Joy of shtetls, sex and suspicious parents
One brilliant play that explores female friendship, and love, in the most open-minded way is Sholom Asch’s God of Vengeance. In this play, written in 1918, the daughter of a brothel owner falls in love with one of her father’s prostitutes. They kiss passionately, on stage, and then elope together. This show toured, without comment, round Eastern Europe for several years. The first night it was put on in Broadway, in 1923, the entire company of actors was arrested the next day and the show lambasted for its “immoral” content.
And then, of course, there’s Jacob Gordin’s muscular family saga, Mirele Efros, often called the “Jewish Queen Lear”, in which a powerful matriarch’s authority is challenged by her daughter-in-law. The title character has not inherited her empire, as Shakespeare’s Lear does, but has built it herself through hard graft. When she’s ousted, she puts up a raw, savage fight, reasoning, shouting and cursing at full throttle. Even in plays which, more conventionally, have male storylines at their heart, the female characters don’t give the male protagonists an easy ride. In Gordin’s powerful, Faustus-like moral fable God, Man and Devil, the female characters’ journeys are given scope, compassionate treatment, and, above all, an honest and nonjudgmental interest.
This foregrounding of female experience — all the more radical for being unforced, for simply being a dominant texture in the fabric of so many Yiddish plays — is all the more remarkable because Yiddish theatre didn’t even exist before 1876. Its beginnings were inauspicious: a two-act play by a dramatist called Avrom Goldfaden was performed one evening in the beer garden of a café in Romania. No one could have predicted that, 40 years later, the genre would have crossed continents, be as popular in New York as it was in Warsaw, and be exerting a huge influence on Broadway and the development of American musical theatre.
Yiddish theatre’s treatment of women is even more remarkable because of the context in which most playwrights and actors had been born and brought up: a rural shtetl culture that was often very traditional, conservative, and sceptical both of sexual freedom and female emancipation.
It wasn’t just fictional women, like Treasure’s Tille, to whom Yiddish theatre gave opportunities, though; as the madcap, clownish novel Wandering Stars, by Sholom Aleichem, recounts, the touring Yiddish theatre exerted a powerful hold over the real women who came to see their shows. As the novel delights in reminding us, when a theatre troupe descended on a town, it was not uncommon for the following daybreak to be heralded not by the crowing of the village cockerel but by alarmed shrieks and lamentations. Parents were grieving over their daughters’ empty beds: the girls would have shimmied out of the window and run off to join the theatre.
Yiddish theatre’s radical treatment of women reflects an even more profound facet about the genre: its fearless takingon of the status quo. The plays, just like the character of Tille in Treasure, are rest- lessly, fiercely self-critical — they wrestle, again and again, with the questions of who are we; what’s beautiful and what’s rotten about us; where do we find, and how do we hold on to, the essence of our mentshlekhkayt, our humanity.
The fight for female emancipation in Yiddish theatre goes hand in hand with the fight for freedom — Tille’s struggle is, at its heart, not for riches or material wealth, but for the freedom to be seen as a human being, as a mentsch.
‘‘I’ll walk along the streets and down the boulevard,’’ Tille says, imagining a trip to town decked out in her finery, ‘‘and you’ll see the great and the small will stare until their eyes burst.’’ This isn’t so much about the glint of her diamonds, or the sheen of her silk parasol, or even about being seen as a woman. Rather, it’s about being seen, simply — but perhaps most radically of all — as a human being.
This is why Treasure is so resonant for our times — not just because it’s a vigorous satire on materialism, and a sometimes funny, sometimes slapstick, sometimes poignant examination of a community forced to own up to its hypocrisy. It’s about the struggle of someone who has nothing to be accorded the same rights and respect as everyone else.
And that’s an idea that couldn’t feel more timely. Treasure, in a new adaptation by Colin Chambers and directed by Alice Malin, plays at the Finborough Theatre, from October 20 to November 14. Visit www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk