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The trajectory of Yiddish theater in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tends to be regarded as a one-way street from Eastern Europe to the New World. Indeed, the expansion of the world map of Yiddish theater closely resembles the migration patterns of East European Jews. Spurred by pogroms, increased antisemitic repression, and worsening economic conditions, millions of East European Jews sought better lives in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s. The 1883 Czarist ban on performances in Yiddish provided many actors and playwrights with an extra incentive to join the mass migration. By the 1890s, New York was not only the world center of Jewish immigration but also of Yiddish theatrical activity. From an immigrant perspective, Yiddish theater in Europe served primarily as a provider for the community's voracious appetite for new talent. Yet, New York was not only a powerful magnet for ambitious actors and playwrights. It became the fountainhead that fed Yiddish theaters worldwide. As theater historian B. Gorin remarked, "[around the turn of the century] the New York repertoire became the only spiritual food for all other Yiddish theaters in the world."1 From a European perspective, America became the principal supplier of and trendsetter for a commercially viable repertoire. Yiddish actors moved back and forth in an intricate zigzag between Romania, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, Western Europe, the United States, and South America, taking along scripts either tucked into their luggage or confined to their memory. Until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, cities in the Russian Pale of Settlement and Polish provinces were generally not part of this circuit. Two factors seem to have played a decisive role for keeping Russia out of the loop for so long: the difficult circumstances for Yiddish theater under the ban that made visits from America unattractive; and the restrictions for foreign Jews to enter Russia. Despite the limited direct [End Page 1] personal contact, American Yiddish plays began to appear in the 1890s because of the pressing need for new repertoire that could not be satisfied locally. Thanks to the general political liberalization in 1905, both Yiddish theater and publishing began to flourish, resulting in an increased need for new plays and the publication of dozens of texts, many of which originated in the United States. The American influence on Yiddish theater in Czarist Russia culminated in the five to six years before the outbreak of World War I, when a considerable network of actors developed between the two countries, and American plays dominated the Russian Yiddish theater. This repertoire and some of its performers brought a crucial infusion into the relatively stagnant theatrical scene in the Russian Empire (and the rest of Europe) to the great delight of commercially oriented theater directors and the dismay of Yiddish intellectuals, whose attempts to raise the level of the Yiddish stage and to create a place for their own or their colleagues' works were constantly thwarted by the popularity of American operettas and melodramas. This article explores the changing dynamics of transatlantic theatrical interaction between Yiddish theater in the United States and Imperial Russia before World War I, and examines the mechanics of transmission and distribution of repertoire from the New World to the Old. While the theater's international nature is generally acknowledged, the phenomenon of New York as the supply center of Yiddish plays for the East European market has not been explored systematically, nor have its implications been assessed.2 Monographs of Yiddish theater have tended to focus on a particular location, personality, or troupe. The relatively abundant works on the New York theater have presented it exclusively as an expression of immigrant culture, made by and for the local population. Yet the framing of the New York Yiddish theater as a local cultural institution...
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