Our Year of Goldfaden
2026 marks the sesquicentennial of a watershed moment in Jewish history and culture. In October 1876, in Iaşi, Romania, Avrom Goldfaden (1840-1908) forever changed the Jewish cultural world by planting seeds that would quickly blossom into the modern, professional Yiddish stage. Out of a performance in a beer garden, which even by Goldfaden’s own account went far from smoothly, would soon grow a global cultural phenomenon whose most accomplished plays and performers would hold their own with, and contribute to, the highest achievements of modern theatre and drama.
As we enter the autumn of 2026, the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project pays tribute to Goldfaden’s place in history with a series of articles approaching his work and legacy from various angles. Contributors will explore how his work was produced on stages from Buenos Aires to Paris to Romania to Israel. They’ll share insights about his contributions to Yiddish music, discuss his innovations as a playwright, closely examine specific productions, and offer insights on how Goldfaden’s plays and music were shaped by the conditions they grew out of, and made their own indelible impact on modern Yiddish culture.
Collectively, the articles in this series will help us appreciate why and how Goldfaden’s work became so ubiquitous in Yiddish culture (and significant beyond it as well), and why it’s important to understand his legacy. In anticipation of those articles, let us look at some key facets of his life, creative activity, and impact.
Both cognizant of his own importance and insistent that others recognize it too, Goldfaden dubbed himself the “Father of the Yiddish Stage.” The epithet sparked no major battles or controversies. If anyone could claim that title, it was he—but let’s look more closely at what that nickname does and doesn’t mean. It does not mean that Yiddish theatre didn’t exist until Goldfaden came along. Quite the contrary: a wide variety of Yiddish-language performances, including Purim plays and presentations by troubadours, magicians, and other performers, dates back to the Middle Ages. Closer to Goldfaden’s time, beginning in Prussia in the 1790s, writers affiliated with the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) created a body of drama that articulated the movement’s agenda for modernizing the Jewish world—often by satirizing what they saw as the most serious shortcomings of the Hasidim, one of their key rivals for the hearts and minds of the Jewish people. Indeed, Goldfaden himself contributed to that body of maskilic (that is, pertaining to the Haskalah) literature in some of his earliest plays and poems.
What Goldfaden genuinely fathered was the professional Yiddish stage. Before 1876, any efforts to establish regular, year-round productions in Yiddish featuring professional performers failed to gain significant traction. Purim plays were, as their name implies, seasonal offerings on and around the time of that holiday and were generally performed by amateurs. And as had been the case in other cultures, all the Yiddish performers were men and boys before Goldfaden and his competitors changed that tradition, starting very shortly after he started touring with his first small company. Goldfaden himself participated in the all-male tradition as well, having played the title role in Solomon Ettinger’s Haskalah satire Serkele when that play was first performed—decades after it was written—at the Zhitomir rabbinical seminary in 1863, while he was a student there.
Goldfaden’s theatrical activity before 1876 helped set the stage for what would happen that autumn and in the months and years to follow. The launch of his first troupe did not happen in a vacuum, for Goldfaden had already cut his teeth at both acting and playwriting for more than a decade. The production of Serkele that he starred in was not just any school production; accounts from the time reveal that Ettinger’s satire, and Goldfaden’s performance in it, were the talk of the town. And Goldfaden published two books before 1876. The first, in 1865, was a volume of Hebrew poetry, followed a year later by a collection of “poems in simple Yiddish.” Before that fateful evening in a Romanian beer garden a decade later, Goldfaden would complete his rabbinical studies, marry Paulina Verbl, publish his first plays, and try his hand at several jobs, including a short-lived effort to start a Yiddish newspaper before the Russian government shut it down.
