Abraham Goldfaden (אַבֿרהם גולדֿאַדַען) is a Jewish poet, playwright, theater director and actor, the author of about 40 plays written in Yiddish and Hebrew, the founder of professional theater in Yiddish. He is rightfully considered the “father of Jewish theater”. He was both a theorist and a practitioner of theater, who made a great contribution to the formation and development of national stage art as a playwright, creator of a stable repertoire and educator of the first generation of professional Jewish actors, many of whom soon became leaders of theater troupes that played in Yiddish in several countries.
He was born on July 24, 1840, in the town of Starokostyantyniv (now Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine) into a watchmaker's family. The family belonged to the middle class and supported the ideas of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Abraham studied at a heder, a Jewish religious school, and at the same time took private lessons in German and Russian. From childhood, he appreciated and imitated the performances of wedding jesters and brodesingers[i]
to such an extent that he received the nickname “Avromele Badchen”, or “Abi the Jester”. However, in 1857 he began his studies at the state rabbinical school in Zhytomyr, which he graduated from in 1866 as a teacher and poet (with some experience in amateur theater), but he never led the community. During his studies in Zhytomyr, Abraham Goldfaden began writing poetry in Hebrew. In 1865, his first collection of poems, Sprouts and Flowers, was published. It contains Zionist ideas. However, as a poet, he became famous for his Yiddish poems. Many of them, from the collections The Jew (1866) and The Jewess (1869), later became popular songs.
In 1867, Avraham took a job as a teacher in Simferopol. The following year, he moved to Odessa, where he renewed his acquaintance with another Yiddish writer, Yitzchok Yoel Linetsky, whom he had known from Zhytomyr. There he met the poet, Eliyahu Mordechai Werbel, who also wrote in Hebrew (Werbel's daughter would later become Goldfaden's wife) and published poems in the newspaper Kol-Mevaser (The Voice of the Herald). He also wrote his first two plays, “Two Neighbors” and “Aunt Susie,” which, along with several poems, were included in the fairly successful 1869 book “The Jewess,” which went through three editions in three years. At this time, Abraham and Paulina lived mainly on his meager salary as a teacher, supplementing it with private lessons and a job as a cashier in a hat shop.
After an unsuccessful attempt to study medicine in Munich in 1875, Goldfaden went to Lviv, where he met again with I. I. Linetsky, who was now the editor of the weekly newspaper Der Alter Isrulik. However, the newspaper was soon closed in 1876, and the aspiring writer was forced to move to Chernivtsi. There he edited the Yiddish daily newspaper Dos Bukoviner Israelitische Folksblatt (The Israeli People's Newspaper of Bukovina), but his financial situation remained difficult. In the same year, he received an invitation to Iași (Romania) from Isaac Librescu, a wealthy social activist interested in theater. It turned out that Goldfaden was known in Iași as a poet, many of whose poems had been set to music and became popular songs. Librescu's wife once remarked that Yiddish journalism was a way to starve and suggested that there would be a much larger market for Yiddish theater. Librescu himself offered Goldfaden 100 francs for a public concert of his songs in the public garden of Shimon Mark. Instead of a simple concert, he expanded the program to an almost vaudeville performance. His play “Grandmother and Grandson” (1876) was staged. This is considered the first theatrical performance in Yiddish. After this time, Goldfaden continued to work in various newspapers, but the stage became his main business.
In the summer of 1876, the famous Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu noted in his theater review that there were six actors in the Jewish troupe. He was impressed by the quality of the singing and acting, noting four of Goldfaden's early plays.
As the open-air season ended, the aspiring playwright tried unsuccessfully to rent a suitable theater in Iași. His search led him to other cities and people. After successful performances in Botoșani and Galați, Goldfaden set off for Bucharest with a troupe that included Soher Goldstein, Israel Grodner, and Sara Segal. He recruited a large pool of Jewish vocal talent: synagogue cantors. He also recruited two well-known classically trained prima donnas, the sisters Margaretta and Annette Schwarz. Goldfaden's “Jewish Theater” enjoyed constant success in Bucharest.
