Nobody knows for certain how the idea of a Yiddish theatre came to Avrom Goldfadn, a poet and folk singer who had spent many years searching for a living. Some say that he had just arrived in the town of Iaşi in Romania, where he had the intention of starting a Yiddish newspaper, when the wife of a friend he was staying with told him not to be stupid. She told him there was already a Yiddish newspaper in the town, it never made any money and that instead of a second newspaper, what the Jews of Iaşi really needed was a theatre . She reminded him that in one of the volumes of poetry he had written were a couple of sketches that could easily be turned into plays.
Others say that Goldfadn went to a wine garden where a Yiddish singer was performing. Goldfadn, who had seen a few Russian and German plays on his travels, thought that the Yiddish songs he was hearing would work far better if they were integrated into a play. The man he saw performing that day, the singer, Israel Grodner, told yet another version of the story: he said that the Yiddish theatre had been his idea and that he had proposed to Goldfadn that the two of them perform together in a show.
One way or another, most people agree that the Yiddish theatre was born at the Green Tree café in Iaşi in 1876, at the show put on by Grodner and Goldfadn; a show which failed so badly that Goldfadn was booed off the stage and Grodner had to rebuke the audience for their bad manners. Nevertheless, the very next day Avrom Goldfadn got up and began writing Yiddish plays. He became known as the father of Yiddish Theatre- a title that he gave to himself.
The atmosphere of chaos and turmoil that marked Grodner and Goldfadn’s first show came to characterise the early years of the Yiddish Theatre. Yiddish speaking audiences knew little of literature or drama. Most of them had never attended live performances before and nor did the actors have much experience. The performances were more vaudeville than drama, the performers paid little attention to their scripts; they weren’t given lines, they were just expected to improvise the character they had been told to play.
The plays revolved around songs, Goldfadn’s lyrics were the only words the actors had to remember. The plots, such as they were, were farces, typically poking fun at the backward religiosity of Jewish village life, full of miracles, angels, spirits and demons. The audiences were not shy about expressing their feelings. As the plays became better known they would remind the actors what to do next; a good play was one in which they wept and laughed, a bad play was when the voices on stage were drowned by heckling. Nevertheless, some of the plays were so well loved, performed so often, they became canonical; fifty years after they were first performed, audiences would still complain if even the set was changed from its original layout.