Yes, you are a Jewish King Lear!

"Reb Dovidl, I do not know if you have heard of the world-famous writer Shakespeare. Among his works is a drama with the title King Lear. The old king, like you, divided his kingdom and also like you sent away the loving daughter who told him the truth. Oh! How dearly he paid for that! Yes, you are a Jewish King Lear! May God protect you from such an end as that to which King Lear came." (Act I)

That's from The Jewish King Lear, a Yiddish play by Jacob Gordin, written and first performed in New York City in 1892. As a repertory vehicle for the legendary actor Jacob Adler (see left), it was performed, off and on, for over thirty years.

The Yale University Press translation (2007) is actually called The Jewish King Lear: A Comedy in America, but the play is, Fool aside, really a melodrama. Cordelia marries Edgar and is reconciled with Lear. Goneril and Regan are more weak and pitiful than evil. The Gloucester plot is merged with Lear's story - it's Lear who goes blind, from glaucoma, which is cured by his surgeon daughter!

I'm keeping Shakespeare's names, since they fit, but the characters' names, the settings, the Purim play, are all Jewish. When a rich merchant divides his property among his three daughters, and rejects the beloved daughter who refuses to thank him for his gift, it is the educated, secularized Edgar who recognizes that the situation is exactly like Shakespeare and says the lines I started with. The climax of the play comes when the battered, pathetic, blind Lear acknowledges the literary analogy:

"What was it [Cordelia's] teacher once said to me? I am the Jewish King Lear... well! I will stretch out my trembling hand and will say: 'Give a little kopeck to the Jewish King Lear!'" (Act III)

Then Lear and his loyal Fool, I mean servant, go into the world to beg. A great scene; easy to imagine how effective it was. Unlike the blunt ending, post-glaucoma:

"I was against Science! But look what a wonder science has performed. I thought a woman had to be dependent on her husband. But look at what a useful person my [Cordelia] is," etc. (Act IV)

I wrote about a later Jacob Gordin play last month, God, Man, and Devil. That one is a Jewish Faust. Perhaps it is possible to detect a pattern already. Among Gordin's eighty plays are adaptations of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and Tennyson's poem Enoch Arden. There's also a Jewish Queen Lear, and why not. Gordin was an improver - educate and uplift. Some other titles: The Pogrom in Russia; Siberia; Hasia the Orphan. You can see where he got his nickname, "Big Barrel of Laughs" Gordin.*

Actually, The Jewish King Lear is not quite humorless, because of one character, the servant, the Fool, who just flew in from the Catskills:

ALBANY: Do you think that we only think of eating?
FOOL: I have heard it said: study like a Jew and eat like a Gentile. And that is after all the law in the Torah.
ALBANY: With your peasant's head, what do you know of what is written in the Gemara?
FOOL: Even if it's not written in the Gemara, it's still a very fine law.

The Jewish King Lear is a step or two away from a masterpiece - I think God, Man, and Devil was better, anyway - but I would love to read more of these fascinating Jacob Gordin plays.

* Nickname made up by me.

Yiddish playwrights are against greed. Me, too, no evil eye.

All of the plays in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation are American (written in the U.S., performed in New York theaters), but most of them are set in the old country, not so old for most of the audience.

The best play, I think, it the one Nahma Sandrow puts in the title: Jacob Gordin's God, Man, and Devil (1900). Gordin was a giant in the Yiddish theater, it's first serious playwright. He was right in the mainstream of modern theater, and reminded me at times of Ibsen or Ostrovsky. Gordin was a Tolstoyan who wanted to use the theater to educate the masses about high culture; as a result, he wrote a stage version of The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Jewish King Lear, which I must, must read.

God, Man, and Devil has a literary predecessor, too, as one might guess from the title. This is a Faust story. In a simplified version of Goethe's prologue, Satan, not to be mentioned on anyone's blog, convinces a distant, preoccupied God to let him test the virtue of a pious man with riches. Satan, no evil eye, actually tells us that this has be more like the story of Faust than Job, because "Nowadays a Jew is used to sorrows."

The dapper Mephistopheles, not to be thought of, calling himself Uriel Mischief, inveigles the poor, virtuous scribe Hereshele into buying a lottery ticket, a winner. Hershele is a genuinely religoius man, but the money, and Mischief's influence, ruin his and his family's lives, no evil eye, in more or less predictable ways. We get divorce, industrial accidents, attempted murder, all sorts of dramatic things.

The ingenious thing about the play is how Hershele's worst traits turn out to have been present all along, and how they are brought out through his interactions with his wife and father and other characters. The story of a man destroyed by his greed, good stay, evil away, is not exactly subtle, but the dramatic revelation of his character is expertly done. Hershele really is a good man, but not just that, like all of us.

It was asking for trouble to mention the devil, not to be mentioned, or good luck, no evil eye, and Hershele has a superstitious neighbor who has all of the formulas necessary to ward off all the bad effects. I have interlarded my text with some of them. She, of course, mentions luck and the devil more than anyone. A good gag for a play where the devil is an onstage character.

David Pinski's play The Treasure (1906) is also a greed play. An undertaker's son finds some gold coins in the cemetery while burying his dog. The vain teenage daughter, who is, frankly, a scream, gets to be a rich girl for a day, perhaps a bit too publicly. Next thing you know, the whole town is digging up the cemetery. Finally, logically, the disturbed dead take the stage.

This one's not exactly subtle, either, but it's funny, it builds to a meaningful climax, and I'll bet it works well live. Sandrow includes a scene from another from another Pinski play, Yankl the Blacksmith, just to show that Jewish playwrights did actually write about lust and adultery and other typical dramatic subjects (and the scene is well-chosen - it's like Jewish Tennessee Williams). But four out of the five plays in her excellent book are primarily attacks on greed.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 3 - Dybbuks, postcards, and King Lear

More early Yiddish writers, on stage and in America.

S. Ansky (1863-1920), a scholar and ethnographer, wrote The Dybbuk (1914), a landmark in the Yiddish theater. The Dybbuk and Other Writings is the book I'll look at first, but his account of the Russian Army's devastation of the shtetls during World War I, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, sounds fascinating.

The Yiddish theater seems to have been most active in the United States. For example, Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear (1892), which is not quite just what it sounds like, but pretty close. This play was only recently translated - Stephen Greenblatt's review of it in The New Republic several months ago is one of the spurs to this project. God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation includes another Gordin play, and who knows what else. An older collection, Six Plays of the Yiddish Theater, may also be worth a look.

The short story writer Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) may push too far out of the 19th century. On the other hand, he seems to be amazing. Last year's The Cross and Other Jewish Stories is the place to go. Wyatt Mason posted an entire story in July.

I'd like to read Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) someday - The Rise of David Levinsky, or Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto - but I think he wrote in English. We'll see. I have to draw a line somewhere.

How about poetry? The earliest Yiddish-American poets I know of, Mani Leib and Moyshe Halpern, start their careers just a little too late, I think. If I change my mind, Ruth Wisse's study A Little Love in Big Manhattan will fill me in.

Wisse also edited a collection called A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas. No idea what's in it. Or in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Or in Great Works of Jewish Fantasy. I could go on.

Two books of photos look interesting. Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1947) contains photos of ghetto life in the 1930s, mostly in Poland. As one might guess, the book was published as an act of remembrance. But what Yiddish-related book is not an act of remembrance now. For example, Yiddishland, which collects actual shtetl postcards. See left. Amazing.

Please fill me in on your favorites - literature, history, art, criticism. I've told you everything I know, almost. I've listed more books than I will actually read. Point me in the right direction.

Update: David Bergelson was a major omission from the original post.