Creating live theatre is never a comfortable undertaking, but Goldfaden’s decision to assemble a theatre troupe and take it on the road was an act of fortuitous folly: fortuitous because it would lead to the emergence of a full-blown theatrical culture in Yiddish in a remarkably short time, folly because one can hardly overstate how unlikely his prospects for success would have been when he was just getting started. When Goldfaden’s troupe took to the road after its debut in Iaşi, it had almost no repertoire; no formal training as performers; no dedicated performance spaces; no personnel with significant experience in any aspect of writing, composing for, acting in, or producing theatre; and no established audience. Goldfaden, his collaborators, and their competitors would face not only the significant task of establishing and sustaining new theatre troupes, but the far more monumental one of manufacturing a professional theatrical culture almost out of whole cloth.
For starters, they needed to create a repertoire. The centuries-old Yiddish theatrical tradition had little to offer. Purim plays were largely improvised, only a handful had been preserved, and in any case they would have been unlikely to effectively address contemporary concerns and interests. While Haskalah satires were more recent and topical, they constituted only a modest number of plays and tended to revolve around a fairly narrow set of themes, issues, and character types. New plays would be needed, and fast, to create a body of stageworthy plays speaking to the interests of contemporary audiences.
Goldfaden wasted no time in starting to fill that gap. Particularly in the early years of his career, he would create new works with remarkable speed—often matched, if not exceeded, by the very busy pens of rivals like Moyshe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner. The need for constant novelty does not tend to be conducive to a high degree of craftmanship, and the quality of his works can be uneven. What is remarkable, though, is how many plays in a wide range of styles and subject matter Goldfaden would produce that would not just stand the test of time, but come to constitute much of the backbone of the Yiddish popular repertoire: in particular, broad comedies, melodramas, and operas.
The first years of his playwriting career were dominated by two types of plays: light comedies, often relying on farcical situations and a significant amount of wordplay; and satires typically in the maskilic vein. The broad comedy Shmendrik is a noteworthy example of the former. Goldfaden introduces the title character as:
fifteen years old, not tall, a yarmulke on his head and two long, straight earlocks, in red underwear that buttons in back. He wears a long string of lead amulets, parchments, and wolf ’s teeth hangs around his neck, and a silver hoop in one ear. His foolish face is framed by large black eyebrows, with redness around his nose and various scratches scattered about his face and neck. He says “s” instead of “sh” and “t” instead of “k.”1
Today many of us would find this description insensitive, to say the least, but regardless of our sensibilities, there’s something rather inhuman about the young man. However harmless he may be—or perhaps not so harmless, if a young woman’s happiness is to be sacrificed by forcing her to marry him just because he comes from a highly regarded family—he is almost impossible to relate to, much less to love. Nevertheless, the play was wildly popular, and the name of the title character entered Yiddish parlance as a byword for a fool or an idiot.
If we fast-forward just a couple years, though, we find a powerful example of how quickly Goldfaden’s dramaturgy evolved. The Two Kuni-Lemls is a kind of Yiddish Comedy of Errors—with the Hasidic worldview being the source of most of the errors. The real Kuni-Leml of the title (as opposed to his rival Max, who will ultimately impersonate him in order to rescue the heroine, Carolina, from a potentially disastrous arranged marriage) is described as “a twenty-year-old Hasid—blind in one eye, lame in one foot, and with a stutter.”2 Once again, Goldfaden relies heavily on the well-worn trope of manifesting a figure’s character defects in physical characteristics. Throughout the play, the text foregrounds Kuni-Leml’s limp, poor vision, and stutter as the stuff of mockery, while the combination also serves the verisimilitude of the plot, since Kuni-Leml’s traits are so easy for Max to replicate. Yet Kuni-Leml is not the monstrosity that Shmendrik was. There’s a softness about him, and while that doesn’t excuse Goldfaden’s repeated reliance on disability as a comic device, it does make Kuni-Leml a much more well-rounded character than Shmendrik can ever be.
Not all of Goldfaden’s earliest plays disseminated maskilic messages. Many had no discernible message at all; rather, they were light comedies and burlesques, purely for the purposes of diverting the audience. That fact takes nothing away from Goldfaden’s reputation or achievements; it is a time-honored tradition in the theatre, and indeed, as the old theatre adage (attributed to Moss Hart) goes, “If you have a message, call Western Union.” Late in his life, Goldfaden would feel the need to defend choices that at least some critics saw as pandering to the audience, but where, exactly, is the line between pandering and simply engaging and entertaining, and giving audiences a reason to come back next time?
Goldfaden wrote some thirty plays during the first few years of his activity as a professional playwright.3 Many were one-acts and most were minor and forgettable, but this period saw the creation of one of his masterpieces, and to this day one of his most popular works: Di kishefmakherin [The Sorceress]. That operetta features two of Goldfaden’s most beloved characters: the title figure, a deliciously cruel and powerful witch traditionally played by a man, and the unscrupulous but lovable and good-hearted peddler Hotsmakh, who repeatedly swindles customers in the shtetl’s busy marketplace, but ultimately helps rescue the play’s heroine, Mirele, from the witch’s plan to traffic her as a sex slave. As bookends to all this activity, the play opens with a lively song, “Tsu dayn geburtstog” [For Your Birthday] that would become the Yiddish world’s answer to “Happy Birthday,” and closes with the witch and her minions outwitted and destroyed.
The early growth of the professional Yiddish stage coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in all of Jewish history. In 1881, just a few years after the first performances of Goldfaden’s troupe in that Romanian beer garden, Tsar Alexander II would be assassinated, a wave of pogroms would erupt across southern Russia, and Alexander III’s cruel regime would make the lives of Russian Jews demonstrably worse. Various segments of the Russian Jewish community responded in different ways: with political movements like Zionism and Bundism; with increased religious fervor; and with mass emigration. They also responded with the proliferation of secular literature and culture. Goldfaden’s output from 1881 onward offers us a snapshot of how one artist responded to those developments.
Just a glance at the titles and settings of Goldfaden’s plays after 1881 shows a marked shift from his earlier work. Where his first plays tended to be either light diversions, maskilic satires, or arguably both at the same time, his later titles include numerous reworkings of biblical tales and historical episodes, such as the tragic opera Bar Kokhba, revolving around a heroic but doomed revolt against the Roman empire; Doctor Almasado, depicting the plight of Jews in Inquisition-era Sicily; Ahasuerus, Judah Maccabee, and Judith and Holofernes, to name a few. While these works are complex and introduce numerous themes and issues to Yiddish audiences, one can identify a central theme of the struggle against often violent persecution. Goldfaden has moved on from the internal ideological and spiritual battles that were the focus of so much discussion for the previous century and had become much more preoccupied with the survival of the Jewish people in what felt like an increasingly hostile world.
That preoccupation focused on literal, physical survival, but also on the spiritual and cultural well-being of individuals and communities. The titular heroine of his beloved operetta Shulamis is forsaken by the man with whom she swore a loyalty oath early in the play, and though he forgets her astonishingly quickly, she remains stalwart, putting off her parade of suitors in Penelope-like fashion, but with feigned madness rather than a burial shroud that manages never to be finished. Along the way, Goldfaden treats us to some of his most enduring melodies and brilliantly constructed lyrics: the ubiquitous lullaby “Rozhinkes mit mandlen” [Raisins and Almonds], the stirring duet “Di shvue” [The Oath], and the brilliant ballad expressing Shulamis’s isolation, “Shabes, yontev, un rosh khoydesh” [Sabbath, Festival, and New Moon].
Goldfaden’s biography is often, ironically, a tale of isolation and loneliness too. Though he earned the self-appointed epithet of “Father of the Yiddish Stage,” lived like an emperor at the height of his career, and had his name and image plastered on countless theater posters and song sheets, he often alienated the theatre makers he worked with, and in his later years tended to rely on special fundraisers in his honor to keep body and soul together. It didn’t help that many of his most successful works were created in the first decade or so of his professional career, with the remaining two decades less fully populated with hits.
