_The Mendele Review_: Yiddish Literature and Language (A Companion to _MENDELE_) ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 03.019 28 December 1999 1) Yiddish Matters: From the editor (Leonard Prager) 2) International Workshop on Yiddish Theater (Joel Berkowitz) 3) Books and Reprints Received (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 December 1999 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Yiddish Matters -- 1. Yiddish theater conference 2. _Politics of Yiddish_ table of contents. 1. We are pleased to present Joel Berkowitz's report on the recent international conference on the Yiddish performing arts held at Yarnton Manor, Oxford. The complete program of the conference can be viewed at http://members.tripod.com/~jtheater.oxford.htm. 2. Abe Brumberg's review of _The Politics of Yiddish_ appeared in _Mendele_ vol. 9, no. 39 on November 1, 1999. In this issue of the _TMR_ we give the Table of Contents of the volume, whose editor is Dov-Ber Kerler. 2---------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 December 1999 From: Joel Berkowitz Subject: Scientific Report on International Workshop on Yiddish Theater, Drama, and Performance (Oxford, 1999) International Workshop on Yiddish Theater, Drama, and Performance Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies Yarnton Manor, Yarnton, Oxford 29 June - 2 July 1999 Scientific Report by Joel Berkowitz Introduction A landmark event in Jewish Studies took place at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies from 28 June to 2 July 1999: the first conference devoted to the study of the international Yiddish theater, made possible by a substantial grant from the European Science Foundation. Over those four days, thirty-one participants in the International Workshop on Yiddish Theater, Drama, and the Performing Arts delivered papers from a broad range of perspectives, including theater history, cultural studies, musicology, dramatic analysis, folklore, legal history, and eyewitness accounts. The workshop participants, from eight different countries and three continents, included many internationally acclaimed figures in the study and performance of Yiddish theater. The keynote address was delivered by Professor Nahma Sandrow (New York), author of the seminal study _Vagabond Stars_, translator of the recent anthology _God, Man, and Devil_, and award-winning adaptor of Yiddish theater material. Celebrated performers Raphael Goldwasser (Strasbourg), Lea Shlanger (Israel), Shifra Lerer (New York), and Bernard Mendelovitch (London) entertained the audience with songs, monologues, and scenes from the Yiddish theater. The papers concluded with a special address by Mr Joseph Schein (Paris), world-renowned theater scholar and author of _Around the Moscow Yiddish Theater_. Mr Schein, speaking from memory without referring to notes, held the audience spellbound with his firsthand reflections on the Moscow State Yiddish Theater's legendary productions of _The Travels of Benjamin III_, _King Lear_, and _Tevye the Dairyman_. The participants, including many seasoned veterans, seemed to agree that the papers delivered at the Workshop were of a consistently high quality. Virtually all of the presenters--and the performers as well--attended every session, and given the unprecedented nature of the event and its specific focus, every panel generated considerable discussion that tended to spill over into the breaks between sessions and long after each day's events ended. I. Scientific content of the event Regardless of the content of individual presentations, one theme consistently asserted itself: the questioning, and at times a critical re-evaluation, of much of our received knowledge of the Yiddish theater and its repertoire. Examples abound, of which we cite just a few of the highlights: 1) In a panel on purimshpiln, the amateur theatrical performances given on the holiday of Purim and dating back as far as the fourteenth century, Professors Jerold Frakes and Ahuva Belkin demonstrated the political and social subversiveness of the form, while Dr Jean Baumgarten illustrated its continued viability in Hasidic Jewish communities today. 