“If we peel off the agitprop banalities,” writes Benjamin Harshav in the prelude to his new, fascinating study on the Moscow Yiddish Theater (better known by its later name, the GOSET), we may find a “lasting contribution to an anti-Broadway Jewish theatrical myth” (x). In many ways, this statement serves to describe the book's own contribution to the scholarship of Jewish theater, as well as to the wider academic discourse dealing with Jewish culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Harshav's exploration of the Moscow Yiddish Theater opens up for the English reader in a lucid manner an avant-garde, groundbreaking, radical theatrical endeavor that should doubtlessly establish itself more prominently in the historiography of twentieth-century Jewish theater. It presents a highly fertile alternative to the more commonly discussed Yiddish-speaking theatrical performances (many times realistic or melodramatic) that took place in New York at the time, as well as to the Hebrew-speaking theater emerging in Moscow during the same years (and later immigrating to Palestine).

The book's structure allows for an unusually enriching and multilayered reading experience. Its first chapter consists of Harshav's succinct and compelling narrative of the first decade of the theater (the 1920s), prior to its deterioration and subsequent brutal liquidation by Stalin. The second chapter conducts an in-depth analysis of Marc Chagall's involvement with and contribution to the theater's intertwined aesthetics and politics (including some beautiful artwork and sketches by Chagall and others, never published before). The remaining seven chapters, however, are in fact a selection of translated documents relating to the theater's activity: memoirs, essays, reviews, manifestoes, short plays, invitations, and letters. The effect of these texts—beautifully translated together with Barbara Harshav—is quite striking, as they amount to a dazzling polyphony of voices and viewpoints, wrestling with each other (and sometimes even with Harshav's own narrative, as it is laid out in the first chapters) vis-à-vis the cultural, artistic, and political meaning of the new Yiddish theater in times of social revolution. True, almost all of these voices hail the Moscow Yiddish Theater and praise its innovative performative language. While there are hints in the texts themselves that this theater has also evoked controversy and debate in Russia (152), these opposing voices are hardly represented to speak for themselves. Still, the documents assembled by Harshav are highly varied, and what they have to say is at times extremely eye-opening with regard to the dynamics of Jewish Russian (and European) theatrical culture in the period (especially the essays by Abram Efros, Moyshe Litvakov, and Joseph Roth), and sometimes simply moving (mainly Chagall's amusing memoirs and the lyrical observations of Osip Mandelshtam).

While the book is naturally an invaluable contribution for theater scholars, I believe it might well be of interest to those who are involved in studying the wider, and now highly developed, discourse regarding the Jewish body that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For theater is first and foremost an art of the body, and the Moscow Yiddish Theater as well as its critics and cultural milieu were acutely aware that their involvement with performance had to do precisely with a renegotiation of the body, its presence and meaning in Jewish culture and revolutionary politics. Harshav describes how, under the guidance of Solomon Mikhoels (the theater's leading actor, and later its director, who was murdered on Stalin's orders in 1948), the actors, “all of whom came from towns in the Pale of Settlement—recovered the gestures, movements, intonations, and sensibilities of the Jewish shtetl world from their childhood memories … . This was knowledge no teacher could provide” (22). Indeed, it is the transmission of this kind of “embodied knowledge,” to use Diana Taylor's term, that performance allows for and which is central for the theater's multifaceted dialogic involvement with the Jewish past.Footnote ¹

The picture that emerges from the pages of Harshav's book is that the Moscow Yiddish Theater reused the stereotypical “Old Jew” body, played with it, and transformed it into a modernist, revolutionary image (this is where Harshav finds one of Chagall's most profound contributions to the theater's artistic-political path). Thus, while moving away from the traditional Jewish body, as it was perceived by modern Jews, the theater did not necessarily participate in the celebration of the “New Jew” physical type either. Litvakov's essay appearing in the book is specifically illuminating on the matter: “The Jewish grimace … the Jewish gesture, which was supposed to remain forever godly pious—here they have become new, free, sharp gestures of an epoch of ‘iron and concrete’” (151). Litvakov later writes, “[T]he Yiddish Chamber Theater is always revolutionary, regardless of its repertoire, because technique alone can also serve, did serve, and still serves the bourgeoisie, but living flesh and blood serves only itself” (156). And while post-Foucauldian readers might find Litvakov's notion of the body's inherent subversive quality to be more than a little optimistic, if not downright naive, it is precisely this optimism regarding the revolutionary body that is crucial for understanding the Moscow Yiddish Theater's undertaking.

The Moscow Yiddish Theater foregrounded the genre of tragicomedy, not just a genre that structures dramatic narrative, and through it the cultural imaginaire regarding Jewish experience of history, but also a style of acting, and therefore an embodied practice, a way of working with the body. Harshav juxtaposes this choice of tragicomedy by the Moscow Yiddish Theater (25–27) with HaBima's choice of Hebrew tragedy as their main genre:

The difference in language and genre is also a difference, as Harshav remarks, in acting style—and therefore in a discipline of the body. And yet, the dichotomy delineated by Harshav between GOSET and HaBima (following views expressed by Efros and Chagall, among others; see 65, 73) might be slightly too clear-cut—for HaBima's choice of plays served not only to establish utopian dreams onstage, but also to question these dreams and allow the anxieties and tensions accompanying them to resurface. After all, neither The Dybbuk nor The Golem, two of HaBima's key performances during the time, offer a reassuring image of Jewish history or of the body.

Harshav's compelling narrative is indeed stirring—yet, as the foregoing example might show, its strong claims might be a bit too strong. The book's focus on the first impressive decade of the theater's activity contributes much to its detailed analysis of the theater's cultural politics. At the same time, what is inadvertently obscured by this focus is the fact that much of the theater's later activity and repertoire somewhat complicates Harshav's narrative. Other recent studies that have covered the GOSET's later days, including Jeffrey Veidlinger's The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, discuss at length plays performed later by the GOSET that surely had more prominent heroic, mythical, and national tones, such as Shmuel Halkin's Bar Kokhba, as well as the theater troupe's involvement with both Zionist and rabbinic figures.Footnote ² In contrast, for earlier sources appearing in Harshav's book, Zionism and rabbinic Jewry are both associated mainly with HaBima.Footnote ³ As Harshav barely refers to other contemporary studies of the GOSET, besides some very general comments (xi), his position vis-à-vis these studies and the stories they tell is left unclear to some degree.

These refinements notwithstanding, Harshav's discussion is of utmost importance for our understanding of the bodily discourse that took place in Jewish culture during the first decades of the twentieth century—and, in my view, is perhaps one of the book's most substantial contributions to contemporary academic discussions. For what it exposes, it would seem, is a “third option” explored by the Moscow Yiddish Theater about the Jewish body—an option that neither fully rejects the “Old” Jewish body nor embraces it, but finds within that body new modernist and radical potentials, an option through which the artists of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, committed to the revolution, found a path toward that past, in order to turn it onstage into one that is, to use the German critic Alfons Goldschmidt's words regarding the Moscow Yiddish Theater's masks, “unspeakably urgent” (119).