Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe,Jewish Theater and The Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan - 2019

Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe,Jewish Theater and The Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan - 2019 

Vilna was often referred to as “The Jerusalem of Lithuania”, a place of great learning, home to highly regarded teachers and Talmud scholars, the center of culture for the centuries old tradition of Ashkenazi Yiddish speaking Jews in Lithuania.  Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe,Jewish Theater and The Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan marvelously tells the story of how, beginning in the World War One Years, a group of actors, who had not yet given up their “day jobs”, formed a theater troupe modeled on the famous Russian  art company of Stanislavsky that would end up preforming  all over Europe, even extending to New York City and South America. Caplan shows is in fascinating detail how from these simple origins a World Class culturally important theater group began.

 Theatrical productions were an important part of writers income in the period 1910 to 1939, often plays were a much bigger source of income than books or stories. (This was not just in the case for Yiddish writers.  Henry James and Somerset Maugham wrote numerous plays but who reads them now?). Theatrical productions were often the main way most people came into contact with Yiddish literary productions.

Life was not often easy for those  in the Vilna troupe.  Caplan lets us see actors and actresses, and sometimes their families traveling with them, sleeping on trains or in theaters.  She gives us a lot of details.  Just like it probably is today, parents were not happy when their son dropped out of medical school

to join a traveling theater company.  Actors were often seen as a bit rebellious from respectable society.  Caplan tells us about the personal lives of members of the troupe, romances and marriages were common.  Sometimes children had to be left with relatives.  Over the life of the troupe over 300 people were members.  They traveled with lots of equipment and stage items.  There were stage hands and set designers as well.  Some of The actors became Broadway stars.  

The premier Yiddish drama was The Dybbuk, written  by S. Ansky, first in Russian then translated by Ansky into Yiddish.  The first preformance was by The Vilna Troupe, in Warsaw in 1920.  The Dyybuk, some call it The Yiddish source for The Exorcist, was preformed all over Europe by The Vilna Troupe. It was the play everyone wanted to see.  Over the course of 25 years over 300 

performed in Vilna Troupe productions.  

Of course we know what puts an an end to Yiddish theatrical productions.  Caplan  tells us to avoid reverse reading everything into the Holocaust.  Before 1939 the World economy had begun to decline and Yiddish theater goers had begun to go to plays in other languages.  Forty five members of The Vilna Troupe were murdered in The Holocaust.  I was very moved to learn of performances given by Auschwitz inmates  formerly in The Vilna Troupe 

for their fellow captives.

There is a huge amount of wonderfully 

rendered details, several  human interest interludes.

The Yiddish theater influenced the early years of American television.  (Like it or not Amos and Andy came out of the Yiddish theater.)

Anyone into theatrical history and Yiddish culture will be so thankful for this great book.

From http://www.debracaplan.com/

I am Assistant Professor of Theater in the Dept. of Fine and Performing Arts at

Baruch College, City University of New York. My research focuses on Yiddish theater and drama, theatrical travel, artistic networks, and immigrant theater. 

My book, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy,was published by University of Michigan Press in 2018. My writing has also appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Pakn Treger, and American Theatre Magazine.  

I am currently working on a new biography of Molly Picon.”

From the website of The Publisher, The University of Michigan Press.

“Yiddish Empire tells the story of how a group of itinerant Jewish performers became the interwar equivalent of a viral sensation, providing a missing chapter in the history of the modern stage. During World War I, a motley group of teenaged amateurs, impoverished war refugees, and out- of- work Russian actors banded together to revolutionize the Yiddish stage. Achieving a most unlikely success through their productions, the Vilna Troupe (1915– 36) would eventually go on to earn the attention of theatergoers around the world. Advancements in modern transportation allowed Yiddish theater artists to reach global audiences, traversing not only cities and districts but also countries and continents. The Vilna Troupe routinely performed in major venues that had never before allowed Jews, let alone Yiddish, upon their stages, and operated across a vast territory, a strategy that enabled them to attract unusually diverse audiences to the Yiddish stage and a precursor to the organizational structures and travel patterns that we see now in contemporary theater. Debra Caplan’s history of the Troupe is rigorously researched, employing primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, and is engagingly written.”

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