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Bidding Information
Lot #    9639
Auction End Date    3/22/2005 10:58:00 AM (mm/dd/yyyy)
          
Title Information
Title (English)    Group of Abraham Goldfaden works
Author    [Theater]
City    New York
Publication Date    19-20 cent
          
Collection Information
Independent Item    This listing is an independent item not part of any collection
          
Description Information
Physical
Description		    Various sizes and conditions, all bound in modernpaper wrappers; sheet music in the original wrappers.
          
Paragraph 1    Books:

1. דיא כישופמאכערן Kishefmakherin ("The Witch"), Baumritter, Warsaw 1887, 66 pp.;

2. דיא קאפיזנע כלה-מויד Die Kaprizna Kallah Moid, Baumritter, Warsaw 1887, 47 pp.;

3. שולמית Shulamis, Leiser Margosches, Lemberg 1889, 54 pp.;

4. בר כוכבא Bar Kokhba, I. Alpin, Warsaw 1890, 84 pp.;

5. שמענדריג Shmendrik, Joseph Lebensohn, Warsaw 1890, 40 pp.;

6. דיא באבע מיט דעם אייניקילBobbe nit dem Einikal (“Grandma and the Grandson”), Baumritter, Warsaw, 1891, 40 pp.;

7. שולמית Shulamis, Baumritter, Warsaw 1891, 64 pp.;

8. דיא כישופמאכערן Kishefmakherin ("The Witch"), J. Saphirstein, New York 1893, 65 pp.;

9. עקידת יצחק Akeidat Yitzhok, Joseph Fischer, Cracow 1897, 70 pp.;

10. יידישע נאניאנאל-געדיכטע Yiddishe Natzional Gedichte, Joseph Fischer, Cracow 1899, 38 pp.;

11. דור והולך ודור בא Dor Holech vedor Ba, New York Hebrew Publishing Co. 83-85-87 Canal Street, c. 1909, 121 pp.;

12. בר כוכבא Bar Kokhba, Nechlas, Lemberg, n.d., 70 pp.

Music notes for Kunilemel (1910); Shmendrig (1914); Soifer Shel Mashiach (1916); Steh Auf Mein Folk (1897); Dus Fertreebene Teibele (1921); Gottes Wunder (1921); Das Boimele (1911); Collection (1898); Flaker, Feierl, Flaker (n.d.); Shulamith: The Oath (1918); Shulamith: Duett, Shulamit & Absalom (1898); Shulamith: David King of Israel (1898); Shulamith: The Misfortune (1898); Shulamith: Shepards Song (1898); Shulamith: Sabbath Yom Tow & Rosh Chodesch (1898); Shulamith: Drawing for Shulamith's Hand (1898); Shulamith: The Oriental Dance (1898); Shulamith: The Blessing (1898); Bar Kokhba: The Mill (1918); Bar Kokhba: G-d! Show Your Wonders (1918); Bar Kokhba: Greeting to Jerusalem (1918); Bar Kokhba: Shepherds Song (1899); Akeidat Yitzhok: 5 (1915); Akeidat Yitzhok: Shlof Lied, Sarah and Abraham at the Alter (1898).
          
Detailed
Description		    Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), Yiddish poet, dramatist, and composer, father of the Yiddish theater (see Theater, Yiddish). Born in Staro Konstantinov, Ukraine, he received not only a thorough Hebrew education but also acquired a knowledge of Russian, German, and secular subjects. To avoid the draft, Goldfaden was sent to a government school at 15 and there came under the influence of his teacher Abraham Ber Gottlober, a Hebrew writer who was also a lover of Yiddish. Graduation from this school in 1857 permitted Goldfaden to enter the rabbinical seminary at Zhitomir, which trained rabbis, teachers, and Jewish officials for government service. Under the guidance of sympathetic teachers, including such leaders of the Haskalah movement as E. Z. Zweifel, H. S. Slonimsky, and Gottlober, he was encouraged to compose Hebrew lyrics. The first of these were published in 1862 in Ha-Meliz. A year later Goldfaden's first Yiddish poems appeared in Kol Mevasser. In 1865 Goldfaden published a booklet of his Hebrew songs Zizim u-Ferahim. In 1866, the year of his graduation as a teacher, his first collection of Yiddish songs Dos Yudele offered rich material for badhanim and folksingers. It was followed by a supplementary booklet Di Yudene (1869). In 1875 he joined a former classmate Isaac Joel Linetzki in founding and editing in Lemberg a short-lived humorous magazine Der Alter Yisrolik. Goldfaden then went to Rumania where he came in contact in Jassy with the Broder Singers, who were singing and acting out Yiddish songs, including his own, in wine cellars and restaurant gardens. He then conceived the idea that the dramatic effect of the songs and impersonations could be heightened if they would be combined with prose dialogues and woven into an interesting plot. He gathered a few singers and rehearsed with them scenarios composed by himself. The first performances in October 1876 initiated the professional Yiddish theater. Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception accorded his performances in Jassy, Goldfaden engaged wandering minstrels and cantors' assistants as additional actors, toured other Rumanian cities, including Bucharest, and then went to Odessa. By 1880 his troupe was giving performances throughout Russia and his phenomenal success was encouraging theatrical ventures by other enterprising actors and librettists. The Yiddish theater expanded and flourished until 1883, when the Russian government, fearing this new mass medium, banned performances in Yiddish. This action compelled authors, actors, and producers to migrate to other lands. Yiddish theaters were established in Paris, London, and New York. In 1887 Goldfaden was invited by some of his actors who had moved to New York to join them, but when he arrived he encountered severe competition from producers who had preceded him and from scriptwriters who were even more prolific than he. He found Europe more congenial and returned to produce and direct performances of his plays in London, Paris, and Lemberg. He returned to the United States in 1903 and spent his last five years in New York.

