Sholem Aleichem in Weimar Berlin: The Cultural Semiotics of Eastern European Jewish Performances

In April of 1928, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre – also known as GOSET – went on tour in central Europe, performing in Berlin for the first and only time in its history. The Berlin audience had high expectations of the company as representative of the flowering of Yiddish culture under communism, leftist German intellectuals who had visited Moscow during the 1920s also already being familiar with it. The tour opened with 200,000 – a Yiddish stage adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Dos Groyse Gevin (The Great Win) – directed by Alexei Granovsky.¹