Jacob Gordin’s Mirele Efros: King Lear as Jewish Mother

Summary

Confronted by the complex, unruly, and finally destructive processes of history which would eradicate their presence from the human narrative, generations of Jews since the 1880s have come, by necessity perhaps, to view the family as the primary agent to secure communal and religious survival. In the face of the destabilizing changes brought by modernity to the cities, towns, and shtetlakh of eastern Europe and the Russian Pale of Settlement, the persecution and dispersal of nearly one-third of the area’s Jewish population, the near-annihilation of European Jewry, and the threat of erasure implicit in assimilation, there emerged a domestic ideology compounded in unequal measure of nostalgia, idealization and fact to validate and sustain this radically empowered vision of family as the single most important vehicle of cultural transmission and ethnic continuity. It should not surprise, therefore, given the pervasive, if ambivalent, stereotypes of Jewish family life that abound and are the consequences of such an historically determined ideological construction, that King Lear, shaped in no small measure by a kind of apocalyptic familialism, occupies a special place in Yiddish theatrical and cinematic history in its various re-formations. It was one of two Shakespearian texts to remain consistently in the performed repertory (the other being The Merchant of Venice).