Of Goldfaden's early plays, the most successful were Shmendrik (1877), a satirical comedy whose title-hero became a synonym for a gullible, good-natured person; Der Fanatik oder di Tsvey Kuni Lemels (1880), a Yiddish parallel to MoliIre's satiric comedy Les prMcieuses ridicules. The last two plays maintained their stage popularity uninterruptedly for many decades and were readapted for Israel audiences of the mid-1960s and Tsvey Kuni Lemels was adapted into a film in Israel (English title: The Flying Matchmaker). Goldfaden's more serious dramas began with the 1880s, a tragic decade for Russian Jewry. The romantic operetta Shulamis (1880) which represented the transition from his earlier period to his later one, alternated between gaiety and tragedy. In Doctor Almosado (1882), he reacted to the pogroms of 1881 and even though he transposed the scene of the dramatic action to 14th-century Palermo, his audience sensed its timeliness and its veiled references to their sad plight. In Bar Kochba (1887), an historical musical depicting the last desperate revolt of the Jews against their Roman oppressors, Goldfaden, an adherent of the Hovevei Zion movement, tried to stir his people with visions of ancient national grandeur and heroism. After Herzl's death, Goldfaden wrote his last play Ben Ami (1907), premiered a few days before his own death. It was to a large extent an adaption of George Eliot's Zionist novel Daniel Deronda, but the action was transposed to pogrom-ridden Odessa and the English aristocrat who admired the Jewish people was transformed into a Russian baron. The play ended with the pogrom victims and their noble savior experiencing regeneration as pioneers of Jewish national redemption on the soil of Zion.

Despite their slight literary value, many of Goldfaden's 60 plays -not all of them published - continued to be adapted by actors and producers and entered into the permanent repertoire of the Yiddish theater. His characters from Schmendrik and Kuni Lemel to Hotzmakh, the good-natured peddler, and Bobbe Yakhne, the malevolent witch, have been real figures to several generations of theatergoers.

Music: Goldfaden himself furnished the tunes to his plays, although he was unable to write music and played no instrument. He drew upon the most varied sources - synagogue chants and Jewish folksong, the non-Jewish folk and popular music of Eastern Europe, and Italian and French operatic arias. Many of the songs from his plays have remained popular: some were folksongs initially (such as the cradle song Rozhinkes mit Mandlen which he adapted and put into Shulamis, from where it achieved its fame), and others became folksongs. Goldfaden described his musical activity with engaging frankness in his short autobiography; A. Z. Idelsohn's analysis of the melodies in Shulamis and Bar Kokhba, and his conclusions, are a fair appraisal both of Goldfaden's musical shortcomings and his merits. For the performance of Di Kishefmakherin ("The Witch") by the Jewish Chamber Theater of Petrograd in 1922, the music was rearranged by Josef Achron. In 1947, "The Witch" was staged in Tel Aviv in Hebrew by the Ohel Theater, on the 70th anniversary of its first performance. The text was adapted by Abraham Levinson as a play within a play -bringing Goldfaden himself and his contemporary audience on the stage - and the music was rearranged by Marc Lavry.

          
Reference
Description		    EJ
        
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Listing Classification
Period
19th Century:    Checked
20th Century:    Checked
  
Location
America-South America:    Checked
Russia-Poland:    Checked
  
Subject
Music:    Checked
Other:    Theater
  
Characteristic
First Editions:    Checked
Language:    Yiddish
  
Manuscript Type
  
Kind of Judaica