Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,007

This is the grave of Leon Kobrin.

Born in 1873 in Vitebsk, in what is today Belarus, Kobrin grew up in the Jewish community of that time, which meant a lot of people were leaving. Kobrin would join those people escaping the poverty and anti-Semitism of that time by going to the United States in 1892. Now, at this time, he wasn’t any kind of artist, but for reasons that I am not sure of, he became interested in Yiddish literature and theater shortly after arriving in New York. Of course, conditions for Jewish immigrants were rough too. The Lower East Side was the most densely populated neighborhood in the world at this time and Jewish immigrants were packed like sardines into the tenement houses. The theater became an escape and a way to explain the rapidly changing lives of these people.

Now, Kobrin did arrive in New York, but he lived in Philadelphia for awhile and then in New Jersey. He worked whatever job he could find. That was the same in New York, but the growing Yiddish literature community there did provide opportunities. He started writing in 1894 and published a story in a Yiddish newspaper. A lot more followed and so did plays. Many proved popular in the Yiddish speaking community. His first book, Yankel Boila and Other Tales, was published in 1898 and proved quite well liked. He supported himself during this while working for The Day, a leading Yiddish newspaper, for a quarter-century.

Now, almost all of this literature is totally unread today. Some of it is the language I suppose, though of course you can translate things. But Kobrin became a master of writing for a community that was disappearing almost as soon as it was created. The first generation Jewish immigrants loved Kobrin. His work addressed them specifically. He wrote about the difficulties of emigration. He wrote about assimilation, always a core topic in immigrant communities, but a particularly salient one for Jewish immigrants, because they were already defined as so different than not only the Americans but all the other immigrant groups too. But then the children were already not going to learn Yiddish and they were going to assimilate and that was that. So Kobrin was a huge figure for his time but then was forgotten about, except by scholars.

Another of Kobrin’s major impacts was translations. He translated a lot of the most important contemporary authors into Yiddish, including Guy de Maupassant, Zola, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. I’m a bit curious about someone translating these extremely long books in a short time, but he spoke both French and Russian and at the very least, he was providing Yiddish speakers with access to the most important intellectuals of the era. Also, Kobrin was the first person to adapt a Shakespeare play into a contemporary setting and perform it in Yiddish.

His plays also attracted the best actors in the Jewish community. Again, quite a few of these people are largely forgotten today, but among them were Stella Adler and Paul Muni. His play Children of Nature was also performed in the Soviet Union. He was one of the artists credited with pulling the Yiddish theater out of the broad comedy and burlesque show and toward the ability to produce real art. I don’t really have a problem with those more popular forms myself, but of course a lot of people who wanted to be taken seriously wanted to downplay that sort of thing for the high arts. Now, the way that Kobrin remembered the beginning of this is kind of interesting–he remembered that he was at a lecture of someone talking about the leading European authors and someone asked why American Jews were focusing on gentile writers instead of developing their own literature. So in the aftermath, a bunch of intellectuals, including Kobrin, decided to do just that and started the Free Yiddish People’s Stage. Writing for this is how he got his start as a playwright.

Kobrin died in 1946, at the age of 73.

Leon Kobrin is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other Jewish writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Chaim Potok is in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania and Neil Simon is in Pound Ridge, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.