30 Facts About Abraham Goldfaden

Abraham Goldfaden, known as Avram Goldfaden, was a Russian-born Jewish poet, playwright, stage director and actor in Yiddish and Hebrew languages and author of some 40 plays.

Abraham Goldfaden was responsible for the first Hebrew-language play performed in the United States.

Abraham Goldfaden attended a Jewish religious school, but his middle-class family was strongly associated with the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and his father, a watchmaker, arranged that he receive private lessons in German and Russian.

Abraham Goldfaden's first published poem was called "Progress"; his The New York Times obituary described it as "a plea for Zionism years before that movement developed".

Abraham Goldfaden lived initially in his uncle's house, where a cousin who was a good pianist helped him set some of his poems to music.

In Odessa, Abraham Goldfaden renewed his acquaintance with fellow Yiddish-language writer Yitzkhok Yoel Linetzky, whom he knew from Zhytomyr and met Hebrew-language poet Eliahu Mordechai Werbel and published poems in the newspaper Kol-Mevaser.

Abraham Goldfaden wrote his first two plays, Die Tzwei Sheines and Die Murneh Sosfeh, included with some verses in a modestly successful 1869 book Die Yidene, which went through three editions in three years.

In 1875, Abraham Goldfaden headed for Munich, intending to study medicine.

Abraham Goldfaden tried unsuccessfully to operate the paper under a different name, but soon moved on to Iasi in Moldavia on the invitation of Isaac Librescu, a young wealthy community activist interested in theatre.

Abraham Goldfaden recorded in his review that the company had six players.

Abraham Goldfaden had no formal artistic training, but he proved to be good at the job, and joined the troupe, as did Sara Segal, their first actress.

Abraham Goldfaden filled out his cast from the great pool of Jewish vocal talent: synagogue cantors.

Abraham Goldfaden recruited two eminently respectable classically trained prima donnas, the sisters Margaretta and Annetta Schwartz.

Abraham Goldfaden was helped by Ion Ghica, then head of the Romanian National Theatre to legally establish a "dramatic society" to handle administrative matters.

We know from similar papers that when Grodner and Mogulescu walked out on Goldfaden to start their own company, it included Israel Rosenberg, Jacob Spivakovsky, P Sapira, M Banderevsky, Anetta Grodner, and Rosa Friedman.

Abraham Goldfaden himself suggested that this increasingly serious turn became possible because he had educated his audience.

Abraham Goldfaden's strong turn toward almost uniformly serious subject matter roughly coincided with bringing his troupe to Odessa.

Abraham Goldfaden was both a theoretician and a practitioner of theatre.

Much of the Jewish community, Abraham Goldfaden included, were already familiar with contemporary theatre in other languages.

Abraham Goldfaden discussed what a Yiddish theatre ought to be, noted its many sources, and praised its incorporation of strong female roles.

Abraham Goldfaden's father wrote him to solicit the troupe to come to Odessa in Ukraine, which was then part of Imperial Russia.

Tissot's account of what he saw gives an interesting picture of the theatres and audiences Abraham Goldfaden's troupe encountered outside of the big cities.

Abraham Goldfaden seems, in Bercovici's words, to have lost "his theatrical elan" in this period.

Abraham Goldfaden briefly put together a theatre company in 1886 in Warsaw, with no notable success.

Abraham Goldfaden attempted to found a theatre school, then headed in 1889 for Paris, rather low on funds.

Abraham Goldfaden completed the play he'd started in Paris, Rabi Yoselman, oder Die Gzerot fun Alsas, in five acts and 23 scenes, based on the life of Josel of Rosheim.

Abraham Goldfaden left Romania in 1896; soon Juvilier's was the only active Yiddish theatre troupe in the country, and foreign troupes had almost entirely ceased coming to the country.

Abraham Goldfaden's plays continued to be performed in Europe and America, but rarely, if ever, did anyone send him royalties.

Abraham Goldfaden wrote the spoken portions of Ben Ami, loosely based on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

In November 2009, Abraham Goldfaden was the subject of postage stamps issued jointly by Israel and Romania.