Yiddish Opera, Russian Culture, and the Jerusalem of Lithuania

• In Event: Translation and Cultural Nationalism in Jewish Vilna, 1915-1923

Abstract

The first opera performed in Yiddish in Eastern Europe had no overtly Jewish content; it was Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” The libretto was translated by a radical-left scion of the Grodzenski rabbinic dynasty during and after the horrors of the Great War, applied the still-maligned Yiddish language to a central piece of Russian high culture, producing a Vilna precedent that paved the way for performances of original Yiddish operas.

Drawing on the Yiddish libretto, advertisements, reviews, and A. I. Grodzenski’s other work, I argue that this opera was Vilna’s unique performance of larger trends in Yiddish culture. When a new library of Yiddish translations of Russian and other non-Jewish works was being created, Grodzenski wished to push beyond the literary text to create a more comprehensive Yiddish culture using non-Jewish models.

Although non-Jewish cultural hegemony was itself unstable as Vilna was changing hands in wartime, Russified Jews were not so quick to embrace the culture of their new Polish rulers. This paper explores the relationship of Jewish cultural production to Russian models when Vilna was no longer under Russian control. By translating both the opera and the novel upon which it was based, Grodzenski advanced a cultural agenda of bringing Yiddish into world literature as the voice of a diasporic people that was well in tune with its imperial surroundings and resistant to its post-imperial context. Concerned with the elevation of Yiddish and the construction of a comprehensive structure of cultural nationalism as he saw it, Grodzenski intentionally used the Russian score and libretto as a catalyst for the creation of Yiddish works in this non-Jewish genre of opera.

Grodzenski’s high-culture production differs from similar efforts in translation from non-Jewish to Jewish culture, however, in his fiercely democratic goals. In contrast to other Jewish cultural activists of the time, Grodzenski prioritized mass accessibility along with high culture—and found common cause with the revolutionaries that had toppled Vilna’s former Russian rulers.

author

• Sara Feldman, University of Michigan