At his death, in 1909, a disciple evoked the memory of Jacob Gordin in these terms:
“I see him again, striding through the streets [of the Lower East Side] like a lulav branch (palm). His lordly beard spreads with a festive (yomtovdik) dignity over his broad chest. His eyes, like two flames; in his right hand a cane, in his left — one of his plays. He passes by, and the actors quiver at the sight of him. Those who know him say, ‘There goes Gordin’; the others turn around, exclaiming: ‘What a handsome man!’”
This tribute gives an idea of the stature and the renown of Jacob Gordin in the Yiddish-speaking world of the turn of the century. A period generally described as the Gordin era of Yiddish theater. A born reformer, he began as a Russian revolutionary, and ended by revolutionizing the Yiddish theater.
Gordin considered himself as much Russian as Jewish. He was born in Mirgorod, in Ukraine, in 1853. Into a family of maskilim [adherents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment]; and so he learned Russian and Yiddish, and found his place on the Russian literary scene. He devoted himself to radical politics and to Tolstoyan spirituality. He wrote in the left-wing Russian press (under the pseudonym Ivan) and spent years working in the fields, convinced that this would lead to the salvation of Russia. He left for America with a group that intended to found a utopian agricultural community — escaping arrest by the tsarist police by barely a few hours. But when he arrived in New York in 1891, he needed work, and set about writing for the Yiddish press.
In 1891, the Russian Jewish intelligentsia despised the Yiddish theater, whose first professional secular performance had taken place only fifteen years earlier (in Jassy, in Romania). The Yiddish theater already had the reputation, in Europe and in America, of being a low-grade popular entertainment. And yet this was the height of the flowering of modern Yiddish literature, and the Yiddish theater was beginning its artistic ascent. A group of experienced actors and interested amateurs were beginning to present serious plays in their Yiddish translation. The stars Jacob Adler and David Kessler, in search of better material, discovered a sketch published by Gordin in a Yiddish newspaper and proposed that he write a play. Burning with enthusiasm, Gordin went home [he recalled afterward] to write his first play, entitled Siberia at its premiere.
“I accomplished this task,” he declared afterward, “like a pious man, a scribe copying out a Torah scroll.”
This play, Siberia, illustrated nearly all the changes that Gordin was to bring to the Yiddish theater — most of which were already familiar to enlightened spectators in Europe. First, he demanded respect for the text; he forbade the actors to add lines. He sought the verisimilitude of the characters, in their language in particular. He insisted on collective work rather than on “starism” (to take up the Yiddish term), creating roles so rich, so powerful, that the actors, compelled to exploit all their possibilities in order to play them, regarded themselves as true artistn [artists], and adored him all the more for it. Later, when the craze for his plays had faded, the performers free to choose the program for benefit evenings continued to play them. Finally, falling in with the contemporary current of Yiddish-language literature and journalism, Gordin made a specific contribution to the Jewish theater: he refused the Germanized version called Daytshmersh, in favor of a Yiddish that was pure, supple, and coherent.
Melodrama dominates Gordin’s plays — some fifty of them. It appeals to violent emotions, to extremes, generally reinforced by music. It moves through successive suspenses that intensify the logic of the action. The minor characters add a comic note, a sense of relief, and a form of commentary. Gordin distinguished himself by a particular signature: the recourse to cutting aphorisms, whose effect, as the curtain fell, was striking. He was, to be sure, influenced by the naturalism and realism of his era, of his country of origin, and his melodramas recall, by their tone, The Power of Darkness by Tolstoy and The Wild Duck by Ibsen. All these elements strongly impressed the Jewish public, as well as the English and French spectators of the nineteenth century.
Melodrama adapted itself marvelously to Jewish culture, for it allows moral lessons to be given. Ashkenazi culture sets a high value on the didactic design of art, in which it is much less interested for its own sake. This attitude holds for the theater. In ancient times, the rabbis disapproved of the theater, that moshav letsim (seat of the scornful). Only characters who seemed to be bearers of a moral were admitted, for example the maggid (preacher) and the badkhen (jester). The fundamental structure of melodrama places the protagonist — always virtuous — in a situation where he is threatened by evil, or by a wicked person; yet it is evident that the good, though devoid of earthly power, will triumph in the end.
Intelligently written melodramas need not be naïve — Gordin and his public were not fools — but they invariably affirm the moral foundation of the universe. When the spectators sobbed with passion, they were reacting not to the specific incidents on stage, but to the deeper crises they perceived beyond.
Gordin used his plays, like his newspaper articles and his lecture platforms, to teach a diversity of moral lessons — most of the time. Eager to bring to modern Western culture the Jewish masses freshly arrived from the preindustrial villages of Eastern Europe, he introduced the story of Faust into Got, Mensch, un Tayvl (God, Man, and the Devil), and slipped descriptions of the Greek gods into Safo (Sappho). But he was concerned still more with philosophy and ethics. Socialism and women’s rights were themes dear to his heart. He cared also about kindness, honesty, and moral decency. In God, Man, and the Devil, the pious scribe is corrupted by money, when he opens a factory and becomes a capitalist boss. Into this corruption is written his betrayal of the friends who come to work for him, and of his faithful wife. In Sappho, the heroine refuses to marry her lover, although she is pregnant by him. She remains independent, works as a photographer while raising her child alone, and lives in harmony with her principles of honesty and loyalty.
Gordin and his publics — the practicing Jews and those who had given up most of the rites — possessed a treasury of religious allusions. They constituted that theatrical language which goes beyond words, and without which any performance would be dull, superficial. The practice of Judaism served Gordin as backdrop and as material, as device, as metaphor, and as philosophy. When the pious scribe of God, Man, and the Devil is corrupted, the twenty-third psalm, which he had sung to the accompaniment of his violin, is replaced by silence; only the closed case of the instrument remains on the stage. He opens a factory to weave talesim (prayer shawls), but when a worker dies, the sacred garment is stained with blood, and it is with this shocking object that he hangs himself. The conflict between the scribe and his tempter takes the form of a Talmudic discussion. A badkhen’s buffoonery provides an ironic commentary on the action. The abandoned wife evokes the rules of modesty. In Gordin’s plays, the hypocrites are usually wicked beings, whereas the sincerely pious persons respect the ethics of virtue.
Gordin’s role in Jewish cultural history is paradoxical. He drew artists and a public of quality toward the Yiddish theater, which he raised to an art; he considered the very existence of this theater to be indispensable to all national cultures. He breathed into it his personal moral authority. When he died, the intelligentsia judged his plays old-fashioned, but many of them remained popular. These were essentially the works closest to the traditional sources by their imagery, their aesthetic conventions, their moral values — and which, in other words, drew on the origins of the culture, providing the individual artist with the richest material, in tune with the impulses of the popular spectator.
Gordin certainly influenced the Yiddish theater, which repaid him in kind; the most powerful energy of the popular theater absorbed him, by the vitality of his repertoire. In retrospect, his most important contribution consisted, it seems, in broadening the definition of Jewishness, allowing a vaster public, and in particular the Russian Jewish intellectuals, to recognize themselves in it to their benefit.
(Translated [into French] by Anne Rabinovitch)