Topic: Yiddish Drama, Theater, and Film: From Popular Culture to High Art

Three credit hour course; meets 2:30-3:45 p.m., MW in BH 246.

This course provides an introduction to Yiddish drama and performance
traditions from the second half of the nineteenth century until the 1930s. We
will follow the first wandering troupes through Eastern Europe, discussing the
difficulties of creating a theater without a repertoire of plays, without
trained actors or an audience knowledgeable of what a performance is. We will
then turn to the immigrant Yiddish theaters in New York at the turn of the
century where intellectuals such as Jacob Gordin tried to make a literary
theater out of an unruly working class entertainment institution. Lastly we
look at the formalist Yiddish stage experiments in the Soviet Union of the
1920s and 30s in which such renowned artists as Marc Chagall, Alexis
Granovsky, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov participated. We will pay particular
attention to the themes and interpretations of plays, the acting and
performance styles, and audience expectations and how they varied in the
different geographic, social, cultural, and political environments in which
Yiddish theaters existed.

Readings will include articles on the history of Yiddish theatre and on
specific performances as well as selected plays by representative Yiddish
playwrights such as Jacob Gordin, Peretz Hirschbein, Ossip Dymov, I.L. Peretz,
Sholem Aleichem, and Sh. Ansky.  We will do close readings of these plays and
analyze them within the context of the history of Yiddish theatre, and discuss
the plays' specific performance history.

The course requirements include active participation in class, weekly
readings, a midterm, several short writing assignments and a final paper.

Texts:
Sandrow, VAGABOND STARS
Sandrow, GOD, MAN, AND DEVIL: YIDDISH PLAYS IN TRANSLATION
Aleichem, THE JACKPOT
PROOFTEXTS 12:1, JAN 1992 (Peretz, I.L., "A Night in the Old Marketplace")