Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama Debra Caplan Barbara Henry . Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Pp. 229, illustrated. $70.00 (Hb); $35.00 (Pb). Jacob Gordin (1853-1909) was the central figure of New York's burgeoning Yiddish theatre culture at the turn of the twentieth century, a playwright whose efforts to "reform" the Yiddish theatre had a remarkable impact on [End Page 415] the development of the Yiddish stage around the world. He was also a Russian émigré, a political dissident, a would-be religious reformer, and an accomplished Russian-language journalist, theatre reviewer, and short-story writer. In Rewriting Russia, Barbara Henry offers a long-overdue and exceptionally engaging study of Gordin's career as a dramatist that, for the first time, positions Gordin's famous Yiddish plays within the larger context of his religious-reform efforts and his twenty-year career as a Russian author and journalist. Not only is Rewriting Russia the first scholarly monograph to treat Gordin's life and work, but within the context of Gordin's Russian activities, Henry's approach yields a rich and nuanced analysis that explains, fully and for the first time, the profound impact of Gordin's dramas on the development of the Yiddish theatre. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on Gordin's contentious position as a theatre reformer within the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community of New York (noting his famously bitter quarrels with the editor of the Forverts and powerful cultural arbiter Abraham Cahan) and to write off Gordin's dramas as simplistic translations or plagiarisms of renowned Russian and European plays, with little significance in their own right. Instead, Henry offers a compelling and thoroughly original perspective that draws upon Kristeva's notion of intertextuality to reframe Gordin's dramas as sophisticated literary adaptations. These plays, Henry argues persuasively, are best understood as "sustained critical dialogues with [Gordin's] source works, which assert Jewish continuity with European literature through its reinscription as popular Yiddish drama, while always subjecting that very generative process to scrutiny" (6). Juxtaposing Gordin's comparatively well-known Yiddish literary career with his lesser-known Russian political projects and literary output is no simple task and requires an extensive knowledge of the complex dynamics at play in both the Russian and Yiddish literary contexts of the period. Moreover, any effort to contextualize Gordin's plays is further complicated by the playwright's own largely successful efforts to obscure the details of his time in Russia via fictional biographies. Henry succeeds in overcoming both obstacles in this scrupulously researched study, which draws upon recently released records from the Tsarist police archives to dispel inaccurate rumours about Gordin's life and to clarify the details of the playwright's thirty-eight years in Russia. Chapter two, which deals largely with this material and provides a much fuller picture of Gordin's life in Russia than any other to date, stands out as among the most intriguing and surprising chapters in the book and lends substantial credence to Henry's argument and methodology. At the core of this book are Henry's close readings of three of Gordin's most successful plays: Der yidisher kenig lir [The Jewish King Lear] (1892), Di kreytser sonata [The Kreutzer Sonata] (1902), and Khasye di yesoyme [End Page 416] [Khasye the Orphan] (1903). Each of these plays fits perfectly into Henry's paradigm of a Gordin drama adapted from a Russian source text - in the case of these three examples, Turgenev's Stepnoi korol' Lir (1870), Lev Tolstoy's Kreitserova sonata (1889), and Turgenev's Asya (1858). While these detailed analyses offer a rich, comparative perspective on Gordin's process as a literary adaptor, Henry's argument would perhaps be better served by comparing these famous and successful adaptations to Gordin's less successful non-derivative dramas. Similarly, Henry might also have more thoroughly accounted for Gordin's adaptations of non-Russian source material (for example, his versions of Ibsen, Euripides, Goethe, and Hauptmann), which were often just as successful and popular as the three "Russian dramas" described in the book. At times, Henry's focus on establishing the...