Background
Born in the Ukraine, and son of an adherent of the enlightenment movement Gordin wrote and spoke Russian more comfortably than Yiddish.
Born in the Ukraine, and son of an adherent of the enlightenment movement Gordin wrote and spoke Russian more comfortably than Yiddish.
Although self-educated, during his teens, Gordin wrote articles in Russian for the left-wing newspapers and worked for underground causes such as the independence of the Ukraine from the rest of Russia, but not for the civil rights of Jews. He himself worked for several years as a farm laborer, believing that the soil was the only answer for humanity. In 1891 he went to America with the group Am Olam (Eternal People), to establish a utopian socialist farming commune.
The commune failed, and Gordin, with a wife and eight children to support, went to work for a radical Yiddish newspaper. Among his early efforts was a sketch of Jewish life with much dialogue. Zelig Molgulesco, a member of Jacob Adler’s company, had the sketch dramatized and a meeting was arranged with Adler and other actors. Gordin was astonished by the actors. He expected boors who wiped their noses on their shirt sleeves. Instead met elegant gentlemen in top hats and silk shirts who seemed sensitive and spoke intelligently.
Here the facts vary. In one version Adler, impressed by Gordin’s obvious intellect and fluent Russian, commissioned him to write a play. In another, his new friends invited him to attend his first Yiddish play. In horror he swore to write a whole new type of Yiddish drama. And thus "Siberia", the first “realistic” Yiddish drama, was born.
For the next two decades Gordin was a central presence in Yiddish theater.
Several of Gordin’s plays became standard in Yiddish repertoire, notably, "The Jewish King Lear"; "God, Man, and Devil"; and "Mirele Efros" (first called The Jewish Queen Lear). Jacob Adler and David Kessler became known as Gordin actors.
He replaced the flow-cry Germanisms of early works with simple, clear Yiddish, declaring that Yiddish was a language, not just a jargon. He brought the common man to the center of the Yiddish stage, enforced a strict moralism, and translated from Hugo, Ibsen, Gogol, and Shakespeare. He was responsible for the tendency of Yiddish writers and audiences to use “realism” as a term of automatic approval. He made the intellectual elite feel that a theater in the Yiddish language could be their concern and pride. Most of all he brought a firm discipline to the stage, insisting upon strict adherence to scripts and a decent system of rehearsals.
Under Gordin’s influence, the Yiddish theater acquired serious actors such as Bertha Kalish, Sara Adler, and Esther Rachel Kaminska. By the time of his death other serious Yiddish dramatists and actors had begun to produce work in the realistic vein. Gordin’s most creative years, around the turn of the century, are known as "the golden age of American Yiddish theater" or "the Gordin era".
He blamed the Jews for the 1881 pogrom, claiming they had failed to be “Russian” and to live by farming.
