Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (review)

The Yiddish theater arrived in America as part of the great wave of immigration that carried more than three million East European Jews across the Atlantic between 1881 and 1914; by the turn of the century, three playhouses on New York's Bowery were presenting a wide repertoire of dramas to an enthusiastic public.

This theater's social role was in several ways analogous to that of its Elizabethan counterpart. Orthodox Jews deplored it as a shameful waste of time, corrupting young people with shund (trash) when they should be at the synagogue; indeed, plays usually opened on a Friday night. Like Alleyn and Burbage, Yiddish actors needed a constant supply of new plays to keep audiences coming back. There were also parallels with the London theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: just as the actor-managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden fought for actors, writers, and audiences, so did Jacob Adler and Boris Thomashevsky on the Lower East Side. They even had "benefits"—performances for which all tickets were bought at a discount by a social club or charitable group and then resold to their members.

As we learn from Joel Berkowitz's wide-ranging study, the Shakespeare plays performed on the Yiddish stage fell into two broadly-defined groups, described as "translations" and "adaptations." The former, usually based on a Russian or German version of Shakespeare, "followed the general flow of the action and kept the same settings," though many characters were eliminated or scenes cut or rearranged; the latter had "sweeping changes of plot, character, and setting . . . that refashion[ed] the Shakespearean source into a story of Jewish life" (29). He devotes a chapter each to five plays that were performed in both modes: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice.

Except for Merchant, Shakespeare was far more successful in adaptation. Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear, written in 1892 for the founder of one of America's great theatrical families, Jacob Adler, is the most important Yiddish play of the era. Adler played "David Moysheles, a wealthy Jewish businessman in Vilna who has decided to divide his estate among his three grown daughters and move with his wife to Palestine" (39). Taybele, the youngest daughter, objects and is cast out of the house, while the two older daughters behave like Goneril and Regan.

Among the most interesting parts of Berkowitz's book are his descriptions of this play and others such as Gordin's companion piece about the mother of all Jewish mothers, Mirele Efros or The Jewish Queen Lear; Isidore Zolatarevsky's The Yeshiva Boy, in which the widow of a Hasidic rabbi marries her late husband's stepbrother to the dismay of her son; and Nokhem Rakov's The Oath on the Torah, or the Jewish Romeo and Juliet. The plot summaries give us a clear idea of what the plays were like and why they would have appealed to immigrant audiences. But the works on which they were based, when performed in more-or-less straight versions, had less impact; and the chief disappointment of Berkowitz's study is, to me, how little information he includes about the Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet of the rotund matinée idol Boris Thomashevsky. The production in which Jacob Adler played opposite David Kessler's Othello, mentioned twice, is never described, even though Adler considered Iago one of his best roles.¹

Berkowitz compares various translations of the plays and quotes reactions of the Yiddish press—Hamlet is a play "about 'a big shlimazl'" (85). But if the reviews provided any descriptions of the performances, they are not included. Oddly, the ten pages on Maurice Schwartz's 1929 production of Othello at the Yiddish Art Theater have much material drawn from reviews about Schwartz's Iago but nothing about the Othello of Ben-Zvi Baratoff or the Desdemona of Celia Adler. It is hard to imagine that every...