Abraham Goldfaden
Abraham Goldfaden, also known as Avram Goldfaden, was a Russian-born Jewish poet, playwright, stage director and actor in Yiddish and Hebrew languages and author of some 40 plays. Goldfaden is considered the father of modern Jewish theatre.
In 1876, he founded in the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia what is generally credited as the world's first professional Yiddish-language theatre troupe. He was also responsible for the first Hebrew-language play performed in the United States. The Avram Goldfaden Festival of Iaşi, Romania, is named after him and held in his honour.
Jacob Sternberg called him "the Prince Charming who woke up the lethargic Romanian Jewish culture". Israil Bercovici wrote of his works: "we find points in common with what we now call 'total theatre'. In many of his plays he alternates prose and verse, pantomime and dance, moments of acrobatics and some of juggling, and even of spiritualism..."
Early life (1840-1876)
Goldfaden was born on in Starokonstantinov in Volhynia Governorate of the Russian Empire. He attended a Jewish religious school, but his middle-class family was strongly associated with the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and his father, a watchmaker, arranged that he receive private lessons in German and Russian. As a child, he is said to have appreciated and imitated the performances of wedding jesters and Brody singers to the degree that he acquired the nickname Avromele Badkhen, "Abie the Jester." In 1857, he began studies at the government-run rabbinical school at Zhitomir, from which he emerged in 1866 as a teacher and a poet, but he never led a congregation.Goldfaden's first published poem was called "Progress"; his The New York Times obituary described it as "a plea for Zionism years before that movement developed". In 1865 he published his first book of poetry, Tzitzim u-Ferahim ; The Jewish Encyclopaedia says that "Goldfaden's Hebrew poetry... possesses considerable merit, but it has been eclipsed by his Yiddish poetry, which, for strength of expression and for depth of true Jewish feeling, remains unrivalled". The first book of verse in Yiddish was published in 1866, and in 1867 he took a job teaching in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula.
A year later, he moved on to Odessa. He lived initially in his uncle's house, where a cousin who was a good pianist helped him set some of his poems to music. In Odessa, Goldfaden renewed his acquaintance with fellow Yiddish-language writer Yitzkhok Yoel Linetzky, whom he knew from Zhitomir, and met Hebrew-language poet Eliahu Mordechai Werbel and published poems in the newspaper Kol-Mevaser. He also wrote his first two plays, Die Tzwei Sheines and Die Murneh Sosfeh, included with some verses in a modestly successful 1869 book Die Yidene, which went through three editions in three years. At this time, he and Paulina were living mainly on his meagre teacher's salary of 18 rubles a year, supplemented by his giving private lessons and taking a job as a cashier in a hat shop.
In 1875, Goldfaden headed for Munich, intending to study medicine. This did not work out, and he headed for Lvov/Lemberg in Habsburg-ruled Galicia, where he again met up with Linetsky, now editor of a weekly paper, Isrulik or Der Alter Yisrulik. A year later, he moved on to Chernivtsi in Habsburg Bukovina, where he edited the Yiddish-language daily Dos Bukoviner Israelitische Folksblatt. The limits of the economic sense of this enterprise can be gauged from his inability to pay a registration fee of 3000 ducats. He tried unsuccessfully to operate the paper under a different name, but soon moved on to Iaşi in Moldavia on the invitation of Isaac Librescu, a young wealthy community activist interested in theatre.
Iaşi
Arriving in Iaşi in 1876, Goldfaden was fortunate to be better known as a good poet — many of whose poems had been set to music and had become popular songs — than as a less-than-successful businessman. Nevertheless, when he sought funds from Isaac Librescu for another newspaper, Librescu was uninterested in that proposition. Librescu's wife remarked that Yiddish-language journalism was just a way to starve and suggested that there would be a lot more of a market for Yiddish-language theatre. Librescu offered Goldfaden 100 francs for a public recital of his songs in the garden of Shimen Mark, Grădina Pomul Verde.Instead of a simple recital, Goldfaden expanded the program into something of a vaudeville performance; either this or an indoor performance he and his fellow performers gave later that year in Botoşani is generally counted as the first professional Yiddish theatre performance. However, in the circumstances, the designation of a single performance as "the first" may be nominal: Goldfaden's first actor, Israel Grodner, was already singing Goldfaden's songs in the salons of Iaşi. Also, in 1873, Grodner sang in a concert in Odessa that apparently included significant improvised material between songs, although no actual script.
Although Goldfaden, by his own account, was familiar at this time with "practically all of Russian literature", and also had plenty of exposure to Polish theatre, and had even seen an African American tragedian, Ira Aldridge, performing Shakespeare, the performance at Grădina Pomul Verde was only a bit more of a play than Grodner had participated in three years earlier. The songs were strung together with a bit of character and plot and a good bit of improvisation. The performance by Goldfaden, Grodner, Sokher Goldstein, and possibly as many as three other men went over well. The first performance was either Di bobe mitn einikl or Dos bintl holts ; sources disagree.
After that time, Goldfaden continued miscellaneous newspaper work, but the stage became his main focus.
