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Feb. 18th, 2014 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe 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.
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Date: 2014-02-19 12:18 am (UTC)Read Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907) in any translation you can find so long as it isn't Donald Margulies' semi-modernization, because it totally misses the point. Joachim Neugroschel published a straightforward one in Pakn Treger #23 (Winter 1996), which is the one I read first. I thought I'd written a full description of the play somewhere, but I just seem to have fragments. It's incendiary, sexy, and the first Broadway production in 1923 was successfully prosecuted for obscenity! (Hint: lesbianism. Explicit. Positively portrayed. Also the bit where the protagonist's father is running a brothel out of his basement might have upset some people.)
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Date: 2014-02-19 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-19 06:04 pm (UTC)You're welcome! Neugroschel never collected it in book form so far as I know, but I successfully ordered the relevant issue of Pakn Treger from the National Yiddish Book Center for $6.50 in March 2011, so I recommend this course of action to you. The staged reading I saw later that year used a translation by Joseph C. Landis that I did not like anywhere near as much. I still wish I'd been able to see the full production in 2012, but my life interfered.
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Date: 2014-02-19 03:33 am (UTC)It's a theatrical Yiddish version of The Pearl?
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Date: 2014-02-19 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-19 08:42 pm (UTC)