2) Several of the presenters documented the richness of Yiddish theater outside of the best- known centers of such activity. Dr Brigitte Dalinger, author of a recent book on Yiddish theater in Vienna, presented an overview of her findings. Miroslawa Bulat chronicled performances in Cracow between the two World Wars. Professor Avram Greenbaum gave an account of the important but generally ignored State Yiddish Theater of Belarus (BelGOSET). And perhaps most surprising, two participants reported on the influence of Yiddish theater on modern-day Italian theater: through a creative use of audio and video materials, Laura Mincer gave the participants a taste of Italian actor/director Moni Ovadia's use of Yiddish themes, while Dr Paola Bertolone described highlights of her own translation into Italian of Avrom Goldfaden's beloved Yiddish operetta Di kishefmakherin, performed in Italy as La maga. 3) Participants also came away from the conference with a deeper understanding of the Yiddish repertoire after hearing papers probing the form, content, and meaning of Yiddish drama. Professor Nahma Sandrow set the tone for this in her Keynote Address, in which she firmly placed the roots of modern Yiddish drama in the romantic movement, citing such figures as Goethe, Schiller, Coleridge, and Hugo as models for the concerns of many Yiddish dramatists. Dr Helen Beer offered the revelation that playwright and poet Itsik Manger had translated Georg Bchner's tragedy Woyzeck into Yiddish. Like Dr Beer, Dr Yitskhok Niborski addressed the audience in his native Yiddish, and also analysed the work of a poet/playwright: Polish Yiddish writer Aaron Tsaytlin. Vassili Schedrin gave a condensed overview of the work of Osip Dymov--like Mr Schedrin, a talented Russian- born emigrant to the United States. The papers also gave a taste of how Yiddish playwrights and performers often went beyond the boundaries of traditional drama. Professor Itsik Gottesman brought a folklorist's approach to the subject, movingly describing the monologue performances of a ^„folk reciter.' Professor Edna Nahshon explored the often blurred boundaries between law and theater in a discussion of Yiddish mock trials. And David Mazower taught the participants about a little-known form, the melodeklamatsiye, as exemplified in the work of London Yiddish playwright/composer Joseph Markovitch. 4) The influences upon the Yiddish repertoire--and on the means of staging that body of work--have been manifold and diverse, as illustrated in many of the papers. Dr Jeremy Dauber examined how the quotation of classical Jewish texts--particularly Torah and Talmud--was used for polemical ends in the satires of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah. Such techniques demonstrate the linguistic fluidity of many Yiddish writers, an issue also addressed in Dror Abend-David's exegesis of German, Yiddish, and daytshmerish [heavily Germanised Yiddish] elements in Yiddish translations of The Merchant of Venice. Yiddish language has in turn influenced writers working in other tongues, as discussed in Ben Furnish's paper on Yiddish reverberations in American Jewish drama. 5) A paper given by Professor John Klier offered exciting and original research into the well-known 1883 ban on Yiddish theater in the Russian empire. Professor Klier provided persuasive evidence that the ban, which he argues arose more from practical reasons than from ideology, was haphazardly enforced, and thus that there were numerous ^„forbidden' Yiddish performances in Russia between 1883 and 1905. Dr Barbara Henry further demonstrated the widespread performances of Yiddish plays in the Russian language between 1905 and 1917. Taking the participants into the Soviet period, Dr Jeffrey Veidlinger posed the provocative thesis that the Soviet Yiddish theater employed a network of encrypted Jewish content, making actors such as Shloyme Mikhoels a sort of 'modern-day Marrano.' Joseph Schein, the world's leading authority on the Moscow Yiddish theater, provided an eyewitness account of his work with such figures as Mikhoels, Binyomin Zuskin, and Marc Chagall. 6) The session devoted to Yiddish theater music proved as stimulating as it was controversial. Ron Robboy played an example of renowned composer Alexander Olshanetsky's use of Wagner's 'Tristan Chord,' raising perplexing questions about musical intertextuality and the intersection of Jewish and anti-Semitic cultural expression. Professor Seth Wolitz stayed closer to home, exploring Avrom Goldfaden's melding of music, subject matter, and dramatic context in the opera Shulamis and thereby making a claim for Goldfaden's being a great artist rather than merely a successful entertainer. 7) Yiddish theater criticism was shown to contain more nuance than is generally known even by scholars in the field. Nina Warnke, exploring the aesthetic politics of critics in New York around the turn of the century, argued that their widely shared view of the Yiddish theater audience as a bunch of wayward children blinded them to many of the achievements of the Yiddish theater. Chronologically, Dr Joel Berkowitz picked up where Ms Warnke left off: in 1913, the time of the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial in Kiev. Dr Berkowitz documented responses to dramatic representations to the trial in Europe and North America, a phenomenon that raised many fundamental questions about the implications of staging current events and the content of the Yiddish repertoire. II. Assessment