Sholem Asch (eBook)

Sholem Asch (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
241 Seiten
White Goat Press (Verlag)
9798987707883 (ISBN)

Infos

The first in a playwright series by White Goat Press, Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy includes three of Asch's Yiddish dramas - taking place in the world of the criminals and the literal underworld - that had successful and influential debuts on the Yiddish stage in the 1920s.

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The first in a playwright series by White Goat Press, Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy includes three of Asch' s Yiddish dramas - taking place in the world of the criminals and the literal underworld - that had successful and influential debuts on the Yiddish stage in 1907, 1917, and 1922.

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION TO GOD OF VENGEANCE

Sholem Asch remains one of the most controversial Broadway playwrights in American theater history, yet he never wrote a play in English. In the early 1920s, two years before Mae West was thrown into the slammer for jumping into bed with sailors in her racy farce Sex, Rudolph Schildkraut starred in an English translation of Asch’s god of vengeance, a drama about a Jewish brothel owner who attempts to go legit by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying off his daughter to a yeshiva student. After a six-week run on Broadway, the entire cast spent a night in jail charged with “lewd behavior” for performing in what was Asch’s first full-length play, complete with Jewish prostitutes, a lesbian scene, and a Torah hurled across the stage.

Born in Kutno, Poland, in 1880 into a large Orthodox Jewish family, as a young man the budding writer abandoned his religious studies and spent a few years slumming in the Warsaw underworld before moving to America. One of his first jobs was writing letters for the illiterate—people from all walks of life, including criminals and prostitutes. This work, at which he surely excelled, gave him deep psychological insight into many different strata of society. Historically, artists and criminals have always lived side by side, poverty and unfettered ambition bringing them close together. It was this milieu that provided Asch with much of his early inspiration for the pimps and prostitutes of god of vengeance. He clearly preferred their company to the religious hypocrites he left behind.

Written by the former rabbinical student when he was about 26 years old, god of vengeance is a send-up of the typical bourgeoisie melodrama. The play opens with a precious mother-daughter scene as Soreh and Rivkele prepare the house for visitors, unremarkable except that this family lives above a brothel and Mother used to be a whore. The first act ends with Soreh describing her fantasy marriage for her daughter to a handsome yeshiva scholar, while behind her Rivkeleh begins passionately kissing one of the prostitutes from downstairs.

Asch has a great sympathy for his subjects, as well as an understanding for the limited opportunities available to them that lead to a life of crime and prostitution. Act two takes place in the brothel and is a deeply human portrait of the young women who live there. As the prostitute Basha says, explaining why she rejected a marriage with the local butcher, “I should go marry Shtinky and every year make another little Shtinky?”

In the scene that shut down the production, Manke and Rivkele cuddle and kiss together before Manke asks her to run away. Manke promises Rivkele that they will go to a place where “no one will hit her, no one will scream at her,” where “they can sleep together the whole night in one bed.” Everyone wants a piece of poor Rivkele, a young woman discovering her sexuality, unaware of her own vulnerability. Her parents want to use her to move up in society, Manke wants her as her lover, the older prostitute Hindl and her boyfriend Shlomo want to pimp her out, and Reb Eli wants to marry her off and collect his matchmaking commission.

The Daddy in god of vengeance dares to challenge God and his position in society. When Yankl realizes his daughter has been kidnapped he says, “Only I ask you, Rebbe—Why didn’t God want me? Why didn’t he bother to save you, Yankl Shapshovitch, from the swamp that sucks you down?” Ultimately, he rejects both God and respectable society after his daughter is corrupted in his eyes. As he says at the end of the play, abandoning all pretenses toward religion and hurling the sacred totem across the stage: “Take your Torah. I don’t need it anymore.”

God of vengeance had been a huge hit when it premiered in German in 1907 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by one of the most celebrated directors of his day, Max Reinhardt, and starring the legendary actor Rudolph Schildkraut (father of the Academy Award–winner Joseph Schildkraut). A few years earlier Asch had seen Schildkraut star as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and was inspired to write the part of Yankl Shapshovitch especially for him. god of vengeance was subsequently performed throughout the world in Russian, French, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian. It was also performed in New York City on Second Avenue in its original Yiddish beginning as early as 1907.

