Selections from YIVO Library Yiddish Theater Collection Now Available Online

by LYUDMILA SHOLOKHOVA
Head Librarian

The YIVO Library has one of the world’s largest collections of Yiddish theater works from 1850 to 1950, the period that coincided with the flourishing of Jewish theater in Europe and the United States.

In December 2012, YIVO received a mini-grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council to digitize microfilms of selections from this collection in cooperation with the Internet Archive. In the course of the project, over 600 theater masterpieces, including many exclusively rare editions of Yiddish plays, operettas and comedy skits published in the United States, Canada, Poland, Lithuania, England, Germany, France, Italy, Soviet Union, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Palestine were digitized. These materials are now available online at the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/yivoinstitutelibrary.

The Yiddish drama collection in the YIVO Library can be thought of as a world anthology of Yiddish theater. It includes many materials that are not be available at any other library in the world. YIVO acquired them mostly from donated private collections (such as the famous Sholem Perlmutter theater collection that includes over 400 editions of plays) and through the efforts of zamlers (volunteer collectors) who, before World War II, sent YIVO rare local materials from their home towns and cities of residence in Poland, Lithuania, and other countries.

Among the playwrights whose works have been digitized are well-known authors Sholem Aleichem, Abraham Goldfaden, Jacob Gordin, David Pinski, Leon Kobrin, Peretz Hirschtein, Moris Winchevsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and Mendl Elkin. But the collection also includes works by numerous little-known, now forgotten authors whose contribution to the development of Yiddish theater was profound. In addition, the Yiddish drama collection also includes Yiddish translations and adaptations of plays by Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Emile Zola, and other playwrights, which brought European masterpieces to the larger Yiddish-speaking audience.

The project was carried out with the assistance of YIVO Library Assistant Librarian Moriah Kennedy.