Paul Green’s Jewish Inspiration

By Talia Brenner

No work of literature says more about North Carolina than The Lost Colony, the musical drama by Paul Green about Sir Walter Raleigh’s fabled settlement.  The play has been a summer mainstay on Roanoke Island for nearly 90 years. Its subject is Elizabethan England, so audiences may be surprised to learn that one of its inspirations traces to the Soviet Yiddish theater.

In 1928, a young Paul Green, already a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright with an academic career at UNC-Chapel Hill, was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study drama in Berlin. In August the Green family left the hot North Carolina summer and boarded a boat to Weimar Germany.

The sojourn in Berlin did not live up to Paul Green’s expectations. He found the city ugly and cold, and the family struggled financially. For him, the one worthwhile experience was seeing the Moscow State Yiddish Theater perform in Berlin.

The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, sponsored by the Soviet government, performed within the Soviet Union and abroad. In his writings, Green would credit the theater’s director, Aleksey Granovsky, with inspiring him to combine music and drama in his own creations, most notably The Lost Colony (1937). Not as widely understood is that Granovsky’s influence went beyond using music in plays. Granovsky’s work was folk drama, about Ashkenazi Jewish life in the isolated Pale of Settlement. Granovsky’s plays used expressionistic elements such as music to interpret the shtetl to cosmopolitan audiences. The power of art to bridge the chasm of time and cultural difference—this is what inspired Paul Green.

The first Moscow State Yiddish Theater production Green attended in late 1928 was Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi (The Travels of Benjamin III), adapted from the novella by the eminent Hebrew and Yiddish writer S. Y. Abramovitsh. Green described Granovsky’s production in his diary as “a grotesque and sentimental operetta…thoroughly delightful.” Only four days later, the Greens attended the Moscow State Yiddish Theater’s production of Tsvey hundert toyznt (Two Hundred Thousand) by Sholem Aleichem. “This company plays in Yiddish with music and highly stylized make-up, pantomime and costumes,” Elizabeth Green wrote to her family, “The whole thing was so perfectly done that you were almost glad that you couldn’t understand the words.”

Granovsky’s goal was to make Ashkenazi folk culture relevant and compelling for modern audiences. Beyond performing Yiddish classics, the company performed plays based on cultural research. These plays included Y. L. Peretz’s Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace), based on Peretz’s collecting of Yiddish folklore, and S. An-ski’s The Dybbuk, which drew on his ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement. Though it might seem surprising that these modernists would take such interest in folk culture, their scientific study of culture was actually quite modern. For Jewish creatives of this era, dramatizing an old-fashioned world honored their heritage while also separating themselves from it. Paul Green could relate. He had left behind what he considered a provincial, old-fashioned life in rural North Carolina, and preserved elements of it in his writing.

The Moscow State Yiddish Theater used expressionistic art to communicate an old culture to modern audiences, and Green recognized that he could do the same in North Carolina. “Again returned to ideas of folk musical plays,” he wrote in his diary after attending Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi. “See more and more my way toward some folk operatic pieces, adequate use of balladry and drama,” he reflected after Bay nakht afn altn mark.

He would have that opportunity in 1937. In The Lost Colony, Green presented the folk culture of sixteenth-century England to a modern audience, through the music and dance from that time period. For decades after, Green wrote numerous outdoor historical dramas using the blueprint of The Lost Colony.

Granovsky never attained similar renown. In 1928, the Soviet Union recalled the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Fearing intensifying persecution, Granovsky defected to Germany, and later moved to France. He died in 1937, the same year The Lost Colony opened. The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre would reach a violent end in the late 1940s. Granovsky’s successor, Solomon Mikhoels, who performed leading roles in Berlin in 1928, was murdered by Soviet secret police in 1948.

According to scholar Lois Adler, Aleksey Granovsky has not been well remembered, in the former Soviet Union nor in the theater world. To some degree, Green’s repeated mentions of Granovsky as inspiration kept his memory when few others did. Yet Green also used his recollections of Granovsky for his own purposes. He characterized Granovsky as a visionary about theater in the United States and even quoted conversations where Granovsky predicted the development of Green’s folk musical theater. Those conversations probably never happened. Ever a playwright, Paul Green often used fictional or semi-fictional dialogues to prove a point. And though Granovsky certainly cared about the future of folk and music drama, theater in America was not his primary concern. But by that point Aleksey Granovsky was dead, and he could posthumously play the role of oracle in Green’s present.

There is a dramatic symmetry, then, in Paul Green’s Jewish inspiration. Much of Granovsky’s work reflected on the hazy boundaries between past and present. So did Green’s plays, as well as his depiction of the man who inspired them. “And in this kind of theatre too as in Granowski’s[,] time could be telescoped through a symbol,” Green wrote. “Tomorrow is already here.”