Benjamin Harshav: The Moscow Yiddish Theatre

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Moskver idisher melukhisher teater), usually referred to by its Russian acronym, Goset, was one of the crown jewels of modern Jewish creativity. Its story has the making of Shakespearean drama: daring, uplifting and tragic. It is a tale of innovative artistry, personal talent, Jewish commitment, political shenanigans, great hopes and broken promises which ends with assassination and institutional liquidation. 
During its lifetime (1918–50) and the decades following its brutal demise, the theatre has been the subject of several books of scholarly and semi-scholarly nature, as well as personal memoirs, written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, French and German. Essays in English appeared every so often in specialized academic journals, yet in the absence of an English-language monograph, Goset remained below the radar. Two reasons for this relative obscurity appear to be the cultural tensions created by the Cold War and the fact that the theatre never toured Britain or the United States.
This situation began to change sixteen years ago. In 1992, the Guggenheim Museum presented Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theatre, an exhibition that captivated New York, and later Chicago, with a display of the large mural paintings Chagall had prepared for Goset’s first home in Moscow. The fate of the murals was tied to the oblivion to which the Soviet authorities had consigned the theatre: after its demise in 1950, the murals had been rolled up and left in storage in the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow; Goset was written out of theatre history. Chagall himself did not know if his work had survived, and only in 1973, when he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1922, did he reunite with the murals and apply his signature to the canvases. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.