Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itineracy by Debra Caplan (review)

In 1922 in Berlin, German-Jewish mathematician Albert Einstein wrote to Dovid Herman, the director of the modernist Yiddish theater company the Vilna Troupe, applauding him for a rendition of Yiddish writer Peretz Hirschbein's The Abandoned Inn: "I feel the urge to thank you for the sublime delights your wonderful performance … gave me." (116) (Note that Einstein barely understood a word of Yiddish.) As Debra Caplan writes in her beautiful book, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itineracy, this compliment from a famous German Jew to a rising modernist Yiddish theater director is a sign that the Vilna Troupe had become a European-wide theater able to attract thousands of audience members across the continent, both Jewish and not, to Yiddish theater.

Caplan begins in 1915 in the heart of World War I as Germany occupied Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania. Although Yiddish theater had been in existence for nearly fifty years, she describes this war-torn scene of hunger and starvation as the context out of which modernist Yiddish theater emerged. German soldiers attended performances of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian theater in regions they occupied during the war, but Caplan tells us that they fell in love with the Farayn fun yidishn dramatishn artistn (Union for Jewish Dramatic Artists or FADA).

FADA, a ragtag theater troupe made up primarily of displaced Jewish refugees, performed in the outskirts of Vilna in a dusty barn. Many of the German (and Jewish) soldiers who patronized FADA became its biggest advocates. In 1917, Yiddish theater critic H.D. Nomberg laudably reviewed The Village Lad in Warsaw's Der Moment. In that review, FADA was nicknamed "the Vilna Troupe," which would eventually become the theater company's name.

Through oral interviews, archival papers, and theater reviews in many languages, Caplan traces the history of the Vilna Troupe and shows that it was never just a single theater company. It became, in the words of Caplan, a "brand." The modernist Yiddish theater troupe originally created in Vilna quickly became an idea or model of theater replicated in communities throughout the region—in Warsaw, then in Berlin, and then around the world. There was one "Vilna Troupe" in Warsaw in 1917; then there were two in Warsaw and Berlin in 1922; and eventually there were six "Vilna Troupes" throughout eastern and central Europe, as well as one based in New York. It had an aesthetic style: two parts German expressionism, one part Polish romanticism, all in the guise of high Yiddish culture meant to develop an interconnected Yiddish nation.

In November 1920, after the death of Sh. An-sky—the famed Russian and Yiddish activist who wrote plays about his Jewish ethnographic expedition just before World War I—the Warsaw Vilna Troupe decided to do an An-sky play in his honor called The Dybbuk, planned and staged all in just a month. In thirty short days, Herman, the Vilna Troupe theater director, put on a play that captivated the audience. In Warsaw and in Berlin, a who's who of Jewish intellectuals came to see The Dybbuk, including German modernist writer Alfred Döblin.

But those beyond the Jewish world came as well, hoping to see how these actors understood modernist Yiddish theater. The Romanian queen praised the Vilna Troupe, even though she did not understand a word of it. The British government invited the actors to tea on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament. With the Vilna Troupe's The Dybbuk soaring, the Soviet Union's State Jewish Theater (GOSET), a Moscow-based Yiddish theater company, also put on The Dybbuk as did Habimah, the Moscow Hebrew-language theater company, which Joseph Stalin came to see.

Although 1928 was the heyday of the Vilna...