10 - Yiddish Theater in America

Summary

By the end of the nineteenth century, Yiddish theater had been carried by immigrants to five continents. This chapter divides the history of professional secular Yiddish theater chronologically into four periods, 1882-1890, 1891-1909, 1909-1945, and 1946-Present, keeping in mind that in so short a span, the most creative years for individual playwrights and actors necessarily overlapped. American Yiddish theater was free of old country impediments: arbitrary censorship and shifting legal bans on Yiddish theater, local wars and mass dislocations, and periods of abject poverty. Avrom Goldfadn's Shulamis, Sholem Aleichem's The Jackpot, Jacob Gordin's Mirele Efros, and S. Ansky's Dybbuk were repertory perennials through the twentieth century and beyond. Till the end of the twentieth century, in memory and later in imagination, stars and theatergoing were emblematic of a rich Yiddish communal life. The theater serves as connection to Jewish cultural and religious roots and to America's past, and contributed to the American theater.