The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (review)

On the rare occasions that anglophone theatre scholars consider the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (1919-1949), it usually and unfairly suffers from comparisons to other, more well-known companies: less "authentically Jewish" than Habima, the Hebrew-language troupe that toured more widely and defected in 1926, later settling in Palestine where it would eventually become the Israeli national theatre; less innovative than the Meyerhold Theatre, its Russian contemporary. But as Jeffrey Veidlinger's eponymously titled book on the Moscow State Yiddish Theater shows, this troupe's history teaches us a lot about the challenges faced by Jews and theatre artists during the first three decades of Soviet rule.

The opening chapters of The Moscow State Yiddish Theater outline the company's early years under the leadership of Aleksandr Granovsky. Granovsky, born to upper-class assimilated Jews in Moscow, studied under Max Reinhardt in Germany and, according to Veidlinger, "was influenced by Vsevolod Meyerhold's experimental studio" (29). Granovsky's productions of the 1920s combined bold, nonrealistic scenery (some designed by Marc Chagall) and highly stylized bio-mechanical acting with traditional Yiddishmusic and literary themes. By applying revolutionary staging techniques to the works of prerevolutionary Yiddish playwrights such as Sholem Aleichem and Avram Goldfadn, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater succeeded at pleasing both audiences and Party censors.

Soon Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948) emerges as the clear hero of Veidlinger's narrative. A leading actor with the company from its first official performance, An Evening of Sholem Aleichem (1921), Mikhoels starred in many of the theatre's productions, and replaced Granovsky (who had defected while on tour in Ger-many) as artistic director. The sure-handed leadership of Mikhoels during the turbulent two decades of his leadership forms the largest and the most compelling story of the book. Veidlinger paints an engrossing picture of a man struggling bravely to reconcile his Jewishness with his Marxian ideology, his aesthetic concerns with his political ones. The final three chapters follow Mikhoels outside the theatre, into his well-publicized role as a leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Stalin tolerated (and at times encouraged) this organization and hoped that the Committee would persuade Jews outside the Soviet Union to lend political and monetary support to the Soviet war effort. After the war, however, the Committee's links to prominent international Zionists caused them to be considered security risks. In 1948, government agents murdered Mikhoels. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater was disbanded by the end of 1949 and many of its members were arrested.

Veidlinger's research into the history of the company is extensive and remarkable. Taking full advantage of archival resources only recently available toWestern scholars, he has compiled the most complete English-language history of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater to date. His primary sources are Yiddish and Russian, but he also cites secondary sources in Hebrew, German, French, and English, as well as interviews he was able to conduct with surviving descendants of Mikhoels and Peretz Markish, a Yiddish playwright affiliated with the theatre who was executed at the hands of the Stalinist regime in 1952. The documents and photographs which Veidlinger has assembled are so remarkable, in fact, that a detailed account of their provenance could easily fill another volume. Portions of the theatre's archives, for example, were literally rescued from the ashes:

[T]he Ministry of State Security ordered the theater's archives destroyed in 1953: a massive bonfire was lit that consumed large segments of the Yiddish theater's records. Satisfied that the deed had been carried out, the inspector departed before the blaze subsided. The fire was quickly extinguished and all archival remnants were collected and hidden.

(16)

The wealth and density of Veidlinger's information can, at times, be overwhelming. Other than Granovsky, Mikhoels, and a few other major figures, it is hard to keep track of all the actors, playwrights, and designers who are mentioned. When we...