Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (review)

Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage tells the story of a minority group's acculturation to a new society and the bridge that Shakespeare's dramas provided for those undergoing that process. Joel Berkowitz posits the theatre, and specifically Shakespeare's plays, as a primary institution affecting the transition. Roughly two million eastern European Yiddish-speaking immigrants made the crossing to the United States—largely to New York—between the 1880s and World War I. Shakespearean drama introduced the newcomers to ideas that were privileged in American society (and indeed the world at large). At the same time, Shakespeare provided opportunities for the immigrants—often the theatrical practitioners themselves—to engage their new neighbors in the cultural arena. Mixed-language productions of well-known Shakespeare plays and Yiddish stars who attracted the interest of mainstream critics and audiences extended the conversation past the bounds of the purely parochial Yiddish-speaking world.

According to Berkowitz, the American Yiddish theatre practitioners employed Shakespeare as a means of acquainting the masses of immigrants with ideas of Western drama, a tradition with which they were largely unfamiliar up to that point. At the same time, the producers, playwrights, and actors of the American Yiddish stage reconceived the Bard, adapting, rewriting and reformulating his plays and thereby reinventing them in Jewish terms. Berkowitz reminds us that Shakespeare has been refashioned in many time periods and geographical locations to suit the cultural perceptions of those producing and attending his plays, asserting that Shakespeare adaptations on the American Yiddish stage are but "one culture's approach to a game that has been played for centuries" (25).

This book asks what can be learned about the Yiddish speakers who made the United States their home at the turn of the century and what their use of Shakespeare can teach us about their experience of becoming new Americans. The question is answered, in part, by considering the particular Shakespearean plays and adaptations that most often made their way to the American Yiddish boards between 1880 and 1960, the years of Berkowitz's study.

The production and reception of King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and, of course, The Merchant of Venice comprise the central topics of each of five chapters. The original producers' choice of plays was directed by commercial as well as literary concerns. Producers of the American Yiddish drama were, as are producers today, keenly aware of types of plays that would appeal to the sensibilities of their paying audiences. Berkowitz concludes that plays of familial, and often intergenerational, conflict spoke best to the Yiddish-speaking immigrants he has studied.

For example, Jacob Gordin's groundbreaking The Jewish King Lear of 1892 retold Lear's story from the vantage point of an eastern European businessman who decides to divide his property among his daughters before moving to Palestine with his wife. This play, which remained in the Yiddish theatre repertoire for years, resonated profoundly with immigrants who were undoubtedly undergoing familial conflict and tensions, perhaps exacerbated by their new cultural surroundings. Weaving Jewish rituals, customs, symbols, and imagery into the basic Shakespearean plot, Gordon created a wholly new "Jewish King Lear" (44), to the delight of his audience.

Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage opens with a brief history of theatre in Jewish life and then deftly moves to the way in which Shakespeare's oeuvre entered and rooted itself within the Jewish theatrical canon. Berkowitz approaches his subject by assessing each Shakespearean play via four categories: adaptations and translations that employed Shakespeare's title, those whose titles only hinted of their Shakespearean origins, plays that referenced the Bard in a subtitle, and lastly, plays that did not refer to Shakespeare by name but are described by contemporaries as deriving from his works.

In writing the history of Shakespeare in the American Yiddish cultural milieu, Berkowitz mines a wealth of Yiddish-language source...