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(Jt) Pinski, David : DOS IDISHE DRAMA: EYN IBERBLIK IBER IHR ENTVIKLUNG

New York: S. Drukerman, 1909

(FT) Hardcover, 12mo, 57 pages, 19 cm. In Yiddish. SUBJECT(S) : Yiddish drama -- History and criticism. At head of title: The Jewish drama. Other Titles: Jewish drama. Pinski (1872-1959) was a “Yiddish author. Born in Mogilev, Russia, Pinski moved to Moscow with his family at 14. He received not only a traditional but also an excellent secular education. He early became interested in literature and in socialism. After living briefly in Vitebsk, he pursued university studies in Vienna and later Berlin, also living in Warsaw, where writer I. L. Peretz became his mentor. Pinski published his first stories in Mordecai Spector’s Der Hoyzfraynd and Peretz’s Yontif Bletlekh in 1894. Pinski’s early writing introduced the Jewish proletariat as a subject in Yiddish literature. He wrote his first full-length play, Ayzik Sheftl, which Martin Buber later translated into German, shortly before moving to New York to edit the Socialist Labor Party's Yiddish newspaper Abend Blat with labor leader Joseph Schlossberg. He also pursued a Ph. D. In German at Columbia University…Pinski wrote over 25 full-length plays, three novels, scores of short stories and one-act plays, two volumes of travel essays, a screenplay, and one of the first histories of the Yiddish theater. Until the 1940s, he was perhaps the world's most frequently and widely translated Yiddish author. Key plays include Di Familye Tsvi, written following the Kishinev pogrom, published and smuggled into Russia by the Bund; Yankl der Shmid, his most frequently performed work, which he adapted into a film for director Edgar G. Ulmer in 1938; and Der Oytser, perhaps his greatest work, a dark comedy about greed in a Jewish town that critic George Pearce Baker compared in achievement to Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Yankl der Shmid, depicting a married blacksmith’s relationship with his neighbor’s wife, is considered the Yiddish theater's first exploration of illicit sexual passion. Pinski’s plays were produced by some of the world’s leading theatrical companies. Der Oytser was first produced by Max Reinhardt at Berlin's Deutsches Theater in 1911. The Theater Guild produced it in English translation by Ludwig Lewisohn in 1920, as well as Dos Letste Sakhakl. Konstantin Stanislavski selected Pinski’s one-act Der Eybiker Yid for the Habimah Theatre’s inaugural performance in 1918. Other companies to produce Pinski’s plays included the Provincetown Players, the Yiddish Art Theater, the Folksbine, and the Vilna Troupe. Very Good Condition in later cloth binding with original wrapper bound in. (HEB-40-11)

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