Review of Three Yiddish Plays by Women: Female Jewish Perspectives, 1880-1920, Alyssa Quint (anthology editor)

A search on the website of the Jewish Women’s Archive lends no results for any of the three women whose voices can be heard when reading Three Yiddish Plays by Women. The life stories of Maria Lerner, Paula Prilutski, and Lena Brown are not documented and their creative output is not recorded among the entries of the database. This state of affairs makes the decision of the two curators of the series Yiddish Voices (a partnership between the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bloomsbury Academic), Alyssa Quint and Elissa Bemporad, to open the series with their works even more pertinent. Specifically organized to showcase first-time translations of Yiddish texts that can address contemporary readers, the series could not have debuted better than with this anthology. Lerner’s, Prilutski’s, and Brown’s voices ring loudly from the pages of Three Yiddish Plays by Women, and Quint’s introduction provides a much-needed historical context not only of the writers’ existences but also of the position of women playwrights in Yiddish theater at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Quint’s expert opinion, plays such as the three in the volume were “not the tip of a [neglected] iceberg, but rarities” and as such the more valuable and worthier of (re)discovery.

Maria Lerner (1860-1927) and Paula Prilutski (1876-1941) were recognized penwomen of their times, whose ascent to the status of playwrights was also made possible by their marriages to important men of Yiddish culture and the stage in particular. Maria Lerner was the wife of the pioneer of Yiddish theater, folklore, and literary criticism Yoysef-Yude (Osip) Lerner, while Paula Prilutski was married to Yiddish scholar and political leader Noyekh Prilutski. Lena Brown alone is an absolute newcomer and mystery, as Quint herself only offers snippets of biographical information on her: she lived on President Street in Brooklyn until sometime in the late 1950s and she had one son, who saved a few of her effects after her passing, including a manuscript, which he deposited in a drawer where her grandson discovered it in 2010 (Quint 17). These three women with lives unfolding in three different localities—Tsarist Russia, Poland, and the US—wrote plays that grapple with women’s issues that were at the forefront of women’s concerns in the first decades of the twentieth century—such as the tragic fate of the agune (“chained wife”), motherhood, self-realization, sex work, financial independence, and reproductive autonomy— and unfortunately still are a century later.

From a woman’s perspective, and in Brown’s case also from the safe haven of the drawer, the three writers create female protagonists who navigate family expectations and personal desires, confront tradition and law, and test the limits of independence and agency. The fact that at the end of each play the main protagonist dies—whether of shame or by suicide—signals that despite their engagement with uncomfortable topics of their times, none of the three writers could even imagine a way out of a Jewish woman’s predicament when she did not conform with her condition and the norms of the society around her.

Maria Lerner’s The Chained Wife (first staged in 1880 in Tsarist Russia) tells the story of Rosa Grossman, obedient daughter to the successful merchant Grossman and his wife, Chayele. Despite her love for Adolf, her father’s bookkeeper, Rosa follows her father’s wish and marries a seemingly wealthy and sophisticated broker from Moscow, Mr. Neumann. Soon after their wedding, Rosa discovers Neumann to be a self-indulgent rapscallion, who not only cheated her father in business but also pawned or sold her jewelry and has no moral qualms about spending her dowry on dubious dealings and long nights of gambling and drinking. Because Rosa refuses “to fall in line with her husband” (59), i.e. to embrace his lifestyle, and defies him when he bids her to entertain his friends, Neumann abandons her without giving her a writ of divorce. After a long search for Neumann, Adolf’s broker reaches Odessa where he is swindled into believing that he procured the necessary document so that Adolf and Rosa can finally get married. They do and live happily together with their two daughters for nineteen years. On the day of the oldest daughter’s betrothal, Neumann returns with irrefutable proof that he had never given Rosa a divorce. Angry at the mercilessness of the laws governing her life, feeling abandoned by the rabbi leading her community, heartbroken and anguished at the thought that her children would have to suffer as mamzerim (illegitimate children subject to a set of legal limitations according to Jewish law), at the end of the play, Rosa collapses and dies.

