Jacob Gordin's Dialogue with Tolstoy

JACOB GORDIN’S DIALOGUE WITH TOLSTOY: DI KREYTSER SONATA (1902)*

Barbara Henry

Sex, violence and classical music: Count Lev Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) scandalous Russian novel The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova sonata, 1889) offered all of these to shocked readers in Europe and America. But Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin (1853–1909) went further still when he adapted Tolstoy’s novel for New York’s Thalia Theatre in 1902.1 Into Tolstoy’s already infl ammatory polemic, Gordin added immigra- tion, a thwarted conversion to Christianity, two illegitimate pregnancies, agrarian utopianism, a double homicide, and trade unions—as well as several musical numbers. Gordin’s Tolstoyan melodrama proved so popular that it was translated into both English and Russian, was performed on Broadway, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and served as the basis for a silent fi lm.2 Gordin’s works were one of the cornerstones of the American Yiddish repertoire from the 1890s through the fi rst decade of the 20th century. His plays are regarded as the fi rst instances of more naturalistic drama on the Yiddish stage, for their use of colloquial language, contemporary

* The present chapter is a substantially revised version of an article, “Tolstoy on the Lower East Side: Di Kreytser Sonata,” published in the Tolstoy Studies Journal 17 (2005): 1–19. 1 Kreytser sonata: a drame in fi r aktn fun Yankev Gordin (New York: M. Mayzel, 1907). All subsequent quotations are from this edition. All translations from Yiddish are my own. I have standardized Gordin’s spelling to refl ect modern usage. 2 There are two English translations of Gordin’s Kreutzer Sonata, the fi rst by Samuel Schiffman, the second by Langdon Mitchell. The latter was used for the 1906 production at New York’s Lyric Theatre, which proved to be Yiddish actress Bertha Kalich’s (1876–1939) breakthrough English role. The play was revived in 1924, in a production at the Frazee Theatre. Mitchell’s translation was also adapted in 1915 by Herbert Brenon for the fi lm version, starring Nance O’Neil as Ettie (“Miriam”) and Theda Bara as Celia. There are several Russian translations. Za okeanom was translated by S. M. Gennerman and used for a production in 1911 at Moscow’s Korsh Theatre, and for a revival in Petrograd in 1916 at the Teatral’nyi Zal “Pollak.” A second translation (also as Za okeanom), by Z. M. Erukhimovich, was probably used by the Moscow Maly Theatre in 1927. Gordin’s play was also performed in St Petersburg in Yiddish in 1908, 1909, and 1917. The most recent and faithful translation of Gordin’s play, by Ruth Levin, appears in Polveka evreiskogo teatra: 1876–1926, ed. Boris Entin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Paralleli”, 2003). 26 barbara henry settings and focus on modern social problems. Di Kreytser sonata is typi- cal of Gordin’s dramas in that it borrows the structure, themes, and title of a well-known work of non-Jewish literature, shifts the action to contemporary Russia and New York, and uses the borrowed work to address issues of importance to Jewish immigrant audiences. This working method was envisioned as a means of reforming the “low” and “parochial” Yiddish stage through adaptation for it of “high” and “universal” works of secular, non-Jewish art. The practice was meant to signal to Jewish audience members not only the relevance of non-Jewish culture for their own lives, but to assert that they too had a stake in that culture—that it belonged to them as it did to the nations that had created it. Jewish interests were not alien to world culture, but a part of it. To this end, Gordin borrowed freely from a variety of writers, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goethe, and Turgenev, and was always careful to incorporate information on the source within the play itself. Despite its melodramatic turns, the Yiddish Kreytser sonata is a complex interrogation of its source material which aims to pique an audience’s interest in Beethoven and Tolstoy, while illustrating Gordin’s own cherished views on socialism, women’s emancipation, and trade unionism. Of these, only the issue of women’s emancipation features in any meaningful way in Tolstoy’s original, and even then Tolstoy’s arguments can hardly be said to constitute a transparently feminist view. In order to render Tolstoy’s work more conducive to conveying Gordin’s own ideas, the Yiddish playwright substantially reorganizes and reinterprets the source material. The resulting play offers some surprising insights. Di Kreytser sonata presents an original critical perspective on the novel that departs signifi cantly from traditional readings of it as a warning against the fatal link between musical sensuality and human sexuality. Rather, the emphases of Gordin’s play suggest that the novel is really about the dangerous powers of fi ction itself, both as art form and as social performance. This idea, in turn, becomes the subject of Gordin’s play, in which he examines the manifold destructive effects of performance, pretense, and literary fi ction on one Russian-Jewish immigrant family. The process of “Judaizing” works of non-Jewish literature emerges as a genuine confl uence of Jewish and non-Jewish, Russian and American, novelistic and dramatic forms, that yield new insights into the processes of cultural assimilation and adaptation that are the hallmark of the immigrant experience. Jacob Gordin enjoyed a reputation in New York’s immigrant com- munity as a passionate follower of Tolstoy, a renown derived in large