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The book of Genesis opens with two creation stories. Not to be outdone, the annals of the Yiddish stage add several more. They tend to be variations on a theme, but anyone trying to find out how the modern Yiddish stage developed is likely to come across an account that reads something like this: Before the 1870s (the creation myths collectively suggest), there was no theatrical performance to speak of in the Yiddish-speaking world, aside from crude amateur entertainments associated with the winter holiday of Purim and a small handful of plays that circulated among intellectuals. That all changed suddenly in the autumn of 1876, when poet and composer Avrom Goldfaden was invited to perform his own compositions at Shimen Mark’s Green Tree Café in Jassy, Romania. The evening was a fiasco for reasons that vary among different accounts, including Goldfaden’s own, which he would publish just a few months before his death in 1908. The failed performance had a silver lining, however. It taught Goldfaden valuable lessons about his audience’s taste, which he proceeded to accommodate in a series of plays of varying length, tailor-made for the two performers who constituted the playwright’s and the Yiddish theatre’s first troupe. The professional Yiddish theatre was born, thanks to the efforts of Goldfaden, the “father of the Yiddish stage.” While this creation myth has some basis in fact, it recasts and oversimplifies the genesis of the modern, and indeed the pre-modern, Yiddish theatre. In doing so, it erases a centuries-old Yiddish performance tradition, including earlier efforts in modern times to assemble a professional company in much the same way that Goldfaden would ultimately do.1 The absence of a premodern Yiddish stage makes for a tidier legend, accompanied by an untainted paternity test. Yet not only does the creation myth run contrary to extensive historical evidence of a wide variety of Introduction Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry 2 Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry performance forms reaching back into medieval central Europe,2 it also relies on a limited understanding of how performance traditions develop in any culture. If an account of the origins of, say, Western drama were to claim that Aeschylus invented Greek tragedy out of whole cloth, any sensible reader would be skeptical, if not downright dismissive. Yet something about the way that the Yiddish theatre has been perceived by insiders and outsiders, creators and audiences, and contemporaries and successors, seems to encourage the persistence of this charming but ahistorical myth of origins.3 To this day, despite a continuing stream of new scholarship that enriches and refines our understanding of Yiddish theatre history, in some circles, the legend lives on, usually embellished with colorful anecdotes about scenery-chewing divas, breathlessly naïve audiences, and outrageous offstage antics. As a consequence of the reluctance to complicate nostalgic legends of the Yiddish stage by a deeper consideration of its performance practices, dramatic texts, artists, and day-to-day business, there is little understanding, outside a small circle of specialists, of the role that Yiddish theatre played in the wider context of modern Jewish life and culture. Far from being a marginal activity, the Yiddish stage was central to the cultural experience of millions of Jews. It was also an international phenomenon, whose audiences could be found in eastern and western Europe, North and South America, South Africa, and Australia. But despite its reach and influence, the Yiddish stage remains curiously compartmentalized, largely removed from most people’s conceptions of modern Jewish history. Yet the Yiddish theatre, in all its forms and phases, was intimately bound up with that history, and reflected the totality of modern Jewish experience in a popular art form. That myth should continue to trump fact will, perhaps, not come as too great a shock, particularly since the myth-makers of the Yiddish stage—notably, actors, playwrights, and other theatre personnel, as well as journalists who frequently relied on the memoirs of these individuals for their own writings—manufactured self-serving legends by the barrelful and then recycled them for decades. These retellings went largely unchallenged by scholars, who had not yet “discovered” the Yiddish theatre as a subject of academic scrutiny or historical value. The mythology of the Yiddish stage, and perhaps even more strikingly, its practitioners’ and theorists’ conscious attempts to construct that mythology, highlight another important characteristic of this theatrical culture: its striking selfconsciousness . Faith Jones, who writes in Chapter 11...

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