Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (review)

Some one hundred years ago, if a visitor to New York (or Warsaw or London or Paris) were interested in experiencing modern Jewish culture at its most intense, there is no doubt where he or she would go: to the Yiddish theater. Rooted in centuries of performative and oral tradition, the Yiddish theater attracted masses whose collective experience of laughter and tears left them delighted and drained. Their raucous devotion to the Yiddish stage reminded more than one contemporary of Elizabethan audiences. But the trajectory of Yiddish theater, beginning with its meteoric rise in the last decades of the nineteenth century, amounted to scarcely two generations; by the 1930s, particularly in the United States, it was already in decline. Today, on the far side of the Holocaust and the linguistic assimilation of Jews to the languages of their various homelands, wherever Yiddish plays are occasionally staged their audiences require headphones. Moreover, unlike the history of Yiddish literary culture which over the past several decades has begun to attract academic attention, the rapture of Yiddish theater remains little more than a bright memory in the minds of elderly Jews.

Joel Berkowitz's new study of the American Yiddish theater is therefore particularly welcome. Prof. Berkowitz is a young scholar who is attempting to remedy the scholarly neglect of Yiddish theater; he is the editor of a new anthology of Yiddish theater scholarship as well as a new electronic journal devoted to the subject. ¹

Berkowitz has framed his study wisely. Focusing on the performance of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish stage allows him to confront some of the very issues responsible for our contemporary lack of attention; for Yiddish theater, despite a handful of "artistic" exceptions, lends itself poorly to the sort of analysis favored by academic criticism. Overwhelmingly a popular art form, its leading genres were melodrama, operetta, and farce. It reveled in spectacle and the heterogenous; as one of Berkowitz's sources put it: "eye-catching scenery; stunning effects; Oriental music; African dances; Arabian horses; Spanish sheep; authentic, historical Jewish goats; Turkish costumes; Chinese shoes; Russian nihilists; Italian melodies; Indian marches; German swords" (36-37). But Shakespeare, at least for the past hundred years, has represented the high-cultural antithesis of such fun. And therefore our laughter at the chutzpah of publishers whose Yiddish versions of Shakespeare typically carried on the title page the words fartaytsht un farbesert (translated and improved).

But Berkowitz knows enough theater history to point out that, for several centuries before his discovery by Jews, Shakespeare was cut, spliced and rewritten to suit contemporary sensibilities. As Berkowitz learned from Lawrence Levine, in America it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Shakespeare was taken out of mainstream culture and locked into the rarefied realm of "art." ² Precisely at this moment, Jewish impresarios discovered the Bard. Berkowitz traces the productions of five of Shakespeare's plays: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. Berkowitz is particularly good at using his sources—manuscripts, newspapers, and memoirs—to bring the reader into the overwrought world of the Yiddish stars and their adoring fans. Those Shakespeare productions that most catered to the needs of Jewish audiences, Berkowitz concludes, succeeded best. This meant recasting plots into a Jewish idiom (Mirele Efros, the Jewish Queen Lear, as a demanding businesswoman, for example), and simplifying plots and dialogue to create unambiguous conflicts and clear moral lessons (even in America, respect your elders; especially in America, learn from your children; and so on). And it meant turning the plays into vehicles for the likes of Jacob Adler, Keni Liptzin, and Boris Tomashefsky. Berkowitz makes it clear that the confrontation between "Shakespearean art" and American box office demands was not much of a contest.

Despite his broad sympathy for the world he depicts, Berkowitz sometimes slips into an apolegetic stance, and argues with critics of a century...