![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Feb. 18th, 2014 01:34 pmThe last thing I hit up on my Yiddish-literature binge last month was God, Man and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation. This is pretty much a motley assortment of SERIOUS YIDDISH THEATER and includes five plays:
God, Man and Devil: Depressing morality play about Satan coming to Earth to tempt an Upright Man into being evil by giving him lots of money. Shockingly, he succeeds.
Green Fields: Rabbinical student passes through idyllic rural town and gets sort of caught up in the feud between two local farmers, one of whom has a flirty daughter and one of whom has a tomboy daughter, but everything's fine and everyone gets married in the end. Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral.
Shop: This was probably my favorite; it's an ensemble play about various machine-shop workers in and around a union strike. The main emotional thread centers around the political/emotional triangle between the former ardent revolutionary who has sold out and is now a guilt-ridden shop boss, the woman who was in Siberia with him and has conversely become a more ardent revolutionary than ever, and her new love interest who is not as capable of being terrible as she is. Would I read fanfiction about all of this? Yes, I would.
The Treasure: Poor gravedigger's son finds unspecified amount of money in unspecified location; town subsequently goes MAD WITH GREED; at the end, irritable ghosts emerge to explain to the audience that unfortunately, as you know, people.
Bronx Express: A Dream in Three Acts with a Prologue and Epilogue: Satire in which cheerful, upright, hardworking man is seduced into the world of capitalism by various personified advertising figures, i.e. the Nestle Baby and the Wrigley Chewing Gum Twins.
In case you didn't catch it from the summaries, the one common thread in these plays is: CAPITALISM BAD. Also, being Jewish is hard. (Well, okay, not in Green Fields. Everything's pretty much fine in Green Fields, because it's nostalgia for an idyllic country past that only ever existed in an alternate reality without Cossacks.)
I still wish I could find anywhere a collection of Yiddish pop entertainment plays though.
God, Man and Devil: Depressing morality play about Satan coming to Earth to tempt an Upright Man into being evil by giving him lots of money. Shockingly, he succeeds.
Green Fields: Rabbinical student passes through idyllic rural town and gets sort of caught up in the feud between two local farmers, one of whom has a flirty daughter and one of whom has a tomboy daughter, but everything's fine and everyone gets married in the end. Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral.
Shop: This was probably my favorite; it's an ensemble play about various machine-shop workers in and around a union strike. The main emotional thread centers around the political/emotional triangle between the former ardent revolutionary who has sold out and is now a guilt-ridden shop boss, the woman who was in Siberia with him and has conversely become a more ardent revolutionary than ever, and her new love interest who is not as capable of being terrible as she is. Would I read fanfiction about all of this? Yes, I would.
The Treasure: Poor gravedigger's son finds unspecified amount of money in unspecified location; town subsequently goes MAD WITH GREED; at the end, irritable ghosts emerge to explain to the audience that unfortunately, as you know, people.
Bronx Express: A Dream in Three Acts with a Prologue and Epilogue: Satire in which cheerful, upright, hardworking man is seduced into the world of capitalism by various personified advertising figures, i.e. the Nestle Baby and the Wrigley Chewing Gum Twins.
In case you didn't catch it from the summaries, the one common thread in these plays is: CAPITALISM BAD. Also, being Jewish is hard. (Well, okay, not in Green Fields. Everything's pretty much fine in Green Fields, because it's nostalgia for an idyllic country past that only ever existed in an alternate reality without Cossacks.)
I still wish I could find anywhere a collection of Yiddish pop entertainment plays though.