The infamous 1923 Broadway production, translated by Isaac Goldberg, marked the first time the play was performed in the United States in English. The play, again starring Schildkraut as the brothel owner, also launched the career of 23-year-old Morris Carnovsky, playing as his first Broadway role an elderly Biblical scribe. Despite a successful run at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village and capacity houses for the duration of its interrupted Broadway showing, the production was shut down at the Apollo Theater on 42nd Street after only a few weeks. The play about a Jewish brothel owner and his attempt to become respectable was deemed immoral.

This revolt was led by Rabbi Silverman, a reform rabbi who was outraged by the portrayal of Jews on stage as pimps and prostitutes. The producer, star, and entire cast were jailed and prosecuted, resulting in fines of up to $500 each or a maximum three years in prison. They were charged with presenting an obscene and indecent play. Producer Harry Weinberger, also a lawyer, acted for the defense. In the ensuing trial, the jury deliberated for under an hour and found the entire company guilty. (The decision was overturned on appeal.)

When I first read the play in its original Yiddish, I found the script beautiful and poetic—culminating in the tender love scene between the two young women. But I was even more captivated by the gritty sexuality and vibrancy that characterized much of the dialogue. The fluid nature of Yiddish allows Asch to write an almost different vernacular for each personality—the more religious have a Hebraicized Yiddish, the country naïve a more Polish vocabulary, the criminal element uses a more Russified Yiddish, and so on. Although most of his characters are Jewish, their cultural, national, and ideological backgrounds are different, and it is this uniquely Jewish collision of cultures within a common ground that Asch captures in his writing. The scribe, the most religious character, speaks the most Hebrew phrases. Shlomo, the incorrigible young pimp, uses more Russian. The dialect Asch creates for each role is so specific and unique that his fully formed characters resonate deeply—because of their cultural specificity—with the universal in all cultures. Reading Asch’s plays, one can see how the Jewish communities he creates are a microcosm for the class, religious, and moral divides existing across all cultures throughout the modern world.

In the late 1990s, I saw a production of the play in a translation that made Asch’s script seem awkward and melodramatic, nothing like the masterpiece I had first read in Yiddish. On the urging of Todo con Nada’s Aaron Beall, I decided to translate the play myself with the belief that this was one of the great works of the twentieth century.

This translation is not an adaptation; it is a literal translation that stays as close to the text as possible. In our translations we look to imitate Asch’s phrasing and diction as much as possible and to include a layer of the original Yiddish so as not to sever the play sonically from the cultural specificity of the source text. Yiddish words or phrases appearing in the translation are meant to emphasize very specific moments in the text and mark moments of intense or increasing emotion—during the love scene between Mankeh and Rivkeleh, for instance, Yiddish is used and then followed by its English equivalent, often because Asch repeats the phrase in his script.

I sense that translators sometimes feel the need to “improve” a play by adapting the script instead of treating it as a great work of art that should be seen first as the author originally intended. And some translations are completely divorced from the rhythms and sounds of their original Yiddish, creating a script that is not rooted in any particular culture, let alone the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and America. Imagine if John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World had been written without the cadence of Irish Gaelic beneath its Irish-language-peppered English text.

Once we completed several drafts, our translation of god of vengeance was then developed through performance, beginning with a run in Times Square just around the corner from where the cast of Goldberg’s very fine translation was arrested in 1923. Because of Mayor Giuliani’s zoning laws from the 1990s requiring porn shops to have at least 60 percent cultural programming, Show World—the world-famous porn emporium right across from Port Authority—was compelled to bring in “nonadult” entertainment to keep the video peep shows open. They were looking to book the go-go room, and all the girls had to be dressed. Aaron Beall, whose storefront theater Nada had led the artistic revitalization of Ludlow Street beginning in the late 1980s, heard about the venue and scheduled a meeting with the owner of Show World. He wrote a plan to transform the second floor into a series of ninety-nine-seat theaters and rehearsal halls.

As a result, Beall’s Obie...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.5.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Dramatik / Theater
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• ISBN-13: 9798987707883 / 9798987707883