Riding the wave of success, Goldfaden “stamped” his repertoire - songs, plays and translations of plays from Romanian, French and other languages (in the first two years he wrote 22 plays, and later about 40). By the end of the year, Abraham Goldfaden's Yiddish theater had become a large theater with exquisite scenery, dueling choruses and extras to fill the massive scenes.
However, while light comedies and vaudeville may have made Yiddish theater commercially successful, it was Goldfaden's higher aspirations for it that ultimately earned him recognition as the “Yiddish Shakespeare.” As a man who knew several languages well, he was acutely aware that there was no Eastern European Jewish dramatic tradition. After the serious The Recruits and The Witches early in his career, he went on to write many similar plays in Yiddish on Jewish themes, perhaps the best known of which is Shulamith (1880).
In 1878, after the end of the Russo-Turkish War, Goldfaden, together with a group of 42 people, including performers, musicians and their families, set off for Odesa. After that, they traveled throughout the Russian Empire, including Kharkiv, Moscow and St. Petersburg. He continued to stage plays at a prolific pace, now mostly serious works, such as “Doctor Almasada” (or “The Jews of Palermo”), “Sulamith”. During this tour, Goldfaden and his troupe gathered large audiences and were generally popular among progressive Jewish intellectuals but gradually incurred the displeasure of the tsarist government. The plays called for change in the Jewish world: “Awake, my people, from your sleep, and believe no more nonsense.” The playwright produced Bar Kochba, a somber operetta about the Bar Kochba uprising, which he wrote after the Jewish pogroms in Russia that broke out in 1881 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. As part of the anti-Jewish reaction, Yiddish theater was banned in Russia from September 14, 1883. Goldfaden and his troupe were left without work and went their separate ways.
In 1886–1889, the playwright continued his work, but without the previous success. After unsuccessful attempts to resume his troupe's performances in Warsaw and Paris, he went to Lviv. There, Goldfaden's new works were published: the plays “Rabbi Yoselman, or the Alsatian Decree” and “The Times of the Messiah”, and the operetta “Rothschild”. Inspired by his success in Lviv, he returned to Bucharest in 1892, where he became the director of the theater in Jingitica. The Romanian Yiddish-speaking theater environment of that time was fiercely competitive, in which Goldfaden significantly lost to his former partners and students. In addition, against the backdrop of the difficult economic situation and the growth of anti-Semitism, part of the Jewish population emigrated, and those who remained were more interested in politics than theater. In 1896 Abraham Goldfaden left Romania and traveled throughout Europe as a poet and journalist. Only in 1903 did he find the money to move and settle in New York, where he had previously visited occasionally. In the American period of the playwright, it is worth noting his play “David in War”, which was staged in March 1906 and became the first Hebrew-language play shown in America. Repeated performances in March 1907 and April 1908 attracted large audiences. He also wrote the spoken parts of the play “Ben Ami”, based on George Eliot's “Daniel Deronda”, the premiere of which was successful in December 1907.
Abraham Goldfaden died in New York City in 1908. According to a report in the New York Times, his funeral was attended by over 50,000 people, who joined a procession from the National Theater on the Bowery to Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn. In a subsequent article, the New York Times called him “both a poet and a prophet” and noted that was more evidence of sincere sympathy and admiration for the man and his work than could be found at the funeral of any poet now writing in English in this country.”
***Unable to record music or play any musical instrument, Abraham Goldfaden nevertheless composed melodies for plays. Drawing on Jewish folk songs, synagogue chants, folk and popular music of other European peoples, including Italian and French opera arias, he transformed them, adapting them to the rhythm and mood of his song texts, which were included in the plays. Many of Goldfaden's songs became folk songs even before he included them in his productions, while others became popular thanks to the performances of his company. Several of Goldfaden's plays were performed with great success in Israel in Hebrew translation.
Dilfuza Hlushchenko
[i]1. Brodesingers were Jewish traveling artists in the Austrian part of Galicia, Romania, and the Russian Empire, who were groups of professional or semi-professional authors and performers.