April 5, 2002

'Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Call it chutzpah, but Shakespeare "translated and improved!" was all in a day's hype for Yiddish-theater promoters in 19th-century New York. And why not? As Joel Berkowitz says in Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (University of Iowa Press), labeling Yiddish versions of the Bard "fartaytsht un farbesert!" appealed to an audience of recent Eastern European immigrants, who favored "Zayn oder nit zayn" over "To be or not to be." They were theatergoers, he writes, who "by and large knew