Abraham Goldfaden

Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908) was a poet, playwright, composer and theatre director born in the Russian Empire, who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew. He is considered the father of modern Jewish theatre, and his work reached Romania and the United States. He matters because he laid the foundations of professional theatre in Yiddish.

He was born in Starokonstantinov, in Volhynia, into a middle-class family linked to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. He studied at a rabbinical school but never led a congregation, preferring teaching and poetry. After working in Crimea and Odessa, he settled in Romania, where in 1876 he gathered a small group of actors in Iaşi from a recital of his songs. From there he founded what is generally regarded as the first professional Yiddish theatre company, which toured Botoşani, Galați and Bucharest. He wrote some forty plays and hundreds of songs, mixing prose and verse, pantomime and dance.

His funeral in New York in 1908 drew more than 75,000 people. His influence reached the playwrights and companies that carried on Yiddish theatre.