Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama by Barbara Henry (review)

Theater historian Barbara Henry’s remarkable study Rewriting Russia presents itself modestly as a literary biography of Jacob Gordin (1853–1909), the celebrated and controversial playwright of the turn-of-the century Yiddish theater in New York City. Its accomplishments, however, are anything but modest. In fact, Henry sets her focus on a knotty intersection of Yiddish theater history, drama, and popular literature as well as the meeting point of historical narratives, Russian, Yiddish, American, and Ukrainian. The book provides thoughtful comparative studies of two of Gordin’s plays with their Russian source texts, and teases a previously unknown hidden life of the playwright out of Russian state archives.

Gordin’s career as a Yiddish playwright began belatedly after he arrived in New York City in 1891 at the age of thirty-eight, with credentials as a writer and editor for a Russian-language newspaper in Odessa. At that time, standing in the sea of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side it made sense to shift from a career in the Russian language to one in Yiddish. A meeting with Yiddish theater celebrities, like Jacob Adler, intrigued him and a visit to the Yiddish theater, which he observed to be “without aesthetic merit, false, vile, and rotten,” convinced Gordin to make a go of writing Yiddish plays. Good Yiddish plays. So he looked back to Russia for inspiration.

Henry’s book is primarily directed to those in the field of Yiddish theater—a field that has grown higher in profile and scholarly muscle over the decade, owing in part to Henry’s work here and elsewhere. On that score, readers should take note of a recent volume of essays she edited with Joel Berkowitz titled Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Although a number of Gordin’s works have earned canonical stature on the Yiddish stage—and of two recently published books on Gordin, one was devoted to a translation and treatment of The Jewish King Lear (ed. Ruth Gay and Sophie Glazer, Yale University Press, 2004)—few of his plays have attracted analytical treatment of any depth. Henry argues the value of Gordin’s theater pieces not only as biographical sources, but in the way he “rewrites” modern classics of the Russian canon for the Yiddish stage. “Gordin’s plays are not translations, plagiarism, or mechanical transpositions of European works to a Jewish milieu; they are sustained critical dialogues with his source works, which assert Jewish continuity with European literature through its reinscription as popular Yiddish drama” (6). Through Henry’s eyes, they are fascinating cultural artifacts that were utter sensations on the Yiddish stage.

Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, Gordin’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novella of the same name, is a wish-fulfillment response to the original. Tolstoy’s novella, published in 1889, is a first-person narrative from the point of view of the hateful Pozdnyshev who kills his wife after he suspects her of cheating on him. Henry sensitively traces the migration of Tolstoy’s story across the divide of language and culture, and describes the far-reaching effects Gordin’s progressive ideas brought to the narrative. In Gordin’s play, the lead protagonist is a woman named Ettie whose husband has an ongoing affair (and, eventually, a child) with Ettie’s own sister. Gordin adds melodrama to melodrama and, in a moment of rage, Ettie kills them both in the last scene of the play.

Gordin’s greatest achievement in the play is his construction of Ettie. For all its previous accomplishments, the Yiddish theater could not muster even one complex female role before Gordin’s arrival. The character of Ettie flouted convention: pregnant with the child of a non-Jewish lover, she moves to the United States to escape shame. The closest exploration Yiddish had of pregnancy out of wedlock is Sholem...