Jacob Sternberg

Jacob Sternberg (a.k.a. Iacob Sternberg) was a Yiddish theater director and teacher of theater, and a Yiddish-language avant garde poet, best known for his theater work in Romania between the two world wars. In 1930 he created a studio theater in Bucharest that played a prominent role in the development of modern trends in European theater. His Yiddish language poems are collected in a volume In Kraiz fun Iorn (At the Crossing of the Year).

He was associated with a short-lived Yiddish-language magazine Licht ("Light"), four issues of which were published in Iaşi between December 1914 and September 1915. Licht called for a "renaissance of the Jewish stages in Romania" and condemned the "poor foundation" of Yiddish theater as a commercial institution: "Th Yiddish stagee ought to be a place of education, of drawing Jews closer together through the Yiddish word... we will fight against this [commercial] state of things.

Israil Bercovici counts the "literary-musical" gatherings sponsored by that magazine as "the beginning of modern Yiddish theater in Romania", and sees Sternberg as preparing the way for the Vilna Troupe, the Yiddish theater troupe that brought the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to Romania.

Nonetheless, Sternberg adopted as a slogan "Back to Goldfaden". Calling Abraham Goldfaden "the Prince Charming who woke up the lethargic Romanian Jewish Culture" when he founded professional Yiddish theater in 1876, Sternberg wrote, "The only milieu that attracts the great Jewish masses is a traditional-cultural theater. Not even a literary theater... From that I created a social-political theater, a theater... [of current events]... which I think was, then, the first of its kind in Yiddish".

In 1917, in response to the antisemitic violence happening in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe at that time, he staged passages from Hebrew and Yiddish poet Haim Naiman Bialik.

A committed socialist, he wrote that, in the wake of the October Revolution, "we satirized bourgeois assimilation, struggled with the [Jewish] clergy, fought for progressive Jewish culture, for the emancipation of the Jews, for the rights of citizenship... for progressive Jewish literature."

References

• Bercovici, Israil, O sută de ani de teatru evriesc în România ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998). ISBN 9739827225. 116–119.