YIDDISH PLAYWRIGHTS
SHOLEM ALEICHEM (1859 - 1916)
Sholem Aleichem believed that Yiddish should be a national Jewish language accorded the same status and respect as other modern European languages. Born Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich in the Ukraine, he took the pen name Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish for Peace be with you! and used as a greeting meaning Good day!) when he dedicated himself to writing at 15. He began by writing in Russian and Hebrew but adopted Yiddish in 1883 when he married Olga Love, one of his wealthy private students, with whom he eventually had six children. He used his wife's personal fortune to support his own writing as well as that of other Yiddish writers until he lost it in a business deal in 1890. In August 1904, Sholem Aleichem published an anthology of literature and art to raise funds for victims of the Kishinev pogrom. The volume included Yiddish translations of three stories submitted by Tolstoy as well as contributions by Chekhov and others. Following waves of pogroms in southern Russia in 1905, he moved to New York City while settling his family in Geneva. When he failed to establish himself in the Yiddish theatre in NY, he moved to Geneva. During this period he suffered a relapse of an earlier bout with tuberculosis and spent the next four years living as a semi-invalid supported largely by donations from friends and admirers. He moved his family back to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1914. After his son's death in 1915, he became profoundly depressed and died the following year at the age of 57. By that time, he had published over 40 volumes of novels, stories, and plays in Yiddish, and his funeral was one of the largest in New York City history with an estimated 100,000 mourners. His will was printed in the New York Times and was read into the Congressional Record of the United States. Sholem Aleichem was often referred to as the "Jewish Mark Twain" because both had a similar writing style, used pen names, and were translated widely. When the two finally met late in life, Twain is said to have told him that he was the "American Sholem Aleichem."
ISAAC DOV BERKOWITZ (1885 - 1967)
Isaac Dov Berkowitz was born in 1885 in Slutsk, Belarus. His first work, At the eve of Yom Kippur, was published in Warsaw in 1903. In 1905, Berkowitz moved to Vilna, Poland, where he worked as an editor for the publication The Time. He met and married Sholom Aleichem's daughter in Vilna in 1906. In 1910, Berkowitz published his first Collected Stories and soon after began to translate Sholom Aleichem's writings from Yiddish into Hebrew. Two years later, he translated Leo Tolstoy's Childhood from Russian into Hebrew. Berkowitz emigrated to the United States on the eve of the First World War, and in 1916 he founded and became editor of Flagpole. Four years later, he became the editor of Shelter. In 1928, Berkowitz emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he co-edited Weights with Fishel Lachower. He also adapted several of Sholom Aleichem's plays for the Habima Theatre. In 1944, he was awarded the 'Tschernikovsky Prize' for his translations of Sholom Aleichem's Collected Works. In 1952, he was awarded the 'Bialik Prize' for his Stories and Plays. In 1958, he received the 'Israel Prize'. Berkowitz was awarded the Bialik Prize a second time for his Childhood Chapters in 1965. He died in 1967.
FISHEL BIMKO (1890 - 1965)
Fishel Bimko was born in Keltse, Poland in 1890. He emigrated to America, where he died in 1965. Bimko was a playwright as well as a short story writer and a novelist. The most well-known of his novels was Hele Blikn [Light Glances]. When his collected works were published, they filled ten volumes. Bimko's first two plays - Ganovim [Thieves] and Dembes [Oaks] - are considered his best works.
PERETZ HIRSHBEIN (1880 - 1948)
Peretz Hirshbein, born in 1880 to a Russian miller, was instrumental in reviving Yiddish theater in Russia in 1904 following the lifting of the twenty-one year old ban on Yiddish Theatrical performances. Hirshbein became known as "the Yiddish Maeterlinck" because his plays focus more on mood than plot. From 1908-1910, the theatre troupe he founded in Odessa, Ukraine performed his own plays as well as those of Sholem Asch, David Pinski, Jacob Gordin, and Sholem Aleichem across Imperial Russia. The troupe's high literary standards and high standards of ensemble acting had an important influence on the theatre community in the region and laid much of the groundwork for the Yiddish 'Art Theatre' movement that began shortly after the end of World War I.
After the financial demise of his theatre troupe, Hirshbein traveled extensively in Europe and even visited New York, where, in 1912, he tried to make a living as a farmer in the Catskills. After a brief return to Russia, he made another attempt at farming Jewish agricultural colony in Argentina. At the onset of World War I, he was en route to New York on a British ship that was sunk by a German cruiser. He was briefly taken captive and then deposited in Brazil, from where he eventually made his way to his final home in New York.
The simplicity and modesty of a 1918 production of Hirshbein's A Farvorfen Vinkel (A Neglected Nook or A Hidden Corner) made theatrical history in New York where bravura was customary on the Yiddish stage. Together with fellow playwrights David Pinski and H. Leivick, he created Unzer Teater (Our Theater), one of the more innovative and noteworthy Yiddish theaters of the period, in the Bronx in 1925. The group folded after one season due to financial difficulties. Hirshbein died in 1948.
