Yiddish Theatre - Russian Era

Russian Era

If Yiddish theatre was born in Romania, its youth occurred in Imperial Russia, largely in what is now Ukraine. Israel Rosenberg's troupe (which later had a series of managers, including Goldfaden's brother Tulya, and which at one point split in two, with one half led by actor Jacob Adler) gave Russia's first professional Yiddish theater performance in Odessa in 1878. Goldfaden himself soon came to Odessa, pushing Rosenberg's troupe into the provinces, and Osip Mikhailovich Lerner and N.M. Sheikevitch also founded a Yiddish theatre at Odessa, which for several years became the capital of Yiddish theatre.

With the more sophisticated audience — many Russian Jews were regular attendees of Russian-language theatre, and Odessa was a first-rate theatre city — serious melodramatic operettas, and even straight plays, took their place among the lighter vaudevilles and comedies. All three major troupes did their own productions of Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta (Goldfaden's was an operetta). What seemed, for a time, a boundless future in Russia was cut short by the anti-Jewish reaction following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; Yiddish theatre was banned, under an order effective September 14, 1883.

Looking back on this period, although acknowledging certain of Goldfaden's plays from this era as "masterpieces", Jacob Adler saw this as a period of relative mediocrity compared to what came later. "For three years I... wandered in the cave of the Witch and the motley of Shmendrick and what did I really know of my trade?" he describes himself as thinking in 1883. "If someday I return to Yiddish theater let me at least not be so ignorant."