Abraham Goldfaden

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Goldfaden, Abraham [ Abraham Goldenfodim] (1840–1908), the first important Yiddish dramatist and the first to put women on the stage in Yiddish plays. His early folk songs and dramatic sketches were performed by the Brody Singers, who in 1876 also put on a two-act musical entertainment in Yiddish which Goldfaden had prepared for them. Its success encouraged him to form a company for the production of his own plays, of which he wrote about 400. Among the best known are The Recruits (1877), The Witch (1879), The Two Kune Lemels, a version of Romeo and Juliet, Shulamit (both 1880), Dr Almosado (1882), and Bar Kochba (1883). Goldfaden gave his audiences what they wanted—a mixture of song and dance, with plots and music borrowed from all over Europe, racy dialogue and broad characterization, much action and little analysis. At the time of his death his last play Son of My People (1908) was running at the Yiddish People's Theatre in New York, where he had settled in 1903, opening a school of drama. Goldfaden was also the author of the first Hebrew play seen in New York, David at War (1904).