A Different 1956 - 80 Years of Yiddish Theater in Romania

Officially sanctioned as a state institution in 1948 under the name Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat Bucureşti (TES), Yiddish theater had a much longer history in Romania and could trace its roots all the way to Abraham Goldfaden, by all accounts the father of Yiddish theater. However, the theater had to turn 80 before it could officially celebrate an anniversary. This lecture will put the theater’s anniversary in the context of both the TES’s existence as a state institution and Jewish life in general under Romania’s socialist regime.

Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of German at The University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS, USA. She is the author of Against All Odds: Subversive Spaces in National Socialist Germany (Peter Lang Oxford 2010) and of various articles on Volker Braun, Eginald Schlattner, representations of 1968 in the Romanian media, and Yiddish theater in Romania. She is currently co-editing a volume on secret police files from the Eastern Bloc as life writing (forthcoming with Camden House in 2016) and a special issue of Monatshefte on surveillance and state intervention (forthcoming in 2018).