Abraham Goldfaden - A Turn To The Serious

A Turn To The Serious

While light comedy and satire might have established Yiddish theater as a commercially successful medium, it would never have established Goldfaden as "the Yiddish Shakespeare" (which the New York Times called him at his death in 1908). As a man broadly read in several languages, he was acutely aware that there was no Eastern European Jewish tradition of dramatic literature, his audience was used to seeking just "a good glass of Odobeşti and a song". Years later, he would paraphrase the typical Yiddish theatergoer of the time as saying to him, "We don't go to the theater to make our head swim with sad things. We have enough troubles at home... We go to the theater to cheer ourselves up. We pay up a coin and hope to be distracted, we want to laugh from the heart."

Goldfaden wrote that this attitude put him "pure and simply at war with the public". His stage was not to be merely "...a masquerade. No, brothers. If I have arrived at having a stage, I want it to be a school for you. In youth you didn't have time to learn and cultivate yourself... Laugh heartily if I amuse you with my jokes, while I, watching you, feel my heart crying. Then, brothers, I'll give you a drama, a tragedy drawn from life, and you, too, shall cry – while my heart shall be glad." Nonetheless, his "war with the public" was based on understanding that public. He would also write, "I wrote Di kishefmakhern (The Witch) in Romania, where the populace – Jews as much as Romanians – believe strongly in witches." Local superstitions and concerns always made good subject matter, and, as Bercovici remarks, however strong his inspirational and didactic intent, his historical pieces were always connected to contemporary concerns.

Even in the first couple of years of his company, Goldfaden did not shy away from serious themes: his rained-out vaudeville in Botoşani had been Di Rekruten (The Recruits), playing with the theme of the press gangs working the streets of that town to conscript young men into the army. Before the end of 1876, Goldfaden had already translated Desolate Island by August von Kotzebue; thus, a play by a German aristocrat and Russian spy became the first non-comic play performed professionally in Yiddish. After his initial burst of mostly vaudevilles and light comedies (although Shmendrik and The Two Kuni-Lemls were reasonably sophisticated plays), Goldfaden would go on to write many serious Yiddish-language plays on Jewish themes, perhaps the most famous being Shulamith, also from 1880. Goldfaden himself suggested that this increasingly serious turn became possible because he had educated his audience. Nahma Sandrow suggests that it may have had equally much to do with the arrival in Romania of Russian Jews at the time of the Russo-Turkish War, who had been exposed to more sophisticated Russian language theater. Goldfaden's strong turn toward almost uniformly serious subject matter roughly coincided with bringing his troupe to Odessa.

Goldfaden was both a theoretician and a practitioner of theater. That he was in no small measure a theoretician – for example, he was interested almost from the start in having set design seriously support the themes of his plays – relates to a key property of Yiddish theater at the time of its birth: in general, writes Bercovici, theory ran ahead of practice. Much of the Jewish community, Goldfaden included, were already familiar with contemporary theater in other languages. The initial itinerary of Goldfaden's company – Iaşi, Botoşani, Galaţi, Brăila, Bucharest – could as easily have been the itinerary of a Romanian-language troupe. Yiddish theater may have been seen from the outset as an expression of a Jewish national character, but the theatrical values of Goldfaden's company were in many ways those of a good Romanian theater of the time. Also, Yiddish was a German dialect which became a well-known language even among non-Jews in Moldavia (and Transylvania), an important language of commerce; the fact that one of the first to write about Yiddish theater was Romania's national poet, Mihai Eminescu, is testimony that interest in Yiddish theater went beyond the Jewish community.

Almost from the first, Yiddish theater drew a level of theater criticism comparable to any other European theater of its time. Bercovici cites a "brochure" by one G. Abramski, published in 1877. Abramski described and gave critiques of all of Goldfaden's plays of that year, discussed what a Yiddish theater ought to be, speculated that this might be a moment comparable to the Elizabethan era for English theater, noted the many sources of this emerging form (ranging from Purim plays to circus pantomime), praised the strong female roles, but criticized where he saw weaknesses: a male actor unconvincingly playing the mother in Shmendrik, or the entire play Di shtume kale (The Mute Bride) — a play apparently written to accommodate a pretty, young actress who was too nervous to deliver her lines — saying of it that the only evidence of Goldfaden's authorship was his name.