Hirshbein's plays include, in 1906: Neveyle (Carcass), Tzvishen Tog Un Nacht/Dammerung (Between Day and Night), Oif Yener Zeit Taikh (On the Other Side of the River); in 1907: Die Erd (Earth), Tkais Kaf (Contract, a.k.a The Agreement), Oifn Shaidveg (Parting of the Ways); in 1908: Die Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain); in 1912: Die Puste Kretshme (The Haunted Inn), A Farvorfen Vinkel (A Neglected Nook or A Hidden Corner); in 1916: Griene Felder (Green Fields); Date Unknown: Dem Schmids Tekhter (The Smith's Daughters), Navla or Nevila (1924 or earlier), Where Life Ends, Joel, The Last One, The Infamous, and A Lima Bean. Hirshbein also wrote a Yiddish-language novel called Roite Felder (Red Fields) in 1935 and an English language screenplay called Hitler's Madman, which was directed in 1943 by Douglas Sirk.
After the financial demise of his theatre troupe, Hirshbein traveled extensively in Europe and even visited New York, where, in 1912, he tried to make a living as a farmer in the Catskills. After a brief return to Russia, he made another attempt at farming Jewish agricultural colony in Argentina. At the onset of World War I, he was en route to New York on a British ship that was sunk by a German cruiser. He was briefly taken captive and then deposited in Brazil, from where he eventually made his way to his final home in New York.
The simplicity and modesty of a 1918 production of Hirshbein's A Farvorfen Vinkel (A Neglected Nook or A Hidden Corner) made theatrical history in New York where bravura was customary on the Yiddish stage. Together with fellow playwrights David Pinski and H. Leivick, he created Unzer Teater (Our Theater), one of the more innovative and noteworthy Yiddish theaters of the period, in the Bronx in 1925. The group folded after one season due to financial difficulties. Hirshbein died in 1948.
Hirshbein's plays include, in 1906: Neveyle (Carcass), Tzvishen Tog Un Nacht/Dammerung (Between Day and Night), Oif Yener Zeit Taikh (On the Other Side of the River); in 1907: Die Erd (Earth), Tkais Kaf (Contract, a.k.a The Agreement), Oifn Shaidveg (Parting of the Ways); in 1908: Die Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain); in 1912: Die Puste Kretshme (The Haunted Inn), A Farvorfen Vinkel (A Neglected Nook or A Hidden Corner); in 1916: Griene Felder (Green Fields); Date Unknown: Dem Schmids Tekhter (The Smith's Daughters), Navla or Nevila (1924 or earlier), Where Life Ends, Joel, The Last One, The Infamous, and A Lima Bean. Hirshbein also wrote a Yiddish-language novel called Roite Felder (Red Fields) in 1935 and an English language screenplay called Hitler's Madman, which was directed in 1943 by Douglas Sirk.
H. LEIVICK (1888 - 1962)
The Encyclopedia Judaica calls H. Leivick “an outstanding figure in the history of modern Yiddish literature, remarkable for the broad sweep of his poetry, spanning the Siberia of political exile, the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side, the oppressiveness of the sanatorium, the Kabbalists of Sfad, and the Holocaust.... His work is imbued with a quasi-mystical, neo-Romantic humanism that finds a redemptive purpose in suffering and is constantly concerned with the cosmic struggle between good and evil.”
Leivick was the oldest of nine children born into an observant Jewish household in Chervyen, Belarus. He began his schooling in a yeshiva but abandoned traditional Judaism after joining the Jewish Revolutionary Party (The Bund). It was also through the influence of the Bund that he began to write in Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew. At 18, Leivick was arrested by Russian authorities for distributing revolutionary literature. He refused any legal assistance during his trial and instead denounced the government: "I will not defend myself… I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary party, the Bund, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, its bloody henchmen, and you as well." He was sentenced to four years of forced labor and then permanent exile in Siberia. Leivick was eventually smuggled out of Siberia with the assistance of Jewish revolutionaries in America and sailed to America in the summer of 1913.
Leivick began his working life in America in a sweat-shop in Philadelphia. He spent most of his life employed as a wallpaper-hanger, while simultaneously pursuing his writing. By the early 1920s, Leivick was writing poetry and plays for several Yiddish dailies, including the Communist Morgen Freiheit and later Der Tog. He also edited an exhaustive series of Yiddish anthologies. A member of Di Yunge, a group of avant-garde American-Yiddish poets, he believed in the artistic and aesthetic possibilities of Yiddish, and encouraged the use of Yiddish in literary work rather than simply to engage the immigrant masses in radical politics as had been the custom. Leivick was among those Yiddish playwrights who found the Yiddish stage of the 1920’s wanting in artistic value and sought to change that through his own writing.
After visiting Europe in 1925, Leivick grew increasingly disillusioned with Bolshevism. His play, The Golem, was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled critique of the Bolshevik Revolution and prompted criticism from the Soviet Union and from Communist Yiddishists. Leivick stopped writing for the Communist papers in 1929 following their public support for the Arab riots in Palestine and broke off all connections with the left following the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.
