Avrom Goldfaden packed several lifetimes of activity and creativity before his death on January 8, 1909 at the age of sixty-seven. Like so many other academically talented young men from his milieu whose families could afford for their sons to pursue a course of advanced study, he progressed through the various levels of a traditional Jewish education and ultimately received his rabbinic ordination. Serving as a rabbi, however, ended up being just one of variety of professional roads he took only briefly before embarking on a very different path. Other stops on his journey included petty trade, the thought of medical school, journalism, and a literary career rather than a theatrical one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The latter career choice, when Goldfaden was in his thirties and at yet another professional crossroads, was\u2014well, not a career at all, at least when it came to writing or performing in a Jewish language like Yiddish or Hebrew. While plays had been written and performed in both languages for centuries, the conditions had not yet arisen for a professional theatrical culture to exist in either. But by the time Goldfaden found himself at loose ends in the mid-1870s, though, many of the ingredients were in place that would enable him to form a Yiddish theatre troupe and take it on the road. There was an audience of millions of Yiddish speakers, mostly in Eastern Europe, to tap into. There was a longstanding performance tradition, even if it was mostly amateur and seasonal. There was a rich musical tradition, and talented singers and instrumentalists to perform it. And there was the influence of the cultures with which Yiddish speakers were regularly in contact. The more acculturated among them had access to works of European dramas, comedies, operas, operettas, and other entertainments. A portion of Eastern European Yiddish speakers as of the 1870s had some sense of what theatre was and could be. They just had very little sense of how it might look and sound, as a year-round, professional endeavor, in mame-loshn<\/em>, their mother tongue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be Goldfaden, organizing performances in the Pomul Verde beer garden in Ia\u015fi, Romania in the autumn of 1876, who would pave the way toward the creation of the modern Yiddish stage. As the timeline below illustrates, new plays would flow from his pen in the years that followed, helping to kick-start a repertoire that a rapidly growing cast of rivals like Joseph Lateiner, Moyshe Hurwitz, Y. Y. Lerner, and others would energetically add to. Remarkably, from a ragtag troupe that Goldfaden would later quip consisted of one and a half performers, the Yiddish stage would explode into a global phenomenon by the end of the century, and contribute to the pantheon of noteworthy Western dramas, productions, performances, music, and set and costume design. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldfaden\u2019s life and work would be intimately bound up in the development of the modern Yiddish stage from early adulthood to his death in New York City in 1908. The timeline below is offered as a road map to key moments in his life and career. It gives some sense of his movements from place to place; many plays (some of them never published, and some of those unpublished plays apparently no longer extant) beyond his most famous ones; his endeavors outside of Yiddish theatre, including several volumes of Yiddish poetry, and several works of Hebrew poetry and drama; and his involvement in communal affairs, particularly in the Zionist movement that, as it happens, became a major force in the Jewish world more or less at the same time that the Yiddish theatre did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n