Yiddish Theater and the Shtetl: Two Branches of Nomi’s Family Tree
As we can see from the family photos shared in this movie, Nomi’s extended family tree includes a wide range of backgrounds, locations, and interests spanning generations. Yiddish-speaking families, like Nomi’s, came from a myriad of demographics — urban and rural, rich and poor, religious and secular, and everything in between. Here we will focus on the settings of two specific, diverse branches of Nomi’s family tree: Yiddish theater in New York City and the concept of the shtetl.
Nomi’s great-grandmother Zelde is depicted as a singer and performer during a golden era of Yiddish theater in New York City, and in the movie we see that Zelde performed at the סעקאָנד עװעניו טעאַטער — the Second Avenue Theatre — one of the many popular Yiddish theaters in New York. New York became a major hub of Yiddish theater beginning in the 1880s with a wave of emigrants from Eastern Europe that included actors and directors as well as audience members who were passionate theater-goers. The Yiddish theater helped immigrants adapt to their new home while retaining a feeling of connection with the homes they had left behind. By the 1910s and 1920s, on any given night, the downtown Yiddish theater district in New York was putting on an array of shows: classic and original plays, dramas, operettas, and comedies, as well as musical shows and vaudeville. Today the Folksbiene Yiddish theater, founded in 1915, is still going strong, with live performances in New York City and online.
Traveling along another branch of Nomi’s family tree, we see a setting quite distinct from New York City: a different great-grandmother is shown as a young girl, next to her brother, in a shtetl — a small town in pre-World War II Eastern Europe. “Shtetl” in Yiddish simply means “town”, but in the context of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the word refers to the many rural market towns in which Jews made up a large proportion — often the majority — of the residents. Unlike the smaller dorf (village), a shtetl had all major Jewish institutions: at least one synagogue, a mikve (ritual bath), a cemetery, a structure of communal leadership, and schools. And unlike in the larger shtot (city), the shtetl had a small-town atmosphere and most Jews knew one another.
In the modern period, beginning in the nineteenth century, the shtetl acquired significance as a cultural concept. Shaped by literature, film, and memoir, the shtetl-as-concept almost always represents traditional Jewish life — but the way this life is presented can range all the way from criticism and contempt to nostalgic praise of a community secure in its yidishkeyt (Jewishness). While the shtetl-as-place continued to coexist simultaneously for many years with the cultural concept of the shtetl, ultimately it is this second incarnation — the literary and cultural shtetl — that lives on to this day.