Leivick’s distinctive lyric voice strongly resonated with the Yiddish public and he became one of the most prominent Yiddish poets in the world. His neo-Romantic style was marked by a deep apocalyptic pessimism combined with a yearning for the mystical and messianic, themes that continually appeared in his writing. Leivick's characters are said to reflect childhood wounds from his abusive father, unpleasant experiences with Orthodox Judaism, his four-years of suffering from tuberculosis, and his years of imprisonment. Much of his work dealt with themes of illness or exile. His complete works were published in 1940. Leivick traveled to Germany with a Holocaust survivor in 1946 in order to provide words of encouragement to survivors living in displaced persons (DP) camps. At Foerhenwald, he witnessed the first wedding between two survivors and told the survivors that “A Jew is stronger than the crematoriums, stronger than gas chambers. You must find peace within yourselves. Through inner peace we will all be healed.” His play A Khaseneh in Ferenvald came out of that experience. In 1958, a stroke left Leivick unable to speak and presumably to write as well until his death on Dec 23, 1962.
Leivick’s plays include: Dort Vu Di Frayhayt, 1912 (Where Freedom Dwells, 1952); Der Goylem 1921 (The Golem, 1966); Shmatez, 1920s (Rags, 1928); Di Oreme Melukhe, 1920’s (The Poor Kingdom, 1927); Bankrot, 1920’s (Bankrupt, 1927); Shap, 1920’s (Shop, 1928; 1999); In Keynems Land (In No Man’s Land, 1922), the poem/play Hirsh Lekert, 1926; Abelar un Heluiz, 1936 (Abelard and Heloise); and A Khasene in Ferenvald, 1949 (A Wedding in Ferenwald).
Leivick was the oldest of nine children born into an observant Jewish household in Chervyen, Belarus. He began his schooling in a yeshiva but abandoned traditional Judaism after joining the Jewish Revolutionary Party (The Bund). It was also through the influence of the Bund that he began to write in Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew. At 18, Leivick was arrested by Russian authorities for distributing revolutionary literature. He refused any legal assistance during his trial and instead denounced the government: "I will not defend myself… I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary party, the Bund, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, its bloody henchmen, and you as well." He was sentenced to four years of forced labor and then permanent exile in Siberia. Leivick was eventually smuggled out of Siberia with the assistance of Jewish revolutionaries in America and sailed to America in the summer of 1913.
Leivick began his working life in America in a sweat-shop in Philadelphia. He spent most of his life employed as a wallpaper-hanger, while simultaneously pursuing his writing. By the early 1920s, Leivick was writing poetry and plays for several Yiddish dailies, including the Communist Morgen Freiheit and later Der Tog. He also edited an exhaustive series of Yiddish anthologies. A member of Di Yunge, a group of avant-garde American-Yiddish poets, he believed in the artistic and aesthetic possibilities of Yiddish, and encouraged the use of Yiddish in literary work rather than simply to engage the immigrant masses in radical politics as had been the custom. Leivick was among those Yiddish playwrights who found the Yiddish stage of the 1920’s wanting in artistic value and sought to change that through his own writing.
After visiting Europe in 1925, Leivick grew increasingly disillusioned with Bolshevism. His play, The Golem, was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled critique of the Bolshevik Revolution and prompted criticism from the Soviet Union and from Communist Yiddishists. Leivick stopped writing for the Communist papers in 1929 following their public support for the Arab riots in Palestine and broke off all connections with the left following the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.
Leivick’s distinctive lyric voice strongly resonated with the Yiddish public and he became one of the most prominent Yiddish poets in the world. His neo-Romantic style was marked by a deep apocalyptic pessimism combined with a yearning for the mystical and messianic, themes that continually appeared in his writing. Leivick's characters are said to reflect childhood wounds from his abusive father, unpleasant experiences with Orthodox Judaism, his four-years of suffering from tuberculosis, and his years of imprisonment. Much of his work dealt with themes of illness or exile. His complete works were published in 1940. Leivick traveled to Germany with a Holocaust survivor in 1946 in order to provide words of encouragement to survivors living in displaced persons (DP) camps. At Foerhenwald, he witnessed the first wedding between two survivors and told the survivors that “A Jew is stronger than the crematoriums, stronger than gas chambers. You must find peace within yourselves. Through inner peace we will all be healed.” His play A Khaseneh in Ferenvald came out of that experience. In 1958, a stroke left Leivick unable to speak and presumably to write as well until his death on Dec 23, 1962.
Leivick’s plays include: Dort Vu Di Frayhayt, 1912 (Where Freedom Dwells, 1952); Der Goylem 1921 (The Golem, 1966); Shmatez, 1920s (Rags, 1928); Di Oreme Melukhe, 1920’s (The Poor Kingdom, 1927); Bankrot, 1920’s (Bankrupt, 1927); Shap, 1920’s (Shop, 1928; 1999); In Keynems Land (In No Man’s Land, 1922), the poem/play Hirsh Lekert, 1926; Abelar un Heluiz, 1936 (Abelard and Heloise); and A Khasene in Ferenvald, 1949 (A Wedding in Ferenwald).
