The decades of the 1880s and the 1890s marked a turning point in American history in regard to both immigration and cultural consumption. For the first time, the bulk of new arrivals to the United States came (originally) from the most impoverished regions of the European mainland, settling particularly in urban areas (such as New York City, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, New Orleans, etc.), rather than resorting to the vastness of the countryside, as was the case with earlier nineteenth-century waves of immigration to the New World. In these closing days of the Victorian Era almost two million Eastern European Jews are said to have left the notoriety of the infamous Pale of Settlement (nearly one quarter of these country-less people fled the deteriorating conditions in Rumania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). After the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the group’s social position changed from a state of uncertainty to one of virtual siege. In his work on the influence of urban Jewish immigrants on the rise of the role of mass consumption within American society in general, titled Adapting to Abundance, the cultural theorist Andrew Heinze notes that the almost institutionalized forms of Anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire, “sustained by the deeply rooted suspicions and animosities among the Russian folk,” allowed “the government…systematically to bar Jews from customary occupations, to limit sharply their enrollment in universities, and to incite pogroms that destroyed millions of dollars worth of Jewish property as well as thousands of Jews.” However, at about the same time, a new cultural phenomenon was born out of the same devastating scarcity and harrowing conditions of the Pale, i.e., the Yiddish Theater, an art form whose full blossoming would be realized in the immigrants’ new home, the mysteriously plentiful United States of America.
This dramatic novelty soon took hold of the immigrant’s life in the Promised Land, and the American Jewish theater exploded onto the American scene as a means of soothing the adjustment to the alien way of life. The “allrightnik” wanted to acculturate, to “green him/herself out” (“oysgrinen zich”), to become more American; nonetheless, the industrial particulars of American nineteenth-century imperialism made the transition a bit more bumpy. So at the end of a long day, the working-class Jewish immigrants, with dreams of grandeur and future prosperity (political, social, material, cultural), went to appease the growing sense of insatiability and discomfort that their American Dream exerted onto their lifestyle, by immersing themselves in the low-brow entertainment of the Yiddish theater. They went to congregate with one another, to hear their own language spoken, to observe their lives – old and new – acted out on stage. The format of this “secular synagogue” encouraged the audience to feel as if they were in their own living room, empathizing with the performers by making loud sounds or even hurling personal items at the actors on stage.
The large, devoted working-class following came mostly to see what was candidly referred to as shund or trash. In her essay on the historical and cultural relevance of the Yiddish theatrical tradition past, present and future, Alisa Solomon looks at the double entendre of the Yiddish theater’s shund-oriented style. Solomon traces the relationship between the incorporation of shund for entertainment purposes and its subsequent devastating effect on the attempt to create a serious, secular form of Yiddish literature. In other words, “the gravest sin of shund…was that it re-feminized the Jewish male, fixing him in a stereotype he had expected to leave behind in the shtetl when he emigrated (internally) to the Enlightenment or (externally) to America.” Although such concerns were voiced repeatedly by purists behind the Maskilim movement, Solomon also points out to the pervasive want of these cultural activists to reach all of the masses encompassing the body politic of the Eastern European Jewry, which led them eventually to forgo their initial dismissal of the cultural value behind the impure “jargon”’ (and its dramatic representation).
Solomon examines this imbedded cultural value of Yiddish theater as she explores the different ways through which Yiddish drama played for and against the need to adhere to Western culture’s continuous push for the emergence of “high-brow” art as a given sign of one’s cultural dominance. Yiddish drama embraced the precepts of the lowest comedy and the thickest schmaltz; it owed much of its formative nature to the distinct styles of late nineteenth-century vaudeville and melodrama, as well as the intricacies of Jewish folklore, to which audiences responded viscerally. However, with the rise of competition from English-language theatres, Yiddish theaters began to stage Broadway and Off-Broadway hits, in translation, outrageously adapted to suit the ego of the star. For example, Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre was the first one of the Yiddish theater houses to proclaim adherence to serious artistic principles by producing the works of Shaw, Ibsen, Strinberg, Schviller, Schnitzler, Wilde (“often before they were played in America’s English-speaking theaters”) , as well as the works of respected Yiddish playwrights such as Jacob Gordin, David Pinski, Leon Korbin, Deretz Hirschbein. Solomon outlines the process of “normalization” of Yiddish drama as she continues to dismantle the submergence of “the excesses and instabilities that gushed out of shund” by something she formulates at the ‘erection of a fourth wall’. That is to say, the lasting plays from the Yiddish drama’s heyday, such as Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance (Got fun Nekome, 1906), “thread issues of sexuality and gender around their existential investigations of what it means to be a Jew.”
The play revolves around a couple whose financial success in running a brothel allows them to ‘buy their way into respectability’, procuring a Torah scroll. This token of a ‘lasting redemption’ is to be kept in the room of their daughter Rivkele, the young waif, who has lived her entire life until now in tight isolation, protected from the indecencies performed in the basement of her parents’ house. She is to marry, a holy man; she is to be exchanged for her parents’ sins, her piety replacing their immorality. But the young ingénue alters her father’s fancies for good, running away with her female lover (a former employee of her father’s) for good. Solomon recognizes the importance of this resilient piece of literature, as she goes through, step by step, the various points on the high standing ‘fourth wall’ that this play erects. Unfortunately, the socio-political climate of the 1922 American cultural milieu did not allow for such a revelation to come full circle, as the production was forcefully closed down, the cast and producers charged with (and later on convicted for) subjecting the audience to immoral and indecent performances.
The question that emerges from Solomon’s meticulously conducted critical work on the development and influence of Yiddish drama in past and present-day American society goes along the lines of the abundant heritage that this dramatic tradition brings forth.
Simply put, how relevant is this multi-faceted heritage as dramatic practices embark on a more experimental plateau of (re)presentation, where Jewishness may or may not be the focal element?
According to Solomon, the Yiddish theatre tradition is the needed touchstone, that link with the past, which fuels the work of contemporary playwrights such as Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner, and/or performance artists like Jennifer Miller and Rachel Rosenthal, “critically reactivating “Jew” as an associated term of inquiry, insight, and ideological insurrection.” Whether or not the work produced makes use of particular “Jewish content”, it creates a platform whose foundation is loaded with rich, bombast Jewish sentiments, and yet, we get the sensation that without it the platform is just another space of barren ground.
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