| Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin''s Yiddish Drama 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 and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most 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. Barbara J. Henry is associate professor of Russian literature and Jewish studies at the University of Washington. |