Offering snapshots of a pivotal era in which the Jews of Europe made the transition from a traditional to a more modern world, the Yiddish plays translated and collected here wrestle with issues that continue to concern us today: changing gender roles, generational conflict, class divisions, and religious persecution. In their introduction to the volume, Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber place the plays in the context of the development of modern drama and Yiddish drama and examine their treatment of social, political, and religious issues. The many ways in which the plays address these issues make them transcend their own time, exciting a new generation of readers and theatergoers.

CONTENTS.- D. Pinski: Abigail, Forgotten souls.- S.J. Rabinowitsch: She must marry a doctor.- S. Ash: Winter, The sinner.- P. Hirschbein: In the dark.

This is an unprecedented collection of three newly translated Yiddish plays written by women in the period from 1880 to 1920. Taken together, these plays provide a fascinating insight into female Jewish perspectives on a range of women's issues prevalent at the time and, in some cases, still prevalent today. The works explore topics such as the Jewish law of the 'chained widow', pregnancy out of wedlock, and birth control, amongst many others. Three Yiddish Plays by Women includes an incisive contextual introduction which provides historical context for each individual work, summaries and discussion of the texts and stage histories for two of the three that have them. The introduction offers biographical information about each playwright and looks at what ambit they were each active in, taking into consideration gender norms. It also engages an array of recent sources and angles on intersecting questions of theater and gender in a landmark volume of vital significance to students of women's history, modern Jewish history, cultural history and theatre history.

This collection of essays conveys a broad range of fundamental ideas about Yiddish theatre and its importance in Jewish life as a reflection of aesthetic, social, and political trends and concerns. The contributions cover such topics as the Yiddish repertoire, including the purimshpil and the relationship between Yiddish drama and the broader European dramatic tradition; the historiography of the Yiddish theatre; the role of music; censorship, both by governmental authorities and from within the Jewish community; and the politics of Yiddish theatre criticism. Taken as a whole, these essays make a significant contribution to our understanding of Jewish literature and culture in eastern Europe and the United States.

The professional Yiddish theatre started in 1876 in Eastern Europe; with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, masses of Eastern European Jews began moving westward, and New York—Manhattan’s Bowery and Second Avenue—soon became the world’s center of Yiddish theatre. At first the Yiddish repertoire revolved around comedies, operettas, and melodramas, but by the early 1890s America's Yiddish actors were wild about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, Joel Berkowitz knowledgeably and intelligently constructs the history of this unique theatrical culture. The Jewish King Lear of 1892 was a sensation. The year 1893 saw the beginning of a bevy of Yiddish versions of Hamlet; that year also saw the first Yiddish production of Othello. Romeo and Juliet inspired a wide variety of treatments. The Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare play published in Yiddish, and Jacob Adler received rave reviews as Shylock on Broadway in both 1903 and 1905. Berkowitz focuses on these five plays in his five chapters. His introduction provides an orientation to the Yiddish theatre district in New York as well as the larger picture of Shakespearean production and the American theatre scene, and his conclusion summarizes the significance of Shakespeare’s plays in Yiddish culture.

God, Man, and Devil is an anthology of five Yiddish plays in translation, plus two additional independent scenes, all written by well-known playwrights in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The settings range widely--a luxurious parlor, a haunted graveyard, a farmyard, a sweatshop on strike, a subway, and the boardwalk of Atlantic City. The plays evoke tears and laughter through melodrama, expressionism, satire, fantasy, farce, suspense, and romance. But all consider the same question: what is life's moral purpose? And all display the theatrical flair that made Yiddish audiences such passionate fans of their dramas and their stars. Translated and edited to make them more accessible for both reading and performance, the plays are accompanied by prefaces and notes to help students of theater and of Jewish culture by providing historical context, production histories, and elucidation of references.

Three stageworthy plays and nine individual scenes that offer an introduction to Yiddish theater at its liveliest.

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Excerpt from Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre: Second Series The two pieces by Pinski included in the present collection of Yiddish plays reveal that noted dramatist in two distinct manners. "Little Heroes," indeed, is one of the most original works of art engendered by the present war. Not only does it reflect, with genuine humor and pathos, the souls of the little ones confronted by a gigantic phenomenon that they cannot understand, but these little heroes mirror quite aptly the minds and the feelings of those larger children whom they call their parents. The play was written in 1916, and has been very successfully produced. It merits a place among the world's juvenile classics. "The Stranger" (or, "The Eternal Jew") is in some respects akin to Pinski's "Abigail" in the previous collection. Where the latter is constructed from one of the episodes in the life of King David, however, the former originates in a short legend from the Talmud. For a better appreciation of the play (which is the first of a tetralogy upon the theme of the Wandering Jew, each part complete in itself) I translate the Midrash legend. Nothing could better reveal how Pinski enriches his sources with most imaginative and dramatic touches, than a comparison of the monotonous, gossipy Midrash tale with the colorful drama developed from it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.