Nadene Goldfoot
For Joel Schecter, Yiddish theater is no long-vanished artifact from the Lower East Side of Jewish history. It’s alive and well at San Francisco State University. Joel Schechter is Professor of Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University. He is famous as a writer about clowns, jesters, satirists and their radical politics. Much of his work has been focused on contemporary global mayhem. He must feel overwhelmed with today's situation in the USA and abroad; so much to work with in mayhem.
The SFSU theater arts professor is about to unveil a new production of Sholem Aleichem’s 1887 one-act play “She Must Marry a Doctor.” It is, he says, a strikingly modern comedy about family values, women’s liberation and Yiddishkeit.
What do you know! My husband and I acted and produced "She Must Marry A Doctor" in Safed, Israel in 1981. I had taken with me the book with the play and other stories I wrote into plays for our new "YIDDISH THEATER IN ENGLISH" that we created. We were new olim, struggling to learn conversational Hebrew, and working on this acting and dealing with living in quarters so different, dealing with dodging planted bombs, etc, helped our minds keep slightly normal. We lived in Israel from 1980 to the end of 1985, first in Haifa for 9 months, then Safed.
Danny was a frustrated actor from Miami, Florida via New York City, and I had studied acting in Portland, OR. We both acted in the play. I made the costumes, made the scripts, and Danny found the other actors. We ran around the town stapling up posters about it in order to have an audience. The city of Safed (Tzfat) was all for it.
I loved Sholem Aleichem, but knew nothing about him at the time except he was a great Yiddish writer. The worlds of Sholem Aleichem were largely Jewish and Russian, but he spent long stretches in so many countries—including, at the end, America—that his universe was expansive. He had a life that began in 1859, when Rabinovich was born in a part of the Russian empire that is now Ukraine. His father was a well-to-do-businessman who later lost it all. His mother died in a cholera epidemic when he was 13. He then endured a shrewish stepmother. One way or another, these relatives, along with plenty of acquaintances, provided material for the young writer, who assumed the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem when he was 24. The name is, of course, a Yiddish variant of the Hebrew for “peace be with you.” It is such a standard greeting among Jews that it's like Hi, or how do you do?
After being ill himself, he was able to come to the USA. The first was in 1906, soon after pogroms swept across southern Russia. He sailed to New York from London on a ship called the St. Louis. Dauber might have noted the grim irony. Three decades later, the sailing of a more famous St. Louis became the voyage of the damned: 937 German Jews who fled Hitler, only to be denied sanctuary by Cuba, the United States and Canada. That happened in about 1926. Doors were closed to USA in 1924 to many Jews.
Shalom Aleichem, a quintessential Yiddish writer, portrayed the transformation and everyday life of Jews in the Pale of Settlement (including areas like Galicia), capturing their vanishing world with deep empathy, humor, and sadness, focusing on themes like tradition's breakdown, urbanization, immigration, and the struggles within shtetls, famously in characters like Tevye the Dairyman, showing the "laughter through tears" of ordinary people facing immense changes, notes Commentary Magazine and Yiddish Book Center.
While not exclusively about Galicia, his works depict the universal Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, a region deeply connected to Galician Jews, or Galitzianers, who share similar cultural roots, and he even set stories, like Wandering Stars, in Galician cities like Lviv (Lvov).
Besides prominent figures like S. Ansky and Shmuel Hurvits (A. Litvin), other Yiddish writers capturing the essence of Galicia, often with its naive or traditional Jews, included Dovid Pinski, Meir Krakowski, Y.L. Peretz (influencing the depiction), and authors featured in the Gesher Galicia journal, exploring themes of Hasidism, tradition vs. modernity, and wartime impact, reflecting distinct cultural traits from other Eastern European Jews.
Isaac Leib Peretz (May 18, 1852 – April 3, 1915), also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (Polish: Icchok Lejbusz Perec; Yiddish: יצחק־לייבוש פרץ), was a Polish Jewish writer and playwright writing in Yiddish. He is 7 years older than Sholom Alecheim. Isaac Leib Peretz wrote about Galicia by highlighting its underdeveloped Yiddish culture and contrasting it with the vibrant Jewish life elsewhere, using stories like "Bontshe the Silent" and" The Three Gifts" to critique passivity while also capturing the mystical, rich inner world of Hasidic life, reflecting a complex view of Jewish tradition in the Habsburg province. He famously described Galician Yiddish literature as "talking in its sleep," noting its slow growth compared to other areas due to strong Polish and German influences.
Mendele Mocher Seforim was a Belarusian Jewish author and one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. Today, Belarus is officially called the Republic of Belarus, though many still use the shortened name Belarus, and some countries and groups still refer to it as "White Russia," a term the country's government and people discourage to emphasize its sovereignty.
(official name: Sholem Yankev Abramovich; January 2, 1836 – December 8 [O.S. 27 November] 1917). He is the oldest of the three authors. Mendele initially wrote in Hebrew, coining many words in that language, but ultimately switched to Yiddish in order to expand his audience. Like Sholem Aleichem, he used a pseudonym because of the contemporary perception of Yiddish as a ghetto vernacular unsuitable for serious literary work — an idea he did much to dispel. His writing strongly bore the mark of the Haskalah. He is considered by many to be the "grandfather of Yiddish literature", an epithet first accorded to him by Sholem Aleichem, in the dedication to his novel Stempenyu: A Jewish Novel. Mendele's style in both Hebrew and Yiddish has strongly influenced several generations of later writers.
Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count Leib Peretz with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers.
So there is: Sholom Alecheim, Mendele Mokher Seforim and Isaac Leib Peretz.
