Background for Theater J’s Upcoming Production of
THE JEWISH QUEEN LEAR Jacob Gordin's Mirele Efros
Village East Cinema, New York City, 2010. One of New York's last remaining Yiddish theatre buildings.
Adapted from The Yiddish Shakespeare By Drew Lichtenberg, Shakespeare Theatre Company Literary Manager
Long recognized as the birthing ground of such artistic luminaries as Marc Chagall, Boris Tomashevsky, Zero Mostel, Clifford Odets and many others, the legacy of the American Yiddish Theater has for the most part been subsumed by Fiddler on the Roof. But the works of the original golden age of the American Yiddish Theater, spanning roughly 1890 to 1920, have remained largely underexplored. Perhaps originating in the satirical songs and skits of the Purim festive period or from the traveling Minnesänger (troubadour) tradition, by the 1870s a professional Yiddishlanguage theater proliferated throughout the Russian Empire’s “pale of settlement” (including modern-day Romania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia). After the Tsar’s 1883 ban on Yiddish performance, it spread rapidly to Western Europe and America, and by the late 1890s the Lower East Side of New York was the world capital of Yiddish drama. On Second Avenue, known as the “Yiddish Realto,” Jewish immigrant children such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and nearly three million others grew up attending Yiddish-language spectacles that nostalgically evoked the old world their parents had left behind. Most Yiddish theater displayed its roots in Purim performance, taking the form of light operetta or melodramatic spectacle with frequent musical interludes. One of the pivotal figures in raising the level of the Yiddish stage was Jacob Michailovitch Gordin (1853-1909), who emigrated to America from Russia in 1891 and quickly began to write for the troupe of the famed actor-manager Jacob Adler (father of celebrated acting teacher, Stella Adler). Gordin, who had worked as a rabble-rousing journalist, detested the theater’s tendencies toward escapist song-and-dance and frequently treated subjects of intense debate within the Jewish community. In his hands, the professional Yiddish theater became a staging ground for changing notions of Jewish identity and culture.
Purim Party at Ludwig Satz’s House in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, ca. 1925
Jacob Michailovitch Gordin
from right: Jacob P. Adler, Zigmund Feinman, Zigmund Mogulesko, Rudolf Marx, Mr. Krastoshinsky and David Kessler, 1888
Jacob Adler as Shylock in a late 19th century performance of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
In March 2019, Theater J will present the Englishlanguage world premiere of Gordin’s best known work: Mirele Efros (now titled The Jewish Queen Lear). Mulberry Street, New York City, ca. 1900
For Tickets, visit theaterj.org or call 202.777.3210.