The Yiddish theater adored Shakespeare’s King Lear. It spoke to American Jewish audiences of family loyalty transcending generational differences, while in Soviet Russia, it became a tragicomic vehicle for political criticism

In one of the opening scenes of Jewish American playwright Tony Kushner’s celebrated work Angels in America, which debuted in the U.S. in the early 1990s, a young Jew named Louis Ironson is walking out of a New York cemetery when he falls into conversation with the elderly rabbi who has just eulogized his grandmother. Louis confesses that he had not visited his grandmother in years, and had in fact assumed she was already dead. The rabbi replies: “Sharfer voy di tson fun a shlang is an umdankver kind.” When Louis admits in perplexity that he does not speak Yiddish, the rabbi deigns to translate: “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Source: Shakespeare, King Lear.’”

The humor of the scene lies not only in the incongruity of the Shakespearean phrase on the aged rabbi’s tongue and the young New Yorker’s failure to identify it, but also in the genuinely natural flow of the quotation from Lear in Yiddish. What sounds like a Yiddish folk saying – a pithy epithet aimed by elderly parents at their thankless children – turns out to be a well-crafted line from one of the greatest playwrights’ finest tragedies.

Two of Shakespeare’s plays were particularly beloved by the Yiddish theater: King Lear and The Merchant of Venice. The latter, featuring the only Jewish protagonist in the bard’s repertoire, was an obvious choice. But why did American and European Jewish audiences in the early 20th century identify with the vicissitudes of an elderly medieval English king?

Let us recall Lear’s trials. Having banished his youngest daughter, Cordelia, for refusing to flatter his vanity, he abdicates the throne and moves in with each of his two older daughters in turn, who now rule the kingdom in his place. But the girls soon show their true colors, refusing to provide for their father in the manner to which he has become accustomed, and ultimately throwing him out in bald-faced denial of all they owe him. Sound familiar? And then, of course, Lear loses his mind and dies, together with his beloved Cordelia. In Shakespeare, as in Yiddish humor, the good always die young.

 

The Emigrant King

King Lear was evidently first produced for the Yiddish stage by Jacob Gordin (1853–1909), one of the most important playwrights of the American Yiddish theater, at the outset of his career. After emigrating from the Ukraine in 1891, Gordin began writing for the Yiddish stage to earn his keep. He was horrified by the lack of professionalism he found there: the highly unlikely plots, with their impossible jumble of comedy, tragedy, and melodrama; the bawdy jokes, dance routines, and popular music-hall numbers thrown in at random; actors who grabbed center stage and basked in the crowd’s affection; and raucous, rowdy audiences that ate and drank throughout performances, accompanied by children of unsuitable ages. Vociferous audience response to all the goings-on onstage was a matter of course, resulting in a very lively theater experience with an engaged and devoted following. Breaching all norms of the cultured Western stage, this form of entertainment was affectionately if dismissively known by the Yiddish derogative shund, “trash.”

Gordin resolved to replace this shund with serious theater, aiming to educate as well as entertain. His highly structured, realistic plays initially mystified theatergoers and alienated actors, who insisted on modifying his scripts to accommodate their usual interactions with the crowd. Gordin found a willing partner in Jacob Adler (1855–1926), the great Yiddish stage star. Their first production, Siberia, met with mixed reviews to say the least – including catcalls and requests for refunds – but Gordin’s works swiftly became smash hits, transforming the Yiddish theater.

The Jewish King Lear (1892) was apparently the turning point. This play was no mere Yiddish translation of the Shakespearean tragedy, but a reworking of the original in a Jewish context. The tragic hero is Dovid Moysheles, an affluent Jewish businessman from Vilna who decides to apportion his wealth among his three daughters and move to Palestine. The two older girls are in favor, but his beloved youngest, Taybele, disapproves, prompting Moysheles to throw her out of his home. In his absence, the older daughters and their fiancés take over the family business, leaving him penniless. By the time Moysheles returns, illness is blinding him, and he is forced to live off charity. Five years later, we find him begging on the street with his loyal servant, Shammai. Taybele has meanwhile become a doctor, and on her wedding day Moysheles and Shammai come calling. In the happy ending, even Moysheles’ blindness finds a cure.

The covert links with King Lear are inescapable, but Gordin left nothing unsaid. Taybele’s fiancé, her tutor Yaffe, tells Moysheles about Shakespeare’s famous drama. “You’re the Jewish King Lear,” Yaffe informs him. “May God protect you from King Lear’s fate.” These lines were intended to enlighten the audience, as well as its protagonist, regarding the deeper meaning of the play.

Gordin strove to broaden his audiences’ horizons, hoping to turn them into enlightened, sophisticated theatergoers. He met with relative success: The Jewish King Lear was followed in 1903 by a performance of Shakespeare’s original – in Yiddish – with Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and other classics in close pursuit over the next decade.

According to researcher Iska Alter, Gordin’s unique contribution to King Lear was his dramatic treatment of the family. Faced with unprecedented hardship, migration, and social and cultural upheaval, Jews turned to the family, even more than the community, for stability. The Jewish King Lear’s kingdom is his home. He rules his business and family but nothing more. While the drama of this Lear allowed Jewish audiences to reflect on the changing parent-child relationship, its happy ending reaffirmed the vital place of family in their lives. It proffered hope that, despite tumultuous circumstances, children might not abandon their parents after all – in stark contrast with the ghastly disintegration of family ties in the original play.

Joel Berkowitz further notes that each of Dovid Moysheles’ daughters is engaged to a representative of a different Jewish cultural movement. There is Abraham, the sharp-tongued Lithuanian scholar; the eponymous Moshe Hasid; and Yaffe, a modern intellectual derisively called “the German.” The storyline thus reflects the choices facing the Jew in the modern era. It is no coincidence that Gordin depicts the Orthodox as thankless hypocrites, whereas only the Enlightenment Jew, seemingly disconnected from his heritage, upholds traditional family values. The subliminal message is that the Jew who knows Shakespeare, as did Gordin himself, does not just promote progress and universalism; in his loyalty to and support of the older generation, he is also the true guardian of tradition – a reassuring message for an audience whose children were steadily assimilating into modern American culture.