Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin is the newest Glimmerglass Opera Book Club selection. It's an engrossing character study of Jacob Gordin, the most prolific playwright of the Yiddish stage at the turn of the twentieth century, and his role as a most reluctant celebrity amid the great changes in Jewish life that took place with the waves of immigration to New York's Lower East Side that coincided with the golden age of Yiddish theater.
Yakov Mikhailovich Gordin, always Russian at heart and never quite at ease in America, indeed paralleled Shakespeare with his truly amazing output of plays. Gordin, like Shakespeare, was surrounded by colorful and versatile actors with whom he had a cyclical relationship consisting of competition and conflict; perhaps in response to this, he positioned himself as the protagonist in his plays (some have argued that Shakespeare used Shylock in the same manner) and in the newspaper which also served as his mouthpiece. His masterworks were Mirele Efros, The Jewish King Lear, and God, Man, and Devil, all evincing a very high need to propel his fellow Jews into social and political enlightenment, with Gordin speaking from the stage, as it were, about the value of education, the virtues of socialism, and even commenting on feminism at a time when Yiddish theater was rigidly formulaic and usually included breaks for song and dance, no matter the subject matter. His efforts to elevate his contemporaries and the art form were met with mixed reaction, and resulted in a long and bitter feud between him and Abraham Cahan, the editor of a rival newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward.
Gordin’s imperiousness and emotional detachment from his friends (and even his family) did not help his cause, and despite his many successes, he was a poor businessman. At the time of his death, his family struggled for a proper memorial even though “Jewish New York has never witnessed such a funeral” for such a complex man. His legacy, described in this first full-scale biography, is his many works, still being performed today, just as those of William Shakespeare.