Unlike personally involved Lulla Rosenfeld (Bright Star of Exile,
p. 403), who embraced and celebrated the Yiddish theater by
following one theatrical family's fortunes, Sandrow stands back,
achieving far greater scholarship and scope yet missing that
certain sense of naches (pleasure-plus-pride). Geographically
peripatetic, mixing literary criticism, textbookish groupings,
excerpts in translation, and more dramatic helpings of history, she
analyzes every imaginable performance in "the rejected daughter"
language-from improvised Purim plays and parades to Avrom
Goldfadn's cabaret-to-theater revolution in Rumania to America's
love affair with low-class shund ("a song, a jig, a kiss, a
quarrel") to the esthetically ambitious efforts of realist Jacob
Gordin and "art theaters" in Manhattan, Vilna, Warsaw, Moscow. The
Soviet Yiddish State Theaters require a separate chapter to track
the quick changes - abundance and vigor (designs by Chagall) to
nitchevo in 30 years - as Party policy moved from an appreciation
of Yiddish's proletarian associations to a hostile awareness of the
art form's unshakeable sectarianism. But other potentially
absorbing arcs - theatrical family sagas, the blazing, flickering,
vanishing lights of Second Avenue - are broken by Sandrow's earnest
attention to completeness and chronology. And the entire project
suffers from a need to legitimize, from a slightly patronizing
lilt, and from glib, often defensive, sometimes strained
cross-cultural analogies (hillbilly songs, commedia dell'arte, She
Stoops to Conquer, I Love Lucy) that deny singularity and unveil a
half-repressed academic impulse: "Nobody could call this
intellectual entertainment, nor is it sensitive to character. But
from a stage or a cabaret floor, it keeps you laughing." But there
are moving touches - makeshift, wartime ghetto playlets, a visit to
the memory-nourished Hebrew Actors Union of today - and, assuming a
masterful index that will lead researchers to the international
dozens of plays, players, and playwrights, this should become a
vital reference work if not the heart-warmer that lovers of shund -
Yoshe Kolb too - would welcome as a substitute for the real thing.
(Kirkus Reviews)
This book is the unusual blend of impeccable scholarship and
hilarious backstage anecdote. The vividness of the book is enhanced
by a collection of 125 rare illustrations- pictures of actors,
scenes from plays and films, posters, newspaper cartoons, and other
memorabilia.
General
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