The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater by Alyssa Quint (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater by Alyssa Quint Rachel Merrill Moss Alyssa Quint. The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 300 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000331 The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater is a welcome and important contribution to early Yiddish theater history. Alyssa Quint offers a new interpretation of, and appreciation for, Avrom Goldfaden's work and its influence on the formation of modern Yiddish theater—crucially including its participants—during its short window of development from 1876 to 1883. In doing so, Quint grapples with a legacy of criticism, rooted first of all in Goldfaden's own time, that turns on upholding invidious distinctions between "high" and "low" culture. Quint lays out her case against long-standing proclivities to confine Goldfaden's work and its impact to the folk artistic realm. This tendency has been reinforced in some ways by Goldfaden's own "distorted," hyper-self-critical memoirs, with such influences still to be found in contemporary scholarship. Early on in the book, Quint establishes the ways in which literary Yiddishists marginalized Goldfaden despite his quantifiable success and how that reputation has limited more nuanced cultural studies of his work—a task she then sets about correcting. Not only did the impresario Goldfaden enable Yiddish theater to be recognized in the broader sphere of Russian professional theater (if only a short time before its ban), but, as Quint explicates, Goldfaden's productions from that period also offer significant insight into the reciprocal levels of performance circulating on and off the stage: the social performances of Jewish actors and theater makers reflect and are reflected in the scripted performances Goldfaden staged. Quint is distinctively innovative in her incorporation of microhistorical methods into her study, drawing on no less than ten memoirs, placed in conversation with contemporaneous press. By bringing an examination of the place and practices of actors into the foundation of her study, Quint not only offers micro-level insights into the impact of the Yiddish professional theater of the late 1800s, but also beautifully brings contextual insight into the ways in which Jewish identity performance was itself being navigated in strategic and complex ways during that period. [End Page 455] With each chapter addressing a different historical angle on Goldfaden or his work, Quint dutifully brings together multilingual sources while artfully using Goldfaden's most successful libretti to structure her chapters. For example, in chapter 5, in which Quint discusses female characters in Yiddish theater and the professional development from cross-dressing male actors playing female roles to finally hiring female actors, Quint aligns her analysis through the similarly embodied dissociations of the highly spiritual titular character in Goldfaden's Shulamis: Or, the Daughter of Israel. Quint offers a close reading of the operetta's narrative, discussing how it provides insight into Goldfaden's general and ongoing ambivalence about the role of Jewish women, held in tension by his own bourgeois sensibilities. Within this same model, Quint's other chapters focus on Goldfaden's upbringing, the early days of the development of professional Yiddish theater in Romania, the audience for Yiddish theater, other Yiddish playwrights, and the fallout of the Russian ban on Yiddish theater in 1883, paired with in-depth, culturally situated analyses of Goldfaden's operettas, including The Sorceress, The Two Kuni-Lemls, and Doctor Almasada and the Jews of Palermo. The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater also boasts synopses of all of Goldfaden's operettas discussed throughout the book, as well as a new English translation of The Sorceress, based on the first edition of the play from 1878. Additionally, Quint includes a juicy translated excerpt from Avrom Fishzon's serialized Yiddish-translated memoirs in Morgan zhurnal (1925) from their original Russian. In it, Fishzon discusses how he and his collaborator, Yisrolik Grodner, ended up playing the eponymous roles in Goldfaden's The Grandmother and the Granddaughter, which adds delightful nuance to Quint's discussion in chapter 5 on the prevalence of men playing female roles in the early stages of the professionalization of the Yiddish theater. Since they struggled to find any woman suitable to take on the roles ("proper young ladies...