GOLDFADEN'S POSITION IN THE YIDDISH THEATRE.
Mr. Berman's rather severe criticism of Goldfaden's work as a dramatist is based, in our opinion, on a wrong assumption of the value of pioneer effort when considered in the light of subsequent developments.
Goldfaden must be credited with having stimulated an appreciation of the art of drama among the Jews. It is true that in our day he represents an obsolete method and a crude understanding of the art, but for the needs of his time, only a Goldfaden could have made Yiddish drama possible. In the first period of the Yiddish theatre, the Jewish people were absolutely unaccustomed to the drama; they had just been given the hint to assimilate with Russian civilization by those wise, impatient pedagogues, the Maskilim; they had just outgrown their provincialism, and the labor question was looming in the distance. Despised by the Maskilim, condemned by the assimilators. Goldfaden had recourse to the proletarians herded in the cities, steeped in ignorance, uncouth, even unlettered, but who were in need of recreation after their hard day's labor. They would not have understood a Hauptman or a Mirbeau, even had Goldfaden been able to write plays of the class writen by these writers. They were not habituated to the illusions of stage representation, and could appreciate only the common, the simple, and the obscene, which is universally appreciated by minds of a certain calibre.
When Gordin became a factor in the development of the Yiddish theatre, he too found himself in advance of the audience, but like a stubborn, dogmatic man, he refused to lower his ideals to the taste of his patrons (in recent years he had become more tractable). The lack of support given to Gordin was evidence of the ineffectiveness of Goldfaden's efforts to educate his public. He did not educate them, but like all compromisers, was himself swept from his moorings, and instead of leading to an appreciation of better things, he was forced to repeat his first successes in more maladroit fashion with an increasing emphasis upon the coarse and the commonplace.
That is why, in his "Bar Kochba," which might have been a good tragedy, he made his Rufus Turnus a contemptible wretch, with no semblance to humanity, and introduced a villianous Pappus with red hair, whose business it was to create laughter as a foil to the heroics of Bar Kochba. That is why, also, in his "Shulamith," the comic intrudes upon the heroic. Goldfaden had become disloyal to his own ideals. He followed where he had set out to lead. His compromises had become a habit. In his last work, "Ben Ami," he adhered to the same methods that had made his reputation thirty years before. He had become the slave of the rabble, after the rabble had gone ahead of him.
It must also be remembered that Goldfaden was not a writer of dramas. He was the pioneer of the operetta in Yiddish, the farcial, the historical operetta, but he never wrote a drama, which can be criticised by the canons of the dramatic art. His first farces were, by his own confession, improved or "advanced" vaudeville, which was in vogue when he entered into his partnership with the ballad singer Gradner. He thought he entertained his patrons by giving them amusement in a form to which they were already accustomed. But when he wrote his more pretentious historical operettas, the operetta form mingled with farce had already become his mannerism, and he could not rid himself of it.
And his interpreters were also afflicted with the same mannerism. They were good farceurs, but never legitimate actors. They were, in a large degree, buffoons playing with a discolored Jewish life. Students of the Yiddish theatre will recall the grade of performance given by the Yiddish actors as late as 1890, when they were still exponents of a medley of realism and operatic farce; remnants of that anomaly may still be found in certain theatres and in the work of writers like Lateiner.
Goldfaden's value must, however, be estimated in the light of his environment. He sustained the Yiddish theatre until it had found its place in the life of the Jewish people. In themselves, his works possess little value, but as historical incidents