The actor Benjamin Zuskin spent most of his career working for the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored Yiddish theater, created in 1920. In 1949, Zuskin was arrested, along with several leading figures in Soviet Yiddish literature; most, including Zuskin, were executed in 1952. Dara Horn reviews a “painstakingly researched” memoir about Zuskin by his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman:
For those artists who worked in Yiddish, the Soviet Union in its early years had the added attraction of apparently not treating them like dirt. In its quest to brainwash national minorities in the 1920s and 1930s, the regime offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were actually salaried by the Soviet government. . . .
But the truth is that from the beginning, Soviet support for Jewish culture came at a very particular . . . price: the extraction of its Judaism. . . . [O]ne can see the process . . . in the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly—as in the many productions involving ghosts and graveyard scenes—as literally dead. . . .
Zuskin . . . not only starred in most [of the theater’s] productions but also ran its acting school. . . . His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle—without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry, beautifully described in this memoir, animated his every role. As one critic wrote, “Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1672/playing-the-fool