Modern Yiddish Theater

An abiding source of modern Yiddish creativity can be found in its encounters with the cultures it flourished alongside. All Yiddish writers of note were, of course, fluent in other languages, masters of other literatures. The awareness of cross-cultural movements, of translation and adaptation, for instance, are particularly palpable in the Yiddish theater. Since the inception of the Yiddish theater in the 1870s, its actors and playwrights moved between Yiddish and Polish or Russian in Eastern Europe, and, in America, between Yiddish and English.

The Yiddish theater thrived on border-crossings of genre—from book to stage, for instance—and, by the 1920s, between theater and film. What is the significance of the wedding jester in The Sorceress, a play Avraham Goldfaden adapted from the Romanian theater, or the meaning of the ambivalent performer in the film The Vilna Town Cantor based on Mark Arnshteyn’s play of the same name? How did the cross-cultural stage experience (Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish etc.) of The Dybbuk shape its meaning?

This course explores border-crossings of genre and language as essential to the cultivation and vigor of any modern theatrical culture. We will focus, however, on border-crossings as an essential ingredient in the coalescence of a distinctive Yiddish theater vernacular.

Alyssa Quint is the Vilna Collections Scholar-in-Residence at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Quint has taught Yiddish literature at a number of universities, most recently at Columbia University, and has lectured and published extensively on Yiddish culture. Her book on the rise of the modern Yiddish theater, The Social Life of Yiddish Theater, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

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