The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution (review)

{ 237 } BOOK REV IEWS \ The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution. By Benjamin Harshav. Translated from Russian and Yiddish by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 248 pp. $45.00 cloth. Benjamin Harshav’s The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution begs the question: Why hasn’t this subject been written about before ? Although references to the Moscow Yiddish Theatre may be found in such works as Nahma Sandrow’s Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and David S. Lifson’s Yiddish Theater in America, Harshav’s is the first fulllength study to be published. Harshav’s historical overview of a theatre that has been greatly overlooked adds an important element to the literature on the Yiddish theatre: the courage of the Jewish artists during a revolutionary period. Within the social and cultural upheaval that became the Soviet Union, the Moscow Yiddish Theatre was born. Harshav recounts with discernment how the company began in 1919 under the aegis of Alexei Granovsky, along with Solomon Mikhoels (director and actor , respectively), who believed that an avante-garde theatre by Jewish artists could survive within the Communist regime. They were able to bring together an extraordinarily talented group of theatre artists, with the significant help of the artistic genius Marc Chagall. Harshav’s narrative is organized into two sections: the first is an account of the company within the historical context in which the Moscow Yiddish Theatre developed; the second consists of a collection of firsthand accounts— translated by the author and his wife, Barbara—from the participants of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, as well as theatre critics from around the world. Harshav ’s discovery and inclusion of these invaluable sources is a great blessing, and he has also provided an added treat at the end of the book: two delightful Sholem Aleichem skits. The first section is itself divided into subsections that discuss such topics as “The Fame of the Yiddish Avant-Garde Theater,”“Yiddish Culture and Yiddish Theater,” and “Granovsky and Theater as Art.” Also, in this section Harshav relates the importance of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre (eventually known as GOSET [Gosudarstvenny Evreysky Teatr]) to the multinational audiences it played before. Granovsky hoped to touch the millions, instead of the few; although many in the audience understood only a few words of Yiddish, through multimedia and pantomime GOSET made itself a theatre for the masses. { 238 } BOOK REV IEWS Of special interest is the second chapter of the first section,titled“Chagall’s Theater Murals,”a fascinating description of the contributions of Marc Chagall to the evolution of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre. Harshav provides a reproduction of the magnificent mural Chagall painted on the walls of the theatre lobby in Moscow (44–45) and a painstakingly detailed analysis of its various components , which represent in pastiche many events and individuals related to the opening of the theatre Chagall helped in so many ways to create. For example, Harshav reads a young goat in the mural as representing company cofounder Solomon Mikhoel—a “naïve ‘baby’” (46) curious about the new art. In another example, Harshav notes that Chagall has depicted Abram Efros, artistic director of the Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow, who brought Chagall to the director , Granovsky. Here he brings him literally, a realization of the metaphor. Efros strides determinedly, left foot forward, as in Mayakovsky’s topical poem “Left March.” Harshav relates Chagall’s relationship to the theatre with eloquence, presenting him as the true driving force behind the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, one who helped to accentuate the importance of a Jewish stage and who founded a dynasty of artist-designers. Unfortunately, Chagall did not believe in the conventional aspects of theatre, which included seating for the audience. So, once seats were installed, he picked up and left, never to work for the Yiddish theatre again, a circumstance Harshav views as a tremendous loss. The firsthand accounts and essays that make up the second section are written by such luminaries of the time as Chagall, Granovsky, and Mikhoels, and English theatre critic Huntley Carter, Dutch critic Niko Rost, and German critic Alfred...