YIDDISH DRAMA

the literature, productions, and acting style of the professional Yiddish theatre, which developed in Europe from crude beginnings in the mid-19th century and rose during its short history to peaks of brilliant artistic expression. European Jewish drama had its origin in the Middle Ages, when dancers, mimics, and professional jesters entertained at weddings and Purim celebrations with songs and monologues. Purim, the holiday celebrating the downfall of Haman, a persecutor of the Jews in the Bible, became the occasion for increasingly elaborate plays, some of which continue to the present day. By the 16th century these plays, with their interpolated songs and free use of improvisation, were being performed in Yiddish, the language of the majority of central and eastern European Jews. The beginning of professional Yiddish theatre is usually dated in 1876, when Abraham Goldfaden, a former schoolteacher and journalist, joined forces with two traveling musicians to present his own two-act musical sketch in a tavern in Romania. The little play was well received, and Goldfaden went on to organize a full-time professional troupe, for which he wrote songs, dialogues, and, finally, full-length plays. Groups of imitators sprang up, some of them formed by Goldfaden's actors or associates. Goldfaden and newer Yiddish dramatists, such as Joseph Judah Lerner, became well established in Russia, but the anti-Semitic laws promulgated in 1883 expressly forbade Yiddish plays, and the playwrights and many of their actors immigrated to England and the United States. New York became the centre of Yiddish drama at the turn of the century, with a vast immigrant population that supported both the commercial theatre of musical farce and sentimental melodrama and the serious art theatre. The early acting style was noted for its lack of restraint. In the early 1880s Boris Tomashevsky came to New York from London with some other Jewish actors and presented the first Yiddish play in the United States. Jacob Gordin is credited with bringing new material and new life into the American Yiddish theatre with free adaptations of the works of major European dramatists, such as his The Jewish King Lear (1892). The role of Lear was interpreted by Jacob P. Adler, founder of a family of Yiddish- and English-speaking actors that included Sarah (his wife), Celia, Julia, Stella, and Luther Adler. Sholem Asch and Sholem Aleichem explored Jewish folk themes and characters with rich humour and sensitivity. H. Leivick (pseudonym of Leivick Halpern) produced social dramas of Jewish workers as well as powerful works such as The Golem (published 1921) and Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto (performed 1945). In 1918 Maurice Schwartz founded the Yiddish Art Theatre, in which he served as director and leading actor. Schwartz became the most highly esteemed actor of the Yiddish stage in its heyday, and the theatre became the training ground for a generation of actors. Among the notable names associated with it are Rudolph Schildkraut, Jacob Ben-Ami, and Muni Weisenfreund (later known in motion pictures as Paul Muni). World War II and the Nazi concentration camps destroyed most of the Yiddish culture of Germany and eastern Europe, and the language is rapidly dying out elsewhere, as the children of immigrants are assimilated into new cultures. All of these factors combined have had a devastating impact on the Yiddish theatre. In the second half of the 20th century, only a few Yiddish theatres of uncertain future survived in New York City, London, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, and Warsaw.