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Joel Berkowitz. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage.

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Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 283, illustrations. $32.95.

Yiddish, once my native language, is a language I still know to a degree. In fact, I consider it a principal source of my interest in English, which now shares its native status. Joel Berkowitz's study helps to explain phenomena such as this: the passing of Yiddish in the space of an individual lifetime from an active literary, journalistic, living language to a respected curiosity of American culture, taught in universities, collected by libraries, and faintly audible in some versions of the English vernacular. Who would guess that the history of the Yiddish theater would provide such documentation? Who would guess that its various, mostly unsuccessful, attempts to create a relationship between secular Jewish cultural life and Shakespeare would yield insight into how languages grow and change--and, in this case, leave the scene.

The title of Berkowitz's book seems bland and indicative, but the study is loaded with interesting sources and accounts of the struggles in the Yiddish communities of America to "act" on their new freedom from the peremptory onslaughts of sadistic gangs (pogroms) common in late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. It also has accounts of how the leading actors approached their materials, competed with one another, and were driven, undoubtedly with some characteristic Yiddish irony, to claim that they were about to present the "greatest" works by the "greatest" dramatists. Most people, and most scholars, do not know what a profound effect the Yiddish theater had on the lives of the majority of ordinary Jews in all social and economic classes. In fact, as Berkowitz implies citing Lawrence Levine, the Yiddish theater was as important to the mass of Jewish population in New York around the turn of the twentieth century as Shakespeare was to all classes of English around the turn of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare was one of many popular dramatists working not just in a theater, but in a theater district one of whose principal functions was to communicate to the mass of illiterate population some of the "facts" of the society in which they lived. Because the population was overwhelmingly illiterate, the theater was not merely entertainment--it said things that could not be said in any other medium. The theater was a counterforce to censorship practiced by governments and religious institutions. Furthermore, it is now well known how much liberty Shakespeare had taken with his own sources. Although the existence of these sources could always become the ground for denying what the plays were "really" about, they also made it easy to say what had to be said now, albeit encoded in "source material." Given the fact that theater/literary performance has always functioned as a means of disseminating serious, usually political, facts to illiterate populations, the analogy between Shakespeare's theater and the Yiddish theater provides a strong foundation for Berkowitz's effort.

The most significant feature of this book is its documentation of how Shakespeare's works were changed by Yiddish writers, theater managers, and actors. While there were several attempts to translate Shakespeare's poetry into Yiddish poetry, these did not succeed, and ultimately they did not really matter....

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