Socialist activist and author Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943) from making a speech in Yiddish, and finally entered the theatre, where “They launched a ‘chemical obstruction’ in a theatre where the Yiddishists—who have as much chance in Tel Aviv as the Hebraists in Chicago— were producing a play in Yiddish [Goldfaden’s Shulamis].”1 As the Hebrew press reported, the Turkish police were summoned, and the young vandals arrested.2 This rowdy episode in the history of Goldfaden productions in Palestine is not representative, however, of the vast majority of productions staged there.3 Goldfaden enjoyed a largely mainstream status, and the diverse artistic approaches taken with his plays serve as fascinating test cases in resurrecting a “moldy” traditional repertoire. The Israeli reception of Goldfaden also illustrates how his vitality as a cultural symbol at times exceeded the popularity of the plays themselves. It is essential, however, to distinguish between the alleged hostility with which the Hebraist yishuv (the Jewish Zionist community in pre-statehood Palestine) treated the Yiddish language, and its simultaneously warm embrace of Yiddish culture. In 1929, Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) was one of the first to clarify this duality of language and culture: CHAPTER 13 No Raisins and Almonds in the Land of Israel: A Tale of Goldfaden Productions Featuring Four Hotsmakhs, Three KuniLemls , Two Shulamits, and One Messiah Donny Inbar 296 Donny Inbar From the Yiddish language Hebrew received its intimacy and vitality; [. . .] In Eretz Israel4 Hebrew ceased to be a holy tongue; namely it lost the narrow focus on limited areas of life and has metamorphosed into a vernacular. On the other hand, Yiddish lost the ground of life from under its feet, and now it seeks refuge—as Hebrew had formerly done—in literature. Hebrew has become the language of life, Yiddish—of ideology. Language is only one component—though an important one—of culture.5 Goldfaden, widely known as “the father of the Yiddish theatre,” enjoyed an unlikely friendship and mutual admiration with Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858–1922), the man remembered as “the father of modern Hebrew.” Their camaraderie gave rise to the first Hebrew translation of the complete text of a Yiddish play, Goldfaden ’s Der fanatik oder di tsvey Kuni-Lemls (The Fanatic, or The Two Kuni-Lemls), which was published in 1900 as a booklet by the press attached to Ben Yehuda’s newspaper, Ha-tsvi (The stag).6 The newspaper also ran an extensive advertising campaign for the Hebrew Two Kuni-Lemls, especially during the Purim season, and the play was eventually produced by the students of the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school on the holiday of Tu Bishvat in 1902. A quarter of a century later, this translation was used for the first semi-professional Goldfaden production by “The Association of Eretz-Israeli Actors” in October 1927. Two decades on, this archaic translation was reprinted under even more unlikely circumstances, when it was one of a series of booklets distributed to Israel Defense Force soldiers in 1949–1950, shortly after the end of the War of Independence. The first dozen booklets in this series were devoted to war historiography, but the “dessert” was this stalwart Hebrew Kuni-Lemls translation.7 One can only speculate on the motivations of the military’s education department for including a near-forgotten Yiddish comedy in soldiers’ rations of instructive martial pamphlets. Bewitched The Goldfaden play that has proved to be a favorite among both professional theatre artists and their audiences in Eretz Israel is Di kishefmakherin (The sorceress, 1879). Palestinian/Israeli theatres have averaged one professional production of Di kishefmakherin per decade for the past seventy years, making it one of the most frequently produced plays of any kind in Israel. At least twelve Israel Prize laureates , as well as two of the theatres honored with this prestigious award, have been involved in Goldfaden productions.8 The special magic that Di kishefmakherin has cast on Israelis, rendering it the “default” Hebrew Goldfaden, calls for a separate discussion. The secret of the play’s appeal lies both in its...

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