Rewriting Russia : Jacob Gordin's Yiddish drama / Barbara J. Henry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Henry, Barbara J., 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gordin, Jacob, 1853-1909--Criticism and interpretation.

Gordin, Jacob.

Gordin, Jacob, 1853-1909.

Yiddish drama--History and criticism.

Yiddish drama.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

229 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2011]

Summary:

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies, egos, and artistic credos. Gordin, like much of his audience, was a Russian emigre. His most influential, successful, and scandalous dramas-The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan-were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land.

Gordin's life, like his plays, held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of the past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's long career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities between his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays. By literally rewriting Russian literature on Jewish terms, in a Jewish language, and for the Jewish stage, Gordin's plays symbolically reframe and rewrite Russian Jews' own story of their old-world past. Book jacket.

Contents:

Amerika

In the old country: The reformer

A Russian writer

The perils of performance: Di Kreytser Sonata

Don't look back: Orphan in the underworld

Homecoming.

Notes:

A Samuel and Althea Stroum book.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780295991320

0295991321

9780295991337

029599133X

OCLC:

708357895