of the results The presentations surveyed in section (1) offered a great deal of new information about the study of Yiddish theater that will undoubtedly have lasting implications for scholars in the field. Collectively, the sessions demonstrated that the Yiddish theatrical repertoire is broader and more diverse than generally believed, more widespread geographically, and more intertwined with politics, social forces, and aesthetic sensibilities of any given time and place. Of course, the ideas laid out in this Workshop represent only the beginning: what we believe will pave the way to a new generation of Yiddish theater scholarship. In his Opening Address to the Workshop participants, Dr Berkowitz outlined several areas requiring further attention by scholars, teachers, and performers of Yiddish theater. Many of those attending eagerly took up his call for a formal discussion of such issues in a round-table discussion that constituted the last session of the symposium. That discussion led to the creation of a new research network, the Yiddish Theater Forum. The Forum, which will expand to include other theater scholars worldwide, intends to carry on an ongoing internet discussion of research issues concerning the Yiddish theater, hold a biennial conference, and enhance the visibility and quality of Yiddish theater studies in academic organisations such as the Modern Language Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the European Association for Jewish Studies. A volume of conference proceedings is being planned. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 December 1999 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Books and Reprints Received 1. Samuel Batt, _Farn koved funem folk_, Los Anzheles: Mayrev Holivuder Yidish Kultur Klub, 1999, 129 zz. [yidish], 118 zz. (english). [English title page: Samuel Batt, _For the People's Honor; screenplay_, Los Angeles, CA: West Hollywood Yiddish Culture Club, 1999] [author's address: 7540 Hampton Ave., #396 West Hollywood, CA. 90046]. ["geshribn in english april 1983 ibergezetst baym mekhaber oyf yidish nerts 1999' ('written in English in April 1983 and translated by the author into Yiddish in March 1999'). 2. Kerler, Dov-Ber, ed. _Politics of Yiddish; Studies in Language, Literature, and Society [=Winter Studies in Yiddish , Volume 4] (Walnut Creek / London / New Delhi: Altamira Press, 1998, 213 pp. [ISBN 0-7619-9025-9]). CONTENTS Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dov-Ber Kerler On the "Politics of Yiddish". 1 Politics, Ideology, and Scholarship 9 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Emanuel S. Goldsmith Yiddishism and Judaism. 11 Avraam Greenbaum Yiddish language politics in the Ukraine (1930-1936). 23 Christopher Hutton What was going on at the 1935 Yivo Conference? 29 Robert D. King The Czernowitz Conference in retrospect. 41 Holger Nath The first international Conference of the Catalan Language in Barcelona (1906): a spiritual precursor to Czernowitz (1908)? 51 Rakhmiel Peltz The politics of research on spoken Yiddish.63 Communities, Centres, and Cities 75 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Milton Doroshkin Yiddish socialist press in New York, 1880s-1920s. 77 Miriam Isaacs Yiddish in orthodox communities of Jerusalem. 85 Josef Kerler Shloyme Mikhoels and his theater. 97 Hannah Kiiger Writers must eat: the New York City Yiddish Writers Group of the Works Progress Administration. 107 Raphaela Lewis Petticoat Lane and the North-West Passage (London, 1880-1940). 123 Edna Nahshon Art and politics: the case of the New York Artef Theater (1925-1940). 133 Language, Folklore, and Literature ------------------------------------------------------------------ Ahuva Belkin _Zmires purim_ -- the third phase of Jewish carnavalistic folk-literature. 149 Dafna Clifford Dovid Bergelson's _Bam Dnieper_: a 157 passport to Moscow. Josef Kerler Dovid Hofstein - our first wonder. 171 Frank Knowles The Aston corpus of Soviet Yiddish lexicon. 187 Rina Lapidus A Vilna folklorist's collection: Structural analysis of Yiddish riddles. 193 193 Wolf Moskovich Mr Khauruchenka, Miss Shaihets', Mrs Hoika and others: the origin of some unusual family names. 201 List of contributors 213 ======================================================================= End of _The Mendele Review_ 03.019 Leonard Prager, editor Subscribers to _Mendele_ (see below) automatically receive _The Mendele Review_. Send "to subscribe" or change-of-status messages to: listproc@lists.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele mail postpone b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail ack c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele ****Getting back issues**** _The Mendele Review_ archives can be reached at: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm