Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan Sonia Gollance (bio) Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy By Debra Caplan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 327 pp. The Yiddish theater company that became the legendary Vilna Troupe had two main goals: create art theater for Jewish audiences and bring Yiddish theater to non-Jewish audiences. Entertainment was an afterthought. Yet entertain the Vilna Troupe did, becoming an international cultural phenomenon with wide-reaching influence throughout the performing arts world. In fact, one could say that Debra Caplan's Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy has similar goals. It is on one hand a narrative about the development of Yiddish art theater. At the same time, Yiddish Empire demonstrates the significance of the Vilna Troupe for theater studies more broadly, especially with regard to transnationalism, branding, the creative potential of itineracy, and as a worthy topic for digital scholarship. Entertainment is not the primary goal of an academic monograph, yet Caplan is an engaging storyteller with a compelling subject. The present moment is an exciting one for Yiddish theater scholarship. Productions such as Paula Vogel's Indecent and the Folksbiene's Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof have attracted broad public interest. New scholarly works, such as Alyssa Quint's The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Indiana University Press, 2019), and translations of plays, such as Michael Shapiro's rendition of the 1932 Moyshe Nadir drama Messiah in America (Farlag Press, 2018), expand upon our knowledge of Yiddish theater. The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (which Caplan cofounded) publishes works of public scholarship and synopses of Yiddish dramas on their website. Yet Caplan's monograph stands out as a work devoted to a theater company, or (one could say) a theater company franchise. Before the advent of digital [End Page 291] humanities tools, documenting the history of the Vilna Troupe was a virtually impossible task: multiple groups (and nearly three hundred individuals) used the company name as they toured almost constantly throughout Europe and the United States for a period of two decades. Caplan successfully navigates her complex topic in two unconventional ways. She provides a companion website, www.vilnatroupe.com, with a visualization of the connections between troupe members (Vilner) and their associates. Caplan also structures her book so that the five chapters about the history of the Vilna Troupe are interrupted by short "interludes" that provide fascinating snapshots into the lives of the Vilner themselves, on topics such as romantic relationships and the Holocaust. Yiddish Empire charts the extraordinary rise and slow decline of the Vilna Troupe, which began as an amateur theater group in German-occupied Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) and became a celebrated art theater that attracted international acclaim among Yiddish-speaking and non-Yiddish-speaking audiences alike. The first chapter recounts (unsuccessful) attempts by Jewish intellectuals, such as Y. L. Peretz, to create a Yiddish art theater. Professional Yiddish theater companies emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1870s, yet they had an uneasy relationship both with Russian imperial authorities and with the arbiters of Yiddish culture. Modernist writers were embarrassed by what they classified as shund (trashy, poorly written melodramas), yet they were unable to establish a commercially viable alternative prior to World War I. Chapter 2 describes how a group of starving teenaged war refugees created a high-brow Yiddish theater in wartime Vilna. Despite the fact that the actors survived on one potato a day, performed in a theater that had recently been used to stable horses, and had little professional experience, their performances were a huge hit with Yiddish-speaking Jews and the relatively benevolent German occupying forces. When the company went on tour, they became known as the Vilna Troupe. The astonishing success of the Vilna Troupe makes for a good story on its own, yet Caplan also makes it clear that their innovations had a lasting impact on the theater world. One of their major contributions was the popularization of S. An-sky's play The Dybbuk, which also helped [End Page 292] the Vilna Troupe expand...