We need to approach this part of Goldfaden’s life and career with some humility and caution, however. For one thing, he continued to be productive and create works of lasting value, such as the operetta Akeydes Yitskhok [The Binding of Isaac] and the epic coming-of-age drama Meshiekhs tsaytn?! [The Messianic Era?!]. He also produced work that has been almost completely overlooked by critics and historians, who have tended to focus on earlier periods of his theatrical career. The second two-thirds of that period of his life—which also includes the publication of books of poetry written in response to contemporary events, his ongoing work as a director and theater impresario, and his involvement in Jewish politics—call for a much full assessment. Goldfaden’s later years, as much as he struggled with matters of health and finances, are far from being a tale of inexorable decline. That fact is attested to by his funeral procession and burial in New York City in 1908, which are said to have drawn as many as 100,000 onlookers. They had reason to mourn, but while the Yiddish-speaking world had lost an extraordinary figure, his works had made his name immortal, and a number of them were making their way toward achieving classic status.
After Goldfaden’s death, the most popular of his plays continued to be ubiquitous on Yiddish stages, and would be translated into, and performed in, other languages as well. And like classic works for the stage in any culture, they would also be reimagined and reinvented. In 1922, for example, the Moscow State Jewish Theatre (GOSET) staged an energetic, constructivist production of The Sorceress that included an exchange where characters symbolically buried the Yiddish theatre of old, making the production part entertainment, part manifesto. A few years later, in New York, actor and impresario Maurice Schwartz would mount major Goldfaden revivals in successive seasons at his Yiddish Art Theatre, starting with The Two Kuni-Lemls in 1924. Schwartz, who played the “real” Kuni-Leml, described the character as a tragicomic figure facing an existential crisis not unlike Hamlet’s. The following year Schwartz embraced the tradition of having the title character of The Sorceress played by a man—in this case none other than Schwartz himself. And in 1926, he inaugurated the opening of a new theatre space on Second Avenue with a major revival of a less frequently produced Goldfaden drama, Dos tsente gebot [The Tenth Commandment]. The star-studded cast and creative team included a young designer named Boris Aronson, who would soon cross over to the English-language stage to become one of Broadway’s most noted designers, for productions including Awake and Sing!, The Crucible, The Diary of Anne Frank, Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, and Follies, and on and on.
Goldfaden’s work would be restaged, reimagined, and even rewritten in the decades to follow. Noteworthy examples include Mikhl Weichert’s metatheatrical comedy Trupe Tanenstap [The Tanentsap Troupe], staged by his experimental Warsaw company Yung Teater in 1933, and Itsik Manger’s Hotsmakh-shpil [Hotsmakh Play], a tender post-Holocaust reworking of The Sorceress, in 1947. Not only does Manger shift the spotlight from the witch Bobe Yakhne to the scheming but good-hearted peddler Hotsmakh, but he gives us three Hotsmakhs rather than one, along with an entirely new songbook composed and arranged by the highly prolific Romanian-born4 Israeli composer Dov Seltzer.
While little of Goldfaden’s work made its way onto the screen, an important exception can be found—though in Hebrew rather than Yiddish. Israel Becker’s 1966 film adaptation of The Two Kuni-Lemls, based on a screenplay he wrote with Alex Maimon, was wildly successful, and sixty years later remains among the highest-grossing Israeli films of all time. Mike Burstyn played both Kuni-Leml and Max, and his performance made him a huge star in Israel, following in the footsteps of his parents Peysekhke Burshteyn and Lillian Lux, who had long careers as beloved Yiddish comedians. The enormous commercial success of the film offered an incentive to bring Kuni-Leml back to the Israeli screen, which Joel Silberg did a decade later with Kuni Leml in Tel Aviv. In both this entirely new story and Kuni Leml in Cairo (Yoel Zilberg, 1983), Burstyn played both Kuni-Leml and his identical-twin grandsons, the religious Kuni and the secular Muni. As far removed as they had become from the original, the progression from a Jewish Enlightenment satire of life in Eastern Europe to popular musicals involving avatars of the original Kuni-Leml chasing each other around the modern Middle East shows how ingrained Goldfaden became not just in Yiddish culture, but in Jewish cultural life more broadly.
