Dec 14, 2018 · Harry Weinberger, the civil rights lawyer and manager of the production of God of Vengeance served as his own defense lawyer, as well as the other accused cast members. As a man who had dedicated his career to civil rights, he took the charges very seriously as they dangerously undermined freedom of speech and expression.
Jun 19, 2012 · Sholom Asch defended his work for the first time in an open letter printed in the pamphlet. He criticized American audiences for not being “either sufficiently interested or adequately instructed to accept The God of Vengeance.” He goes on to defend himself against the Jewish community’s earlier fears about the play: “Jews do not need to clear themselves before …
The New Yiddish Rep presents a revival of the 1907 Sholem Asch play that scandalized New York with its portrayal of prostitution and same-sex romance.
Feb 28, 2017 · Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome ( God of Vengeance) has one of the most remarkable histories of any modern drama. A Twitter summary of its production history would read something like this: “admired, translated, parodied, panned, banned, prosecuted, withdrawn, forgotten, revived, celebrated.”. The current staging by New Yiddish Rep gives New York …
Got fun nekome was the first Yiddish play to be translated and staged throughout Europe. From Berlin, Asch went straight to St. Petersburg for the Russian-language premiere. Over the next few years Asch’s “brothel play” was also translated into Polish, Hebrew, English, Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, Swedish, and Norwegian. In 1912, the Moscow branch of the cinema firm Pathé Frères released a silent film of Got fun nekome with Russian titles. According to film historian Jay Hoberman, it featured two Yiddish actors, Israel Arko and Misha Fishzon, at the head of a mainly non-Jewish cast. The film is now presumed lost. But Got fun nekome found its greatest success on the Yiddish stage. The towering dramatic actor Dovid Kessler headed the cast of the New York Yiddish premiere, and the play was also hugely popular among the amateur Yiddish dramatic groups that flourished worldwide in the early twentieth century.
The Author. My great-grandfather Sholem Asch was twenty-six and a rising star of Yiddish literature’s new wave when he wrote Got fun nekome in the summer of 1906. The former yeshiva student had absorbed the latest trends in Polish, German, and Russian modernism and was now a cosmopolitan European writer.
Got fun nekome on Broadway should have been Asch’s moment of triumph. Instead it turned into something of a nightmare. The English-language production opened in December 1922 at the Provincetown Theatre, moving first to the Greenwich Village Theatre and then, in February 1923, to the Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street. Schildkraut starred and directed with a stellar cast including Morris Carnovsky, Sam Jaffe, and Lillian Taiz. Urged on by influential members of the Jewish establishment, producer (and noted civil rights attorney) Harry Weinberger and the cast were arrested on March 6th and charged with “unlawfully advertising, giving, presenting, and participating in an obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama or play.” They pleaded not guilty. Debates about the play raged in the press, with Constantin Stanislavsky, Eugene O’Neill, Frank Crane, and Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan all coming to Asch’s defense. The ACLU refused Weinberger’s request to help finance the appeal, but he won anyway, overturning the verdict after a two-year battle.
Asch was born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Congress Poland to Moszek Asz (1825, Gąbin – 1905, Kutno ), a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska (born 1850, Łęczyca ). Frajda was Moszek's second wife; his first wife Rude Shmit died in 1873, leaving him with either six or seven children (the exact number is unknown). Sholem was the fourth of the ten children that Moszek and Frajda Malka had together. Moszek would spend all week on the road and return home every Friday in time for the Sabbath. He was known to be a very charitable man who would dispense money to the poor.
Many of Asch's father figures are inspired by his own father . Sholem was believed to have adopted much of his own philosophies from his father, such as his love for humanity and his concern for Jewish-Christian reconciliation. He summed up his father's faith as "love of God and love of neighbor". Asch often wrote two kinds of characters: the pious Jew and the burly worker. This was inspired by his family, as his brothers dealt with peasants and butchers and fit in with the hardy outdoor Jews of Kutno, which Asch had much pride in. His older half-brothers, on the other hand, were pious Hasidim.
Due to his controversies, his funeral in London was small. His house in Bat Yam is now the Sholem Asch Museum and part of the MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam complex of three museums. The bulk of his library, containing rare Yiddish books and manuscripts, as well as the manuscripts of some of his own works, is held at Yale University. Although many of his works are no longer read today, his best works have proven to be standards of Jewish and Yiddish literature. His sons were Moszek Asz/ Moses "Moe" Asch (2 December 1905, Warsaw – 19 October 1986, United States), the founder and head of Folkways Records, and Natan Asz/Nathan Asch (1902, Warsaw – 1964, United States), also a writer. His great-grandson, David Mazower, is a writer and a BBC Journalist.
Indecent, the 2015 play written by Paula Vogel, tells of those events and the impact of God of Vengeance.
Abramovitch was hailed as "the father of Yiddish. . literature" and his example was followed by a number of new writers, several of whom proved to be men of extraordinary gifts. The movement bears curious resemblance to that of the present literary renaissance of Ireland.
Enters. Halts for a moment upon the top stair and looks down at Shloyme, She is wrapped in a thin shawl, coquettishly dressed in a skirt much too short for her age. Descends into the cellar, stepping noisily so as to wake Shloyme.
S HOLOM ASH is one of the chief authors in contemporary Yiddish letters,—a literature at present enjoying a renaissance that attests the remarkable vitality of a people long oppressed in intellectual no less than in economic domains,—a literature that has much to teach America in the way of fearlessness before the facts of life, frankness in their interpretation and persistent idealism in face of the most degrading and debasing environment. Indeed, the conjunction of squalid surroundings, sordid occupation and idealistic yearning to be met so frequently in Jewish writers arises most naturally from the peculiar conditions of much of the life in ghettos the world over.
Sarah and Rifkele are discovered as the curtain rises. Sarah is a tall, slender, prepossessing woman. Her features have become coarsened, yet they retain traces of her former beauty, which has even now a tone of insolence. On her head lies a wig, through which, from time to time, shows a lock of her alluring hair. She is dressed quite soberly, as befits a mother, yet a vulgar display of jewels spoils this effect. Her movements, too, reveal that she is not quite liberated from the influences of the world out of which she has risen.