Rewriting Russia : Jacob Gordin's Yiddish drama

Author(s)

    • Henry, Barbara J.

Bibliographic Information

Rewriting Russia : Jacob Gordin's Yiddish drama

Barbara Henry

(Samuel and Althea Stroum book)

University of Washington Press, c2011

  • : cloth

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-221) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian emigre. His most successful and scandalous dramas--The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan--were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Note on Transliteration Introduction 1. Amerika 2. In the Old Country: The Reformer 3. A Russian Writer 4. The Perils of Performance: Di kreytser sonata (1902) 5. Don't Look Back: Orphan in the Underworld (1903) 6. Homecoming Notes Bibliography Index

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