Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/195

Yiddish Drama 607 the author sets out with the manifest purpose of taking the American reader by the hand and showing him through all the nooks of the Ghetto. This motive, with the author's genuine literary talent, a most felicitous style, a realistic treatment that is both engaging and convincing, makes The Rise of David Levinsky a monumental work, and surely the most remarkable contribution by an immigrant to the American novel. Cahan's work as editor of The Jewish Daily Forward and as literary critic, his novel, and his subsequent attack upon American fiction constitute a bold challenge to American novelists. The Yiddish drama in America has always been trammelled by the immediate requirements of the playhouses, has been dic- tated mainly by box-office considerations, and, as a result of this, is of a decidedly inferior nature. ' At first the American Jewish theatre ministered to the crude wants of the coarser elements among the immigrants, who sought diversion rather than art. The actor as a professional was hardly yet differentiated, and the performers on the stage were of a kind with the hearers. The public did not value the labours of the dramatist, taking the actors to be the improvisors of the songs and the "prose. "^ But the actors regarded the playwright as the chieftain of their tribe. The institution of the "retained" author at the theatre became firmly established, and outsiders could not get a hearing with th-^ theatrical man- agers. The names of A. Goldfaden, I. Shaikewitz, J. Lateiner, and M. Hurwitch are worth mentioning in connection with the beginnings of the Yiddish drama in America. Goldfaden is considered the founder of the Yiddish theatre. All of them had been practised in their craft before they came here. They knew their audience from the old Ghetto and understood per- fectly well how to suit its tastes. Their plays were mostly adaptations from the inferior European stage. The most preposterous plots, a few songs of the salacious and sentimental pseudo-nationalistic kind, a comedian for the display of whose "stunts" the action was frequently and arbitrarily suspended ' The Jewish Art Theatre, established in 1919, bids fair to make an important contribution of a higher sort. 2 Z. Libin is authority for the story that only some ten years ago he had great difiSculty in explaining to a Jewish audience in a country town that he was a playwright. "Why should you write the words after the actors have said them? " he was asked.