The politics and aesthetics of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) are here shown to be inherently connected to the European avant-garde and the secularization of Soviet Jewish culture. The author positions GOSET alongside experiments of Reinhardt and Meyerhold, and discusses the emergence of this theatre's specific aesthetics at the intersection of the European avant-garde and Jewish folk tradition to reveal the company's cultural and aesthetic complexities. While presenting the Moscow Yiddish Theatre as a modern national phenomenon of post-Revolutionary Jewish culture, attention is also drawn to its longing to create a ‘mythological Jewish space – a lost fictional world based on the classics of modern Yiddish fiction’ (p. x). Harshav demonstrates that the tensions between GOSET's attempts at construction of contemporary secular Jewish art and its nostalgic representation of Jewish folklore became increasingly compounded by Soviet political propaganda: ‘Only through a grotesque mirror or political negation of the past could the theatre evoke this powerful bygone but symbolic world in the Soviet context’ (p. x).

Bridging the history of the post-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde with the development of modern Jewish culture in the Soviet political environment, the two parts of this book offer multiple perspectives on GOSET's artistic innovations and political tribulations in relation to the ‘modern Jewish Revolution’ (p. 3). The critical analysis in Part I is followed by a selected collection of primary documents: essays, memoirs and original plays. These sources are translated and collated for the first time to comprise a unique resource, including voices of influential theatre critics as well as celebrated artistic and literary figures such as Marc Chagall, Shloyme Mikhoels and Sholem-Aleichem. Harshav here juxtaposes scholarly opinions with the artists’ intimate descriptions of their engagements with the theatre, striking a balance between critical observations and personal accounts. He painstakingly details important aspects of GOSET by dividing the collection into eight categories encompassing the theatre's programme, its reception in the West and its aesthetics vis-à-vis Soviet culture, the European avant-garde, and Jewish tradition. Although more contextualization of the primary sources would have aided in illuminating the challenges surrounding GOSET, the collection offers a colourful and multifaceted portrait of the theatre that espoused both tradition and innovation, and for two decades effectively fused cultural past with revolutionary aesthetics in a perilous political climate.