Yiddishe Theater

Yiddish theatre, both in Eastern Europe and America (mainly New York City), is not just any day at the show. Many hundreds of plays have been written in Yiddish, both original scripts and Yiddish-ized modifications of the works of fa mous Western authors like Shakespeare Goethe. They were performed to noisy, interactive audiences who made sure that the characters on stage heard their own opinions. Imagine going to see a play with everyone pulling an MST3K (Mystery Science Theatre 30 00 to the uninitiated, a proccess whereby the audience heckles...no, that's too strong...offers spirited commentary...as the events of the play progress) as it goes along! In a production of a Yiddish version of King Lear, the scene where Lear bemoans h is fall from grace was so moving that an audience member rushed the stage and said "I'll help you, you poor man!," and offered the fallen King use of the spare room in his house!

Lest this paint too comical a picture, a suprisingly large number of well-written plays and powerful actors graced the Yiddish Stage in the short time from 1880 to the mid 1900s. For a brief history of the Yiddish Theatre, click here.

Boris Tomoshevsky and Jacob Adler were probably the two most famous Yiddish actors. Tomoshevsky actually produced a play at only fifteen years of age - it failed due to a crisis with the lead actress, but he went on to act instead and be come a legend in the Jewish circles of the time. Adler, dubbed "The Great Eagle," was a 6 foot tall, statuesque romeo who was married 3 times and fathered 10 children - ten confirmed ones, anyway. Not only a star in the Yiddish Theatre, he played Shyloc k in a Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice that ran for an entire year. What is so remarkable is that he played the part entirely in Yiddish!! Such a great actor was Adler that the gentile audiences could still feel the effects of his words, even in an alien language.

The Yiddish press and the theatre supported one another - the plays provided a whole series of writers with jobs as critics, and the critics could make or break the actors...and very often made them.