Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (review)

Reviews JoelBerkowitz.ShakespeareontheAmerican YiddishStage. IowaCity: UniversityofIowaPress,2002.Pp.xvi+ 283,illustrations.$32.95. Yiddish, once my native language, is a language I still know to a degree. In fact, I consider it a principal source of my interest in English, which now shares its native status. Joel Berkowitz's study helps to explain phenomena such as this: the passing ofYiddish in the space ofan individual lifetime from an active literary , journalistic, living language to a respected curiosity ofAmerican culture, taught in universities, collected by libraries, and faintly audible in some versions ofthe English vernacular. Who would guess that the history oftheYiddish theater would provide such documentation? Who would guess that its various, mostly unsuccessful, attempts to create a relationship between secular Jewish cultural life and Shakespeare would yield insight into how languages grow and change—and, in this case, leave the scene. The title of Berkowitz's book seems bland and indicative, but the study is loaded with interesting sources and accounts of the struggles in the Yiddish communities of America to "act" on their new freedom from the peremptory onslaughts ofsadistic gangs (pogroms) common in late-nineteenth-centuryEastern Europe. It also has accounts of how the leading actors approached their materials, competed with one another, and were driven, undoubtedlywith some characteristicYiddish irony, to claim that theywere about to present the "greatest " works by the "greatest" dramatists. Most people, and most scholars, do not knowwhat aprofound effect theYiddish theater had on the lives ofthe majority ofordinary Jews in all social and economic classes. In fact, as Berkowitz implies citing Lawrence Levine, the Yiddish theater was as important to the mass of Jewish population in New York around the turn of the twentieth century as Shakespeare was to all classes of English around the turn of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare was one ofmanypopular dramatists working not just in a theater, but in a theater district one ofwhose principal functions was to communicate to the mass of illiterate population some of the "facts" of the society in which they lived. Because the population was overwhelmingly illiterate, the 203 204Comparative Drama theater was not merely entertainment—it said things that could not be said in any other medium. The theater was a counterforce to censorship practiced by governments and religious institutions. Furthermore, it is nowwell known how much liberty Shakespeare had taken with his own sources. Although the existence of these sources could always become the ground for denying what the plays were "really" about, they also made it easy to say what had to be said now, albeit encoded in "source material." Given the fact that theater/literary performance has always functioned as a means of disseminating serious, usually political , facts to illiterate populations, the analogybetween Shakespeare's theater and the Yiddish theater provides a strong foundation for Berkowitz's effort. The most significant feature of this book is its documentation of how Shakespeare's works were changed by Yiddish writers, theater managers, and actors. While there were several attempts to translate Shakespeare's poetry into Yiddish poetry, these did not succeed, and ultimately theydid not really matter. What mattered mostly was what critics now call "rereadings" of Shakespeare. The classic plays of Shakespeare were understood as tales offamily and society, shorn ofmuch oftheir original accoutrements such as doublings, subplots, and settings, and refashioned in ingenious ways to appeal to the thousands ofregular theatergoers in the Yiddish-speaking communities. The plays were then advertised as Shakespeare "translated and improved" (1). Berkowitz writes that this was a "theater that mattered" (29) because active, enthusiastic working people would skip lunch or sometimes spend halftheir weekly paycheck in order to be regular theatergoers. The historical moment ofYiddish theater was a massive transplantation of European Yiddish culture in America and an increasing push toward the secularization of Jewish life between about 1880 and 1924, when the United States Congress put an end to the very large scale of immigration to that point. Yiddish theater has been traced back to the Purimshpiel of fifth-century Greece, a playful re-enactment ofthe Book ofEsther. Just as English theater became progressively secularized in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment (the Haskalah to Jews) found Jews broadening their horizons of reading to...