The Jewish King and Queen Lear: Immigration, Care for Elders, and the American Yiddish Stage, with Gabriella Safran

Click here to register for this free in-person program co-presented by Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California, the Jewish Folk Chorus of San Francisco, and KlezCalifornia. The Library is located at 1835 Ellis Street in San Francisco, with free garage parking at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.  

The large wave of migration of Jews from the Russian Empire to the United States from the 1880s through the 1910s included men, women, and children, but many elders stayed behind. The new immigrants wrote to their parents and sent them money… except when they didn’t. The Yiddish writing that these immigrants produced and consumed addressed the topic of care for elders, sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely. Jacob Gordin, who migrated to the United States in 1891, wrote two famous plays about the topic—The Jewish King Lear (1892) and Mirele Efros, or the Jewish Queen Lear (1898), both set in the Russian Empire—and audiences responded by thinking about their own relationships to their parents in the Old Country. Even as Gordin references a world-renowned case of bad care for elders, King Lear, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s model draws on the economic realities and the ideologies of the 1890s.

Gabriella Safran is the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is the author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky, a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker. Her most recent monograph, Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century, looks at how Russian subjects and visitors to the Russian Empire display their skills at listening to and recording the words of “the people.”