Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (review)

Much has been written on the rich history of Yiddish theatre. Indeed, a bibliography compiled by Joel Berkowitz for the book under review includes 35 pages of references. However, with the exception of a handful of scholarly books and articles, most of the writings on the Yiddish theatre have been hagiographical, impressionistic, polemical, or anecdotal. With the emergence of the academic study of Yiddish theatre, though, this is beginning to change. One of the turning points in the maturation of Yiddish theatre studies has been the International Workshop on Yiddish Theatre, Drama and Performance held at Oxford University in July 1999. The conference, organized by Berkowitz and Dov-Ber Kerler, was the inspiration for the book under review. The published volume presents a sampling of the papers presented at the conference together with an introduction, written by Berkowitz, that helps place the papers within the context of Yiddish theatre studies and suggests directions for future research on the topic.

One of the book's best attributes is the ability of its contributors to place their subjects within larger European contexts. Ahuva Belkin's "The 'Low' Culture of the Purimspil" begins the volume with a discussion of the role of profanity, obscenity and the grotesque in traditional Purim Plays. Drawing upon Bakhtin, she shows that the Purimspil played a carnivalesque role in Jewish society by parodying orthodox mythologies and subverting social conventions. Nahma Sandrow, in her contribution, also places Yiddish theatre within a non-Jewish European context, this time by arguing that Yiddish theatre paralleled the historical development of the Romantic Movement. Sandrow demonstrates how Yiddish playwrights such as Hirschbein, Peretz, and Gordin borrowed attributes of melodrama, rebelliousness, nationalism, and merging of theatrical conventions from Goethe, Schiller, and Ostrovsky. Similarly, Paula Bertolone focuses on one particular play—Goldfadn's Kishefmakherin (The Sorceress)—to show how the operatic form could be implemented. Her article discusses several different productions of the play, showing the evolution of Yiddish theatre through the spectrum of one of its most famous texts. The evolution of theatrical texts is also the subject of Seth Wolitz's chapter on the Soviet interpretation of two of Goldfadn's later plays—Shulamis and Bar kokhba. Wolitz argues that Shmuel Halkin, who adapted the scripts for performance in Soviet Russia, did so by removing the religious and nationalist underpinnings of the texts and reinterpreting the positive and negative in the plays' protagonists. Significantly, though, Wolitz points out that both Halkin and Goldfadn were drawing from the same cultural inheritance of both Jewish tradition and European culture.

Three articles deal with "regional centres" of Yiddish theatre. Brigitte Dalinger presents a survey of Yiddish theatre in Vienna from 1880 to 1938, drawn largely from her book on the same topic. She shows that the city boasted a "durable Yiddish theatre scene" populated mostly by East European immigrants. David Mazower brings us to London's East End and particularly to the playwright Joseph Markovitsh, whose self-described melo-deklamatsyes (dramatic poems set to music) established a novel theatrical convention. Mirosława Bułat, in her contribution on the theater of Cracow, once again returns to the theme of how the meanings of Goldfadn's texts were transformed over time. In the provincial center of Cracow, though, directors dared not transform the plays as radically as their colleagues in Moscow or New York, usually leaving the provincial centers with more conservative staging.

Both Nina Warnke and Leonard Prager address the issue of how authorities attempted to mold Yiddish theater for didactic purposes. Prager does so by looking at the Lord Chamberlain's Office in London and the process by which it censored and approved Yiddish theater productions, whereas Warnke looks at Yiddish theatre critics in New York. Prager focuses on Sholem Asch's notorious play, God of Vengeance, which was censored from the London stage in 1946. He shows how the Office turned to rabbinical authorities for advice on how to handle the play, denying permission for its performance only after the...