Abraham Goldfaden - Bucharest

Bucharest

As in Iaşi, Goldfaden arrived in Bucharest with his reputation already established. He and his players performed first in the early spring at the salon Lazăr Cafegiu on Calea Văcăreşti (Văcăreşti Avenue, in the heart of the ghetto), then, once the weather turned warm, at the Jigniţa garden, a pleasant tree-shaded beer garden on Str. Negru Vodă that up until then had drawn only a neighborhood crowd. He filled out his cast from the great pool of Jewish vocal talent: synagogue cantors. He also recruited two eminently respectable classically trained prima donnas, sisters Margaretta and Annetta Schwartz.

Among the cantors in his casts that year were Lazăr Zuckermann (also known as Laiser Zuckerman; as a song-and-dance man, he would eventually follow Goldfaden to New York and a long stage career, Moishe Zilberman (also known as Silberman), and Simhe Dinman, but the find, soon to become a stage star, was the 18-year-old Zigmund Mogulescu (Sigmund Mogulesko), an orphan who had already made his way in the world as a singer not only as a soloist in the Great Synagogue of Bucharest, but in cafes, at parties, with a visiting French operetta company, and even in a church choir. Before his voice changed, he had sung with Zuckerman, Dinman, and Moses Wald in the "Israelite Chorus", performing at important ceremonies in the Jewish community. Mogulescu's audition for Goldfaden was a scene from Vlăduţu Mamei (Mama's Boy), which formed the basis later that year for Goldfaden's light comedy Shmendrik, oder Die Komishe Chaseneh (Shmendrik or The Comical Wedding starring Mogulescu as the almost painfully clueless and hapless young man (later, famously played in New York and elsewhere by actress Molly Picon); the title is a pun on the Chemical Wedding).

This recruiting of cantors was not without controversy: Cantor Cuper (also known as Kupfer), the head cantor of the Great Synagogue, considered it "impious" that cantors should perform in a secular setting, to crowds where both sexes mingled freely, keeping people up late so that they might not be on time for morning prayers.

While one may argue over which performance "started" Yiddish theater, by the end of that summer in Bucharest Yiddish theater was an established fact. The influx of Jewish merchants and middlemen to at the start of the Russo-Turkish War had greatly expanded the audience; among these new arrivals were Israel Rosenberg and Jacob Spivakovsky, the highly cultured scion of a wealthy Russian Jewish family, both of whom actually joined Goldfaden's troupe, but soon left to found the first Yiddish theater troupe in Imperial Russia.

Goldfaden was churning out a repertoire – new songs, new plays, translations of plays from Romanian, French, and other languages; in the first two years, he wrote 22 plays, and would eventually write about 40 – and while Goldfaden was not always able to retain the players in his company once they became stars in their own right, he continued for many years to recruit first-rate talent, and his company became a de facto training ground for Yiddish theater. By the end of the year, others were writing Yiddish plays as well, such as Moses Horowitz with Der tiranisher bankir, (The Tyrannical Banker) or Grodner with Curve un ganev, (Prostitute and Thief), and Yiddish theater had become big theater, with elaborate sets, duelling choruses, and extras to fill out crowd scenes.

Goldfaden was helped by Ion Ghica, then head of the Romanian National Theater to legally establish a "dramatic society" to handle administrative matters. From those papers, we know that the troupe at the Jigniţa included Moris Teich, Michel Liechman (Glückman), Lazăr Zuckermann, Margareta Schwartz, Sofia Palandi, Aba Goldstein, and Clara Goldstein. We also know from similar papers that when Grodner and Mogulescu walked out on Goldfaden to start their own company, it included (besides themselves) Israel Rosenberg, Jacob Spivakovsky, P. Şapira, M. Banderevsky, Anetta Grodner, and Rosa Friedman.

Ion Ghica was a valuable ally for Yiddish theater in Bucharest. On several occasions he expressed his favorable view of the quality of acting, and even more of the technical aspects of the Yiddish theater. In 1881, he obtained for the National Theater the costumes that had been used for a Yiddish pageant on the coronation of King Solomon, which had been timed in tribute to the actual coronation of Carol I of Romania.