Matthew Krouse
HISTORY records the existence of Yiddish theatre troupes in South Africa, in the 1880s, when an alumnus of the famous Goldfadn, Yankl Rosenfeld, led several performances of Yiddish classics.
The latter part of the 19th century saw ad hoc troupes travelling the breadth of the country, playing to a culture-starved European audience that often consisted of non-Jews too.
By 1901 the Hebrew Oriental Opera Company was at work, producing “semi-sacred” pieces, even on the Sabbath, in order to placate the Jewish religious authorities.
Later decades saw the establishment of Jewish theatre groups that came and went – the Zionist Dramatic Society, the Sociables and the Yiddish African Theatre, to name a few.
As far as the Jewish contribution to local drama goes, these weren’t the original contributors. One example, the Dutch Jew Suasso de Lima, arrived in Cape Town in 1818. A doctor of jurisprudence, he was severely physically handicapped but made a living tutoring slaves and editing a newspaper, De Verzamelaar. His form of self-penned drama was largely satirical, using verse to criticise the state of culture in the Cape at the time. In 1825 he intended to establish a company of juveniles called Oefening en Smaak, but his plans were scuttled by puritan legislation against all forms of entertainment, particularly child actors.
It was only with the second wave of Jewish immigrants to South Africa, between the two wars, that a truly “enlightened”, South African Jewish drama began to come alive.
In fact, a survey of Jewish literature in South Africa, conducted by one JA Poliva in the early 1960s, lists well over 20 indigenously written dramas from the years 1916 to 1960. Among these are the plays written by the esteemed Dr Rabbi JL Landau, mostly on Biblical themes, that would contain allegorical meaning for Diaspora Jews trying to make religious sense of the epidemic of the anti-Semitism of those years.
A not-so-hidden aspect of some of these was the themes of conquest that were precursors to Zionism, which would eventually pave the way to the establishment of the Israeli state.
Simultaneously, politicised European immigrants, many of them organised socialists from Eastern Europe, began frequenting the Jewish worker clubs that had sprung up in Doornfontein, in Johannesburg.
Fervently anti-Zionist, the worker clubs put on productions of Yiddish classics with socialist messages. The plays of Ansky and Aleichem were among these.
One can safely assume that these dramas furnished players and audiences with ample nostalgia, and a hint that the working class utopia would someday be a fact of life.
The political discussion that surrounded the plays concerned constant debate of whether Jewish interests lay in Zionism or with an “Assimilationist International”.
It was from this radical tradition that local, liberal Jewish practitioners were to make their contribution.
In 1953, Jewish Affairs magazine dedicated a short article to note the return of Leon Gluckman to South Africa, from London, to appear in Molnars Lilliom, noted there as a forerunner of existentialist drama. Gluckman went on to direct the seminal King Kong in 1959, which gave some prominent black artists of his generation their moment to flee apartheid for what would become a lifelong exile.
It was also an early exposure to Yiddish theatre, through his parents, that first got Barney Simon considering his career.
While the contributions of Gluckman and Simon remain outstanding, there must have been many earlier, politicised radicals who gave vent to their politics through plays that closely resembled the trade union theatre of organised workers today.
World history records the existence of Yiddish political workers’ theatre troupes, like Artef and Proltet, in America in the 1920s and 1930s, that provided almost carbon copies of contemporary workers’ theatre.
This political history of Jewish drama has been somewhat sublimated, and what Jews tend to remember, with great warmth, were the tours to this country by stars of the international Yiddish stage – largely forgotten names like Yankev Mansdorf, Max Perlman and Maurice Schwartz.
However unfortunate, it is not surprising that Jewish elders, today, tend to remember this heyday, over the difficult years of turmoil when Yiddish had to prove itself as a European language. An issue of survival, this forced identification with “Europeanness” meant the newly arrived Jews would be automatically classified as white, and that their culture wouldn’t be threatened, or ultimately be considered dangerously “Red”.