| Though commonly recognized as "The Father of Jewish Theater," and despite the fact that a number of his plays are still produced and some of their songs still retain their popularity, Abraham Goldfaden (1840, The Pale of Settlement-1908, New York) is often dismissed, patronized or ignored in modern scholarship. His plays and poetry tend to be examined according to their textual or ideological message, a reductive approach that was shared by the Jewish elites of his time. However, Goldfaden, though a loyal member of the ideological Haskalah` (The Jewish Enlightenment), was never a radical thinker, but rather an artist of lightweight materials. In fact, the substance within his plays is just one among the array of components that lend his creations their overall historic significance. Goldfaden's revolutionary creation of Jewish show business occurred almost instantly and singlehandedly. Being a jack of many trades and a master of a few, he adapted a Western artistic model that was alien to Judaism into a Jewish popular medium, molded and trained Jewish stage professionals (who later reached Broadway) and introduced the performing arts to Eastern European Jews. Thus, he turned show business into an integral part of Jewish culture, and with his artistic medium, contributed tremendously to the secularization and acculturation of Ashkenazi Jews---an ultimate end of the Haskalah. In this dissertation I therefore claim that this contribution, rather than the ideological message or the literary quality of his plays, is the appropriate criterion by which Goldfaden and his Jewish theater must be assessed.; To support this thesis, I reevaluate his oeuvre and significance by examining the constant tensions to which his creativity was subject between maskilic ideology and the complexity of the professional theater world. I define Goldfaden's artistic formulae and contextualize them within the Jewish ideologies of his time. For that purpose I review his plays, his own partial memoirs, his self-reflexive references within those pieces, and the reception of his theater in the Haskalah press. |
