The Jewish Shakespeare

By BETH KAPLAN

In the early hours of Friday, June 11, 1909, the famous playwright Jacob Gordin (née Yakov) died in New York City. There were no prayers, no Jewish burial rites. Early on Sunday, after a brief secular ceremony, Gordin’s coffin was carried from his narrow Brooklyn row house.

As soon as word got out, the writer’s home was besieged with condolences. Telegraphs poured in; letters piled up; a scrawled note arrived from the Catskills requesting a photo of Gordin, for “all the jews in Monticello are Morning…[him].” News had spread since Friday, when the front page of the Jewish Daily Forward was banded in black. “Our friend is gone!” it exclaimed. “Gordin is gone!”

That Sunday morning, the 3,000-seat Thalia Theater was packed to its ornate ceiling with mourners, its stage overflowing with red and white roses. Jewish New York had never seen a funeral quite like this, with 250,000 mourners paying their respects. But then again, the emotional display was understandable: The entire community was consumed with grief, the agony made worse by guilt. For years, they had turned their backs on Gordin; even his theater colleagues had abandoned him. Gordin died a humiliated man, bitter and broken-hearted at the age of fifty-six. Late in life, he became convinced that his life’s work—to propel Jews, and then every other citizen of the world, into social and political enlightenment with his dramatic words—had been in vain.
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Gordin’s story begins in Russia on an auspicious day—May Day, 1853—in an ancient and prosperous shtetl on the expansive black steppes of the Ukraine. During Gordin’s youth a movement called the Haskala, the Enlightenment or emancipation, was pushing its way east from Germany. The Haskala philosophers, known as Maskilim or “enlighteners,” encouraged secular education and acculturation to the society outside the ghetto walls. Yakov’s father, Mikhail Yekiel Levi, or Ha-Levi, was a Maskil. Yakov Gordin was home-schooled in the open ways of the Haskala by his father, who brought Hebrew, Russian, and German books and magazines into the house for his son.

By the time of his bar mitzvah in 1866, the precocious young man was spouting socialist slogans. All around him, society was in ferment: Revolutionary groups, social movements, idealistic cult-like societies were springing up throughout the western world, as secularity challenged the dominance of religious thought and discontented citizens sought alternatives to the stagnant status quo. Young Russian-Jewish radicals like Gordin absorbed into their very pores the Haskala literature urging Jews to turn to humanism, to break free from the narrowness of Jewish life and join the world.

It was not until 1891 that Gordin was forced to leave Russia. Though he abandoned his Russian rubles, he kept his illusions about his birth country for many years, long after most Jewish dissidents had come to realize that Russian Jews would always be outcasts. Arriving in lower Manhattan via steamship, Gordin stepped into his new life—as Jacob.

Gordin immediately began to write articles for the Yiddish Worker’s Newspaper. Just as quickly, he became immersed in the world of Yiddish theater. Although he had no knowledge of the historionic world he was about to enter or of the technical requirements of playwriting, Gordin was determined that his plays be of far higher caliber and more attuned to realism than any Yiddish play yet seen in New York.

Success came rapidly. The Mail and Express compared Gordin to Shakespeare, as both worked “for a humble and absolutely unconventionalized public...” (Jewish writers, it seems, achieved their greatest status when they were compared to other writers, as Gordin so often was). That “humble public” was New York’s ghetto of immigrants, a people without a country, speaking an ancient language with a brand-new dictionary; many, in fact, still fought for food and a decent place to sleep. Before them stood one broad-shouldered man, a writer who spoke in their own tongue and had brought their old lives onto the stage. With his clear, stern views on the issues confronting them now, Jacob Gordin tried to touch them all.

Indeed, his plays were flinging out a number of subversive ideas for a nineteenth-century immigrant audience to digest all at once: Unashamed pregnancy out of wedlock; love without marriage; and, most difficult of all, female self-determination. His plays’ portrayal of love, motherhood, and unwedded independence not only challenged Jewish law but many centuries of Jewish tradition. Responding to his critics, Gordin wrote that the task of every poet, every writer, is to struggle against old dogmas, and to enlighten the people. One of the lessons of his plays is that moral laws should apply to everyone equally.

It was a message that didn’t please everyone. Gordin’s radical ideas, large following, and tumultuous relationships with other playwrights led one paper to write that Gordin’s pen was “enlisted in the service of anarchist propaganda...replete with denunciation of Judaism and Jewish morality...With Jacob Gordin in their ranks, the anarchists conspire to capture the Yiddish stage.” Gordin was relentlessly attacked by Abraham Cahan, the founding editor of the Forward, who hounded Gordin until the very end of his life; the two men were mortal enemies. Gordin was even accused of antisemitism by a rival who claimed that in writing about the Jewish family, Gordin looked only for ugliness—theft, adultery, murder.

In fact, Gordin did not define himself as a Jew but as a citizen of the wide world; comedies with Jewish folk themes held no interest for him. Yet his influence in the Jewish theater world was profound. As Yiddish theater began to fail, as mama-loshen diminished in importance, the Yiddish American companies which still existed continued to produce Gordin’s work. In 1911, a brooding civil servant named Franz Kafka wrote in his diary about “the obviously great powers of the playwright” after seeing Gordin’s play The Wild Man performed in Prague. As recently as 1979, the Third New York Yiddish Film Festival, held in New York, was “dedicated to Jacob Gordin, playwright.”

In the days following Gordin’s death, the English-language press, including the Forward, contributed lamentations and eulogies. “All his life he fought like a bear,” the journalist Louis Lipsky wrote. “Peace to your spirit, great teacher of the long-suffering people,” wrote a Russian paper. Even before he died, Gordin had his defenders in the press. “He has the gift of energy, humor, and a ‘hustling’ ability that is truly modern,” one English-language paper asserted, describing Gordin as stalwart and majestic.

Over and over since his death, producers have chosen from the Gordin repertoire. But of all of his ongoing appearances, I am proudest by far of this: for three decades after his death, Gordin—“The first Jewish playwright,” “the people’s writer,” and my great grandfather—continued to be the most produced playwright of the Eastern European Yiddish theater troupes.

This piece was adapted from Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, with the permission of the author and the publisher.