Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (review)

The claim of novelty runs throughout Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, a collection of essays from some of the leading scholars of the genre, including (among others) Ahuva Belkin, Paola Bertolone, Leonard Prager, Seth L. Wolitz, Nahma Sandrow, and editor Joel Berkowitz. Each chapter stands as a rebuttal, often explicit, to an academy that has historically paid little attention to a body of work considered vulgar, sentimental, or otherwise unworthy of rigorous analysis. Belkin's essay on "The 'Low' Culture of the Purimshpil," for example, notes rightly that "[m]odern scholars addressing the history of Jewish literature have dismissed the purimshpil [seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Purim play] texts as examples of literary degradation" (32). Brigitte Dalinger, in "Yiddish Theatre in Vienna, 1880-1938," notes "[o]nly the end of the twentieth century, however, has seen the beginnings of scholarly research on these topics" (107). David Mazower's critical biography of composer Joseph Markovitsch, "Stories in Song," concludes with the declaration that Markovitsh's "distinctive voice deserves greater recognition" (137). The book's message is clear: it is time for Yiddish theatre to emerge from the ghetto of "low culture" and assume its rightful place as an object of serious scholarly study.

In his introduction, Berkowitz delineates some of the unique obstacles that Yiddish theatre poses for historians:

Yiddish performers and playwrights were often itinerant not just as entertainers seeking out new audiences, but also as Jews fleeing persecution and economic hardship. Many of them made their careers in a variety of countries, and not infrequently in two or more languages. Their movements can be difficult to retrace, their manuscripts difficult or impossible to recover. Countless performers and writers were murdered in ghettos, concentration camps, and gulags. . . . In short, the usual barriers to historical scholarship are magnified in the case of the Yiddish theatre by the violent upheavals of its modern existence.

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When we consider what a daunting task such history can present, the significance of each of the essays in Yiddish Theatre, and of their publication in one English-language volume, cannot be underestimated. Where else can a reader turn to find first-rate scholarship on such diverse subjects as purimshpilim, early twentieth-century Yiddish theatre criticism, and the controversial London production of Sholem Asch's Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) in 1946? The rich variety of subjects supports Berkowitz's optimism that "the study of Yiddish theatre is beginning to come into its own as a scholarly endeavor, in the process enhancing our understanding not only of plays and productions, but of the larger social context in which they were performed" (25).

Yet what Yiddish Theatre offers is less "new approaches" than new material. Each chapter is meticulously researched and eloquently argued, but all employ well-established methodology: close readings of play texts, examination of archival records, or analyzing reviews and memoirs to better understand significant performances. Wolitz, for example, compares the texts of Avrom Goldfaden's plays Shulamis (1880) and Bar Kokhba (1882) with interpretations of the same stories in the 1930s by Soviet Jewish playwright Shmuel Halkin. John Klier has combed through Russian police records and print advertising to produce an important catalogue of two dozen heretofore-unknown Yiddish theatre productions in the Russian empire between 1883 and 1909 (because such performances were technically banned by government edict during this period, earlier scholars have often assumed there were no such performances). Such studies open significant areas for further research, but scholars seeking more radical interventions in historiography (feminist or queer approaches, for example) may be disappointed.

Moreover, while each of the essays collected in Yiddish Theatre offers a genuine contribution to the field, the anthology as a whole lacks a coherent narrative. Though divided into a mere eleven chapters, the book is further divided into five sections: "Purimshpil," "Repertoire," "Regional Centers," "Censorship," and "Criticism"—the first and last of these sections contain only one chapter each. The introduction offers no clear rationale for this organization, and while the ordering suggests a roughly chronological...