Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama

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 me...