Abraham Goldfaden - The Prophet Adrift

The Prophet Adrift

While Yiddish theater continued successfully in various places, Goldfaden was not on the best terms at this time with Mogulescu. They had quarrelled (and settled) several times over rights to plays, and Mogulescu and his partner Moishe "Maurice" Finkel now dominated Yiddish theater in Romania, with about ten lesser companies competing as well. Mogulescu was a towering figure in Bucharest theater at this point, lauded on a level comparable to the actors of the National Theater, performing at times in Romanian as well as Yiddish, drawing an audience that went well beyond the Jewish community.

Goldfaden seems, in Bercovici's words, to have lost "his theatrical elan" in this period. He briefly put together a theater company in 1886 in Warsaw, with no notable success. In 1887 he went to New York (as did Mogulescu, independently). After extensive negotiations and great anticipation in the Yiddish-language press in New York ("Goldfaden in America", read the headline in the January 11, 1888 edition of the New Yorker Yiddishe Ilustrirte Zaitung), he briefly took on the job of director of Mogulescu's new "Rumanian Opera House"; they parted ways again after the failure of their first play, whose production values were apparently not up to New York standards. Goldfaden attempted (unsuccessfully) to found a theater school, then headed in 1889 for Paris, rather low on funds. There he wrote some poetry, worked on a play that he didn't finish at that time, and put together a theater company that never got to the point of putting on a play (because the cashier made off with all of their funds ). In October 1889 he scraped together the money to get to Lvov, where his reputation as a poet again came to his rescue.