The vitality and professionalism of the Yiddish theater, as well as its cultural content, make it an important Jewish space in interwar Poland. For participants as well as for the audience, the Yiddish theater was an entertaining and educational space available to most Polish (and Eastern or Central European) Jews. Many major Polish cities had amateur and professional theaters or traveling theater troupes, and these could be found in smaller Jewish communities as well. The Yiddish theater produced works that have survived to this day, and the names and accomplishments of the playwrights and actors working in interwar Poland were well known and much revered.
The Yiddish theater, like many other forms of Yiddish expression, is often seen as representative of a pre-Holocaust golden age of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. There is validity to this, as an examination of the Yiddish theater in interwar Poland can indeed shed light on the lives of Yiddish speaking Jews during a highly productive period of their history. Yiddish speaking Jews in Poland were dealing with anti-Semitism and at the same time producing massive amounts of literature and other forms of expression. Looking at the Yiddish theater in interwar Poland offers a glimpse into one specific, important cultural space Jews inhabited.
This paper will explore the role of the Yiddish theater in interwar Poland. By examining the role the theater played for both participants and for the audience, the plays performed, the dramatic content therein, and the theatrical spaces themselves, as well as the social, political and religious climate of Poland at the time, I intend to demonstrate it was a place of cultural transmission as well as a place of entertainment. By "space of cultural transmission" I mean a space in which markers of Jewish culture (religion, language, world-view, norms, ethics and identity, etc.) were readily found, presented and accepted in a variety of ways.