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

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.