Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama

by Barbara J. Henry

Overview

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 émigré. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295991337
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/01/2011
Series:	Modern Language Initiative Books Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Barbara J. Henry is associate professor of Russian literature and Jewish studies at the University of Washington.

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

What People are Saying About This

Jeremy Dauber

"A mold-breaking work of literary history as well as a brilliant analysis of literary text."

Tony Michels

"Lucid and engaging this study makes an important scholarly contribution to the fields of Yiddish culture, American Jewish history, and Russian Jewish history."

Editorial Reviews

"Henry has done a service in re-kindling the conversation regarding this iconoclast by constructing a new image of Gordin based on exhaustive archival work. . . . She should be commended for breaking new ground on such a significant figure, and, hopefully, providing access for future work from a range of disciplines."

Studies in American Jewish Literature - Max Shulman

"Henry has done a service in re-kindling the conversation regarding this iconoclast by constructing a new image of Gordin based on exhaustive archival work. . . . She should be commended for breaking new ground on such a significant figure, and, hopefully, providing access for future work from a range of disciplines."—Max Shulman, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Fall 2012

"Well researched and artfully argued, Henry's Rewriting Russia is a long-overdue book on this major figure that establishes how Jacob Gordin created a rich and important interplay between Yiddish and Russian forms that elevated the literary status of both."—Leah Garrett, The Russian Review, June 2012

"This new and elegantly written literary history . . . provides a new model for literary history by expertly weaving together previously unexamined Tsarist-era archival records with insightful literary analysis of Gordon's major works."—Barry Trachtenberg, H-Net Reviews, March 2012

From the Publisher

"This new and elegantly written literary history . . . provides a new model for literary history by expertly weaving together previously unexamined Tsarist-era archival records with insightful literary analysis of Gordon's major works."

H-Net Reviews - Barry Trachtenberg