Yiddish Theatre by Joel Berkowitz Deserves an Ovation

 Until the beginning of this year, I did not know that Yiddish-language theater existed, much less that it had a rich and diverse history across Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th century. As someone who is involved in my own high school theater and is deeply interested in learning the history of the medium, I realized I needed to rectify that. Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, a collection of essays compiled by my mother’s colleague Joel Berkowitz, is the first step in an ongoing project to learn more about theater history and its intersection with society and culture.

I expected a good history. I expected good insight and good translations. I did not anticipate that I would have so much fun reading or that I would respect the scholarship so deeply.

Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches is not a singular narrative, but a compilation of scholarly articles by multiple authors from across the world of Yiddish Theater. I cannot evaluate them as a historian might, but I can recommend them or the breadth and diversity of material that they cover. Ahuva Belkin describes the improvisational and subversive origins of Yiddish theater in “The ‘Low’ Culture of the Purimshpil,” while Seth L. Woliz studies the appropriation of two plays, Shulamis and Bar kokhba, by the Soviet Union. One article that I found particularly interesting was Brigitte Dalinger’s “Yiddish Theatre in Vienna,” which explored the conflicts between Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe and Vienna’s German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie in the years before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.

The historians in Yiddish Theater: New Approaches made skillful use of sources in places where conventional recollections are not always available. For example, in tsarist Russia Yiddish-language theater was banned in 1883 in an attempt at cultural repression, so troupes would often perform covertly or claim to perform in German, which many Russian policemen could not distinguish from Yiddish. Historian John Klier’s essay “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” includes a compilation of Russian police records and bureaucratic documents to paint a picture of theatrical life between 1883 and 1909, when the ban mostly stopped being enforced. An essay exploring Britain, where Yiddish theater was legal but required a permit to perform, includes a 10-page appendix of licensed performances. These studies make for great social history, and it’s clear that their researchers have gone to great lengths to retrieve them.

“Sifting through the often tattered and illegible papers that make up these archival remains of decades of Yiddish theatre in Britain, one experiences a sense of unmediated participation in that quite remarkable institution. There is much to be seen here if one has the patience and perseverance to look carefully—these are fragments waiting to be pieced together” (186).

So what is the source of this relative neglect? In his introduction, Berkowitz theorizes that it is a combination of contemporary disrespect for the medium and the shadow of the Holocaust, which murdered many Jewish artists and audience members across Europe. But the Yiddish theater survived in urban centers like New York, where the language and social themes reflected the cultural identity of their audience. To that end, I would like to recommend Berkowitz’s Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which contains further sources and articles.

By the time I finished Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, I knew I would have to read more. And perhaps that interest speaks more to the success of Bekowitz’ compilation than I can articulate.

“That the Yiddish theatre is not only worthy of academic study, but has a long and complex history that can contribute to our understanding of Jewish civilization, may come as a surprise to many readers. Scholars who study the subject however—either as the focus of their research or in conjunction with related fields such as Yiddish literature, theatre history Jewish folklore, or European history—appreciate what a rich story the Yiddish theatre has to tell” (1).