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

Benjamin Harshav begins The Moscow Yiddish Theater by stating that it was born "out of space and out of time" (ix): out of space, because it was outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and out of time, because it was created by Russian-speaking, Europeanized, secular Jewish intellectuals. After its liquidation by Stalin in 1949, the Moscow Yiddish Theater (hereafter GOSET, its Russian acronym) was again out of space and out of time. Chagall's theatre murals were hidden under the stage and a fire at the Bakhrushin Museum destroyed part of the GOSET archive, singeing the page edges of many surviving works. In recent years, however, GOSET has garnered well-deserved scholarly attention, as the opening of its surviving archives to researchers has made comprehensive studies of this vibrant theatre possible.

Harshav's book is one of several important works on GOSET published during the last decade. Jeffrey Veidlinger's The Moscow State Yiddish Theater (2000) provides breadth and detailed analysis of GOSET during the entire span of its existence; Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater (the catalog for the eponymous 2008-09 Jewish Museum exhibit), edited by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, contains descriptions of many productions, accompanied by vivid reproductions of designs, photographs, and posters.

Harshav's book differs from these works in several ways. Rather than providing a comprehensive history, Harshav traces the innovations of GOSET in the years before Socialist Realism crushed its style and Stalin slaughtered its artists. Rather than being organized chronologically, this exploration of the theatre's first decade (1918-28) introduces contrasting thematic pairs: visual art versus theatre, GOSET versus Habima (Moscow's Hebrew-language theatre), leftist versus traditional theatre, the lost Jewish world versus a new Soviet reality.

The book's greatest value lies in its translations of numerous documents that provide immediacy of detail on the revolutionary theatre created during a time of tremendous deprivation, innovation, and change. It is this "mosaic of texts" (xi), meticulously translated by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav from Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, that will be of major interest to a broad range of readers. The fact that, after reading these letters, manifestos, memoirs, and plays, one instantly wishes for more, in terms of both analysis and breadth, simply reinforces how very gratifying it is to read about this theatre directly from the perspective of its participants and observers.

Harshav's book is divided into two sections, the first containing two chapters by the author. Chapter 1 introduces the theatre's early leading figures: Alexander Granovsky, the theatre's founder and director, who owed much of his aesthetic to his work with Max Reinhardt; actor Solomon Mikhoels, who later played Russia's most memorable King Lear; and artist Marc Chagall, who created "Chagall's box," the famous series of murals that covered the interior walls and ceiling of the theatre auditorium. Chapter 2 provides an invaluable explication of these murals, a subject Harshav has addressed in previous work.

The second section, comprised entirely of source documents with brief introductory notes, explores three general themes: GOSET's inception, reception, and relevance. Chapters 3 and 4 relay the ideas that went into GOSET's formation, weaving together a multifaceted account of the theatre's beginnings, the formation of its aesthetic, Chagall's influential (albeit brief) collaboration with Granovsky, and larger questions of how art and theatre influence each other. Chapter 4 is comprised of a 1919 brochure that includes essays by several GOSET members. In one of these, Granovsky presents his artistic agenda, which included eschewing professional actors in favor of training his own and developing "Yiddish theater art in a European sense" (89); another essay by Mikhoels details how this agenda was implemented in its first few months of actor training.

In the next two chapters, Western spectators assess GOSET's artistic and cultural value. Chapter 5 charts...