Leon Kobrin - Life and Works

Life and Works

Born in Vitsebsk, then part of Imperial Russia, culturally considered at that time part of Lithuania, now in Belarus, he wrote in Russian before he emigrated to the United States in 1892; only in America did he discover that there was such a thing as Yiddish literature and theater. In the U.S. he first worked menial jobs in Philadelphia and in rural Pennsylvania, before settling in New York City. He became a journalist, then a writer of short stories, and finally gained fame as a playwright.

Gordin collaborated with Kobrin on completing Minna (1899) as a play; the title of Kobrin's Natur, Mensh un Khaye (Nature, Man and Beast, 1900) was a conscious echo of Gordin's Got, Mensch un Teivel (God, Man, and the Devil, 1893). Liptzin singles out his tragedy Yankel Boila (1908, based on his own 1898 story) as the "apex" of his work, and describes its title character as "a kindhearted but dull-witted Jewish youth… embroiled in a complex moral and emotional dilemma to which he could find no solution short of suicide".

His thirty or so plays spanned both "golden ages" of Yiddish theater in America. He started as a playwright at the time when Yiddish theater was bringing to America challenging modern classics such as the works of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, and Leo Tolstoy that, at that time, had not been presented on the English-language American stage, and continued into the era of the Yiddish Art Theater, when Yiddish theater rivalled any in the world in defining 20th-century theatrical practice.

Kobrin continued, throughout his life, to contribute to Yiddish-language newspapers. He also worked extensively as a translator of modern classics from French and Russian into Yiddish. Among the authors whose work he translated were Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov. His wife, Pauline, collaborated on some of these translations.