A TALE OF TWO MUSEUMS: ARCHIVAL SOURCES AND SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

 The majority of this website consists of about 100 documents contained in Record Group 8, the Esther Rachel Kaminska Theater Museum Collection. The content presented here represents less than ten percent of this voluminous collection. Undoubtedly, at the hands of future scholars, it will go on to tell many stories connected to the Yiddish theater as it plays out until 1939 when YIVO ceased collecting materials.

 Information for this website, however, was pulled from sources within and beyond RG8, and within and beyond the archival holdings of the YIVO Institute.  "A Tale of Two Museums" showcases documents, photographs, as well as information from biographical notes in YIVO's finding aids from the following of its collections (among many others):

RG 356      The Papers of Jacob Shatzky

RG 26        The Yiddish Actors Union of Poland

RG 1843    Hebrew Actors’ Union

RG 376      Leon Kobrin

RG 833      Peretz Hirshbein

RG 119      Avraham Goldfaden

RG 994      Ida Kaminska and Meir Melman

RG 204      David Pinsky

RG 530      Jacob Gordin

We urge those interested in this website to explore YIVO's finding aids for a greater appreciation of YIVO's holdings. Browse or search, for instance, the digitzed documents of YIVO's Vilna Collections at the Edward Blank YIVO Online Collections here:  https://vilnacollections.yivo.org/ . In addition, more and more of YIVO's finding aids to other collections can be found in digital form here: http://yivoarchives.org/ .

Selected Bibliography:

Caplan, Debra. Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2018.

Nahshon, Edna. Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925-1940 (Contributions in Drama & Theatre Studies)

Nahshon, Edna. From the Bowery to Broadway. New York: Columbia University Press. 2016.

Quint, Alyssa. “Visual Artists and Yiddish Avant-garde Theatre in Poland.” Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (June 2018): Accessed Jul 25, 2019.

Quint, Alyssa and Michael Steinlauf. “Jewish Theater in Polish Lands,” The Cambridge History of Polish Theater, eds. Fazan, Lease, Kobialka. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020.

Steinlauf, Michael. “Fardibekt: The Dybbuk in Poland Before WWII.” Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (2007).
 
Thissen, Judith. “Reconsidering the Decline of the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s.” Theatre Survey (2003).

Veidlinger, Jeffrey, “From Boston to Mississippi on the Warsaw Yiddish Stage.” In Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business, edited Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry, 136-158. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012.

 
Memoirs quoted:
 
Kaminska, Ida. My Life, My Theater. London: MacMillan Publishing Company. 1973.

Kaminska, Ruth Turkow. I Don’t Want to be Brave Anymore. Washington, DC: New Republic Books. 1978.

Vaykhert, Mikhl. Zikhroynes. (Tel-Aviv: 1970).


We drew additional information from www.yleksikon.blogpost.com and from Digital Yiddish Theatre Project at https://yiddishstage.org/.