Later that summer, the famous Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu, then a journalist, saw one of the Pomul Verde performances. He recorded in his review that the company had six players. He was impressed by the quality of the singing and acting, but found the pieces "without much dramatic interest." His generally positive comments would seem to deserve to be taken seriously: Eminescu was known generally as "virulently antisemitic." Eminescu appears to have seen four of Goldfaden's early plays: a satiric musical revue Di velt a gan-edn, Der farlibter maskil un der oyfgeklerter hosid, another musical revue Der shver mitn eidem, and a comedy, Fishl der balegole un zayn knecht Sider.
Searching for a theatre
As the season for outdoor performances was coming to a close, Goldfaden tried and failed to rent an appropriate theatre in Iaşi. A theatre owner named Reicher, presumably Jewish himself, told him that "a troupe of Jewish singers" would be "too dirty." Goldfaden, Grodner, and Goldstein headed first to Botoşani, where they lived in a garret and Goldfaden continued to churn out songs and plays. An initial successful performance of Di Rekruten in an indoor theatre was followed by days of rain so torrential that no one would come out to the theatre; they pawned some possessions and left for Galaţi, which was to prove a bit more auspicious, with a successful three-week run.In Galaţi they acquired their first serious set designer, a housepainter known as Reb Moishe Bas. He had no formal artistic training, but he proved to be good at the job, and joined the troupe, as did Sara Segal, their first actress. She was not yet out of her teens. After seeing her perform in their Galaţi premiere, her mother objected to her unmarried daughter cavorting on a stage. Goldstein - who, unlike Goldfaden and Grodner, was single - promptly married her and she remained with the troupe.
After the successful run in Galaţi came a less successful attempt in Brăila, but by now the company had honed its act and it was time to go to the capital, Bucharest.
Bucharest
As in Iași, Goldfaden arrived in Bucharest with his reputation already established. He and his players performed first in the early spring at the salon Lazăr Cafegiu on Calea Văcărești, then, once the weather turned warm, at the Jignița garden, a pleasant tree-shaded beer garden on Str. Negru Vodă that up until then had drawn only a neighbourhood crowd. He filled out his cast from the great pool of Jewish vocal talent: synagogue cantors. He also recruited two eminently respectable classically trained prima donnas, the sisters Margaretta and Annetta Schwartz.Among the cantors in his casts that year were Lazăr Zuckermann, Moishe Zilberman, and Simhe Dinman, as well as the 18-year-old Zigmund Mogulescu, who soon became a stage star. Orphaned by the time he reached his teen years, Mogulescu had already made his way in the world as a singer - not only as a soloist in the Great Synagogue of Bucharest but also as a performer in cafes, at parties, with a visiting French operetta company, and even in a church choir. Before his voice changed, he had sung with Zuckerman, Dinman, and Moses Wald in the "Israelite Chorus", performing at important ceremonies in the Jewish community. Mogulescu's audition for Goldfaden was a scene from Vlăduţu Mamei, which formed the basis later that year for Goldfaden's light comedy Shmendrik, oder Die Komishe Chaseneh, starring Mogulescu as the almost painfully clueless and hapless young man.
This recruiting of cantors was not without controversy: Cantor Cuper, the head cantor of the Great Synagogue, considered it "impious" that cantors should perform in a secular setting, to crowds where both sexes mingled freely, keeping people up late so that they might not be on time for morning prayers.
While one may argue over which performance "started" Yiddish theatre, by the end of that summer in Bucharest Yiddish theatre was an established fact. The influx of Jewish merchants and middlemen to the city at the start of the Russo-Turkish War had greatly expanded the audience; among these new arrivals were Israel Rosenberg and Jacob Spivakovsky, the highly cultured scion of a wealthy Russian Jewish family, both of whom actually joined Goldfaden's troupe, but soon left to found the first Yiddish theatre troupe in Imperial Russia.
Goldfaden was churning out a repertoire – new songs, new plays and translations of plays from Romanian, French, and other languages – and while he was not always able to retain the players in his company once they became stars in their own right, he continued for many years to recruit first-rate talent, and his company became a de facto training ground for Yiddish theatre. By the end of the year, others were writing Yiddish plays as well, such as Moses Horowitz with Der tiranisher bankir, or Grodner with Curve un ganev, and Yiddish theatre had become big theatre, with elaborate sets, duelling choruses, and extras to fill out crowd scenes.
Goldfaden was helped by Ion Ghica, then head of the Romanian National Theatre to legally establish a "dramatic society" to handle administrative matters. From those papers, it is known that the troupe at the Jigniţa included Moris Teich, Michel Liechman, Lazăr Zuckermann, Margareta Schwartz, Sofia Palandi, Aba Goldstein, and Clara Goldstein. We also know from similar papers that when Grodner and Mogulescu walked out on Goldfaden to start their own company, it included Israel Rosenberg, Jacob Spivakovsky, P. Şapira, M. Banderevsky, Anetta Grodner, and Rosa Friedman.
Ion Ghica was a valuable ally for Yiddish theatre in Bucharest. On several occasions he expressed his favourable view of the quality of the acting, and even more of the technical aspects of the Yiddish theatre. In 1881, he obtained for the National Theatre the costumes that had been used for a Yiddish pageant on the coronation of King Solomon, which had been timed in tribute to the actual coronation of Carol I of Romania.