The botched kiss: Abraham Goldfaden and the literary origins of the Yiddish theatre.

Although an impressive body of scholarship has illuminated aspects of the early Yiddish theatre (1876--1883) and its founder Avraham Goldfaden (1840--1909), there have been few sustained inquiries into the literary quality of his work. Scholars have been quick to dismiss Goldfaden's plays and musical operettas as belonging to the "lowbrow" class of early modern Yiddish culture-itself a category that scholars have, until now, defined only vaguely and inconsistently. Moreover, contradictions still suffuse the great deal we have learned about the events leading up to Goldfaden's establishment of the Yiddish theatre. Did his founding of the theatre originate in Jewish traditional performance? Or was Goldfaden's destiny as the father of the Yiddish theatre sealed when he was first attracted to writing modern Yiddish drama almost a decade earlier? How did these elements come to coalesce in his artistic efforts?This thesis argues that Goldfaden's work is, in fact, of high literary merit that is revealed in close-readings of his major plays. Close readings of works by earlier Yiddish playwrights such as Israel Aksenfeld and Shlomo Ettinger are included in attempt to establish Goldfaden's literary pedigree. Three chapters that explore aspects of Goldfaden's early literary context precede the series of close textual analyses. What intended audience accounts for the sophistication of Goldfaden's work? How were his works made accessible to a common audience? Although scholars have assumed that Yiddish literature during this early era was pitched to a mass audience, these chapters reveal that a variegated Yiddish audience existed and, in fact, had an important impact on the Yiddish literature of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s."The Botched Kiss" of the title encapsulates the aesthetic-ideological dilemma that shaped Goldfaden's imaginative world and is elaborated throughout the close readings of his dramas. It equally describes the limited, if not doomed, cultural relationship that grew up between well-intentioned Yiddish-writing Enlightenment proponents and their intended audience of "the Yiddish masses."Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 2002.School code: 0084