Academia
Yiddish and Hebrew stage across land and language borders: A transnational and translinguistic theatre in the first half of the 20th century
Tags: Hebrew theatre | Theatre studies | Yiddish theatre
Abstract
During the first half of the 20th century, Yiddish theatre was the most popular form of entertainment for millions of people inhabiting the Yiddishland, a discontinuous homeland whose invisible borders were defined by the presence of Yiddish-speaking communities. In the same years, Hebrew-language theatre was moving its first steps between Moscow and the Land of Israel.
Yiddish theatre in its golden era, when it was a mass phenomenon, was intrinsically transnational. The protagonists of the Yiddish scene in New York City at the dawning of the 20th century were all born and raised in Eastern and East Central Europe and had moved to greener pastures following a ban on Jewish theatre in the czarist empire in the 1880s. In the following decades, second-generation Yiddish artists were active on that scene, but bridges to the lands of origin were never burnt until the common language was spoken. Plays written in America were performed in the Old Country and vice versa; not infrequently, the same productions were brought across the Ocean. Some European stars made fortunes on their US tours (e.g. Ester-Rokhl Kamińska), while other European-born artists achieved fame in America and reimported themselves to Europe as “American” stars (e.g. Clara Young); on the other hand, American-born stars repeatedly and successfully toured Europe (e.g. Molly Picon). Cross-border exchanges were everyday things on the Yiddish stage.
While the transnational nature of Yiddish theatre is evident, a lesser-known aspect of transnationalism and intersection of identities in the Jewish arts has always been overlooked. Due to a strongly entrenched idea, the two voices of Jewish national discourse in the early 20th century, Yiddishism and Hebrew-based Zionism, are commonly perceived as the expressions of two distant and mutually exclusive worlds. Therefore, their artistic outputs were rarely explored as an interconnected whole. Still, despite the heated debate on several issues, these two contrasting worlds were undeniably intertwined. In the first place, most people from both parties shared the same origins in Yiddish-speaking East-Central European communities. Secondly, their cultural experiences had much more in common than it appears at first sight, which also applies to theatre.
In this regard, the parallel stories of Artef and Ohel, two workers’ theatres founded in the same year (1925) in New York City and Tel Aviv, respectively, are particularly significant. They shared the ideology and the aesthetics, they underwent the same influences, they promoted the same idea of politically-committed art theatre, and they offered similar repertoires. It could be said that the only visible difference was language: Artef was a Yiddish troupe, whereas Ohel productions were in Hebrew. It is nonetheless evident that they were the expression of one shared transnational Jewish experience.
Such cases call for a new approach in the study of transnationalism in the Jewish world, an approach considering cross-language exchanges in the intersection of experiences across the Yiddish-speaking and the Hebrew-speaking world.