And that phenomenon continues into the contemporary moment, with the most popular of Goldfaden’s plays continuing to resurface and at times be reinvented on Jewish stages internationally. The past decade has seen revivals or adaptations of Goldfaden plays on major Yiddish and Jewish stages in the US, Europe, and Israel. The Sorceress and The Two Kuni-Lemls continue to be by far the most popular Goldfaden plays in revival, with New York, Tel Aviv, Bucharest, and Warsaw being the main venues where his work has been staged in recent years.
In terms of scholarship on Yiddish theatre and drama, Goldfaden is everywhere and nowhere. That is, his name is ubiquitous because his plays were and are, but there is an endless amount of research to be done on his life, work, and impact. The most significant study in English is The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater by the DYTP’s own Alyssa Quint. That study focuses on the early years of Goldfaden’s professional theatrical activity, from 1876 to 1883. Those are by many measures the most consequential years of his career, and the ones where he created almost all of his most-produced plays. Quint mined archival materials in multiple languages, and her study is a must-read for any serious student of the Yiddish stage. And like any valuable scholarship, it opens up avenues for further study. There’s endless work to be done to better understand Goldfaden’s place in cultural history, and even broader work to better understand and assess the work of his competitors and collaborators.
Goldfaden created a significant output of plays, songs, and poetry for us to continue to explore. If the production history of his plays has tended to narrow to a couple of greatest hits, what’s known of his music in Yiddish-speaking circles is similar. If someone knows just three Yiddish songs, one of them is likely to be “Rozhinkes mit mandlen,” recorded by everyone from Jan Peerce to Richard Tucker to Martha Schlamme to Theodore Bikel to Dudu Fisher to Chava Alberstein to the local klezmer band that performed at your cousin Marissa’s bat mitzvah. In the heyday of the Yiddish stage, other popular Goldfaden songs were recorded by stars of the Yiddish stage, but few of his songs are widely known or performed today apart from where they appear in the plays for which they were written. In many cases that may be just as well; songs from musicals, operettas, and operas don’t always work well out of context. But countless hits from musicals make their way into singers’ repertoires, and singers who perform in Yiddish could do worse than going back to the sound archives and troves of sheet music to look for other Goldfaden tunes ripe for rediscovery.
The same can be said for theatre makers. Less frequently produced Goldfaden plays deserve to be revisited and brought before audiences once again. I can imagine operettas like The Binding of Isaac finding new life, alongside works like the greatly underappreciated six-act epic, The Messianic Era!?, which spans the Eastern European Jewish experience from the shtetl to the city to various possible destinations out of the region: to the United States, Argentina, or Palestine.
The task, then, is not simply to commemorate Goldfaden, but to keep discovering him. His most familiar works have earned their place in the repertoire, but they should not have the last word. There are plays waiting to be read, songs waiting to be heard, and theatrical possibilities waiting to be tested. We don’t have to await the Messiah to continue getting to know Goldfaden better.
In the weeks and months ahead, the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project will take up some of those possibilities, with explorations of Goldfaden’s work as a composer and theatre maker, articles examining the ongoing production history of his plays, and a timeline of his varied and eventful life and work. But those are only beginnings. A sesquicentennial is a useful occasion to look back at what Goldfaden made possible, and just as fitting an occasion to ask where his work might take us next.
- Avrom Goldfaden, Shmendrik (Ulrikh, 1879), 3. ↩︎
- Avrom Goldfaden, Di tsvey Kuni-leml (New York, Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.), 1. ↩︎
- For further details, see the timeline and bibliography in the DYTP Blog post that follows this one. ↩︎
- Born, in fact, in Iaşi, the cradle of the professional Yiddish stage, in 1931. ↩︎