In Paula Prilutski’s One of Those (first staged in 1912 in Warsaw), Judith Zaltsman is a daughter who cannot stop mourning her mother’s death and in so doing resents her father’s happiness with a new wife. Exasperated by her behavior, Saul Zaltsman banishes Judith from his house, who turns to prostitution to support herself “in a large Russian city” (123). Eight years later, Judith is the mother of an unwanted child of “fathers” (124) and the mistress of the Officer, who is ready to marry her upon her conversion to Christianity. Emboldened by a letter describing her father’s misery after his wife had left him, Judith decides to return to help him regain his footing. She abandons her child—whom she does not love—and goes back to Warsaw to patch things up between her father and her stepmother. While she succeeds at that, she cannot find her way back into society in the traditional way—by marrying—as she is unwilling to deceive a prospective husband by lying about her past. Another four years later, somewhere in Russia, Judith is the forewoman in an institution designed to reform former prostitutes through hard work. The communal living arrangements and regimented daily routines leave the women longing for the creature comforts of their previous life. Feeling betrayed in her aspirations to improve their lives when one of the prostitutes questions the validity of her efforts, which do not remove their social stigma—“What do you think, because we don’t do anything wrong here, people look at us differently than they used to?” (167)— Judith kills everyone including herself.

Lena Brown’s Sonia Itelson or A Child … A Child … (written sometime in the early 1920s in Brooklyn) follows the life of Sonia Itelson in New York. An educated, cultured, and lively middle-class twenty-eight-year-old (at the beginning of the play), Sonia has a mind of her own and speaks it. She does not shun the idea of free love and finds the expectation that women of her standing be tied down by marriage, child-bearing, and homemaking out of touch with the spirit of her times. Sonia defends her views until she falls for a man equally in love with her, but also five years her junior, and they get married. Seven years later, the couple is anything but happy as Sonia refuses to become a mother and her husband, Leo Edit, wishes for nothing more than a child of their own. Moreover, Sonia’s fallback onto abortion as a means of contraception has left her incapable of conceiving without an operation that is deemed life-threatening. For a few months the Edits adopt a child, but the situation fails to make Sonia happy and she decides to have the operation in spite of the danger it poses to her. It does not come toSonia’s surgery, as during the preparatory phase, her sister Fanny is rushed into the operating room for an emergency intervention after another one of her abortions. This one ends fatally for her. Several months later, a sad and distraught Sonia, a mere shadow of her former independent and outspoken self, decides to set her husband free by committing suicide.

At the core of each of the plays lies a transgression and the protagonist pays for it with her life. Rosa Grossman wants to marry for love and, even though she accepts her father’s choice of a husband at first, once the chance of matrimonial happiness with her loved one arises, she pursues it. Yet she does so within the norms of Jewish customs—Adolf hires a broker to obtain the divorce writ; neither he nor Rosa act directly on the circumstances that stand in the way of their happiness. Rosa is certainly not Henrik Ibsen’s Nora although the two women were contemporaries—A Doll’s House was first performed in 1879 in Copenhagen. While she strives to be happy in a loving relationship, she is ultimately a passive victim of the laws and customs governing her life. Judith Zaltsman has a strong moral compass and it is her knowledge of right and wrong that determines her to resort to murder and suicide when her attempts to reform those around her fail. As a woman driven to prostitution by the lack of prospects to sustain herself financially, she does not succumb either to the conveniences that come to her once she becomes the Officer’s mistress or to her father’s attempts to deceive a suitor into marrying her. Her choices distinguish her from one of her forerunners, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu of the Earth Spirit (premiere 1898 in Leipzig), and, while her end is tragic, at the end of the play Judith is neither submissive nor a victim of circumstances. Sonia Itelson wants freedom—she wants to move around freely, love freely, and make decisions about her own body. Even when she gives in and marries the man of her choice, she is still determined to fight the societal norms that require women—no matter how educated and independent—to be mothers. In a way, Sonia’s story shows the progress that Jewish women had made over the course of forty years and through the relocation to a new continent. Neither Rosa’s wish for a love match, nor Judith’s struggle for financial sustainability are unfeasible to her, yet even under these circumstances, she is still bound to a man who limits her agency and drives her to her death. In the realm of European literature, Sonia’s equivalent is Friedrich Wolf’s Hete from the politically charged Cyankali (premiere 1929 in Berlin). While, unlike Hete, Sonia finds ways to have her abortions with a doctor as opposed to a back-alley abortionist (a so-called “angel maker”), they are still illegal and her actions still depend on a male agent of authority. Transgression, thus, is a woman’s unpardonable offense no matter where, when, and why she commits it.

To contemporary readers this anthology offers more than just historical perspectives on unresolved women’s issues. It proffers a base from which to reflect on the implications of the lack of resolution for these issues at a time of rising right-wing populism. To readers interested in seeing what infringement on liberties such as bodily autonomy and self-determination can look like under an authoritarian regime, I recommend Cristian Mungiu’s sobering film Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (2007).