LAUSR

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater is a welcome and important contribution to early Yiddish theater history. Alyssa Quint offers a new interpretation of, and appreciation for, Avrom Goldfaden’s work and its influence on the formation of modern Yiddish theater—crucially including its participants—during its short window of development from 1876 to 1883. In doing so, Quint grapples with a legacy of criticism, rooted first of all in Goldfaden’s own time, that turns on upholding invidious distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. Quint lays out her case against long-standing proclivities to confine Goldfaden’s work and its impact to the folk artistic realm. This tendency has been reinforced in some ways by Goldfaden’s own “distorted,” hyper-self-critical memoirs, with such influences still to be found in contemporary scholarship. Early on in the book, Quint establishes the ways in which literary Yiddishists marginalized Goldfaden despite his quantifiable success and how that reputation has limited more nuanced cultural studies of his work—a task she then sets about correcting. Not only did the impresario Goldfaden enable Yiddish theater to be recognized in the broader sphere of Russian professional theater (if only a short time before its ban), but, as Quint explicates, Goldfaden’s productions from that period also offer significant insight into the reciprocal levels of performance circulating on and off the stage: the social performances of Jewish actors and theater makers reflect and are reflected in the scripted performances Goldfaden staged. Quint is distinctively innovative in her incorporation of microhistorical methods into her study, drawing on no less than ten memoirs, placed in conversation with contemporaneous press. By bringing an examination of the place and practices of actors into the foundation of her study, Quint not only offers microlevel insights into the impact of the Yiddish professional theater of the late 1800s, but also beautifully brings contextual insight into the ways in which Jewish identity performance was itself being navigated in strategic and complex ways during that period. Book Reviews