Leon Kobrin was a playwright in Yiddish theater, writer of short stories and novels, and a translator. As a playwright he is generally seen as a disciple of Jacob Gordin, but his mature work was more character-driven, more open and realistic in its presentation of human sexual desire, and less polemical than Gordin's. Many of his plays were "ghetto dramas" dealing with issues of tradition and assimilation and with generational issues between Jewish immigrants to America and the first generation of American-born Jews.
Life and works
Born in Vitsebsk, then part of Imperial Russia, culturally considered at that time part of Lithuania, now in Belarus, he wrote at first in Russian. In 1892 he emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; only then did he develop an interest in Yiddish literature and theater. In the U.S. he first worked menial jobs in Philadelphia, as well as in rural Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, before moving to New York City. He became a journalist, then a writer of short stories, and finally gained fame as a playwright. He began writing in Yiddish by translating stories from Russian; the first original story he published was "A merder oys libe", which appeared in the newspaper Filadelfyer Shtot-Tsaytung, in 1894. Kobrin's first play, Mine, was rewritten and adapted by Jacob Gordin for a production in 1899, with the original text appearing in print later the same year. Gordin's strong influence on Kobrin's work is reflected in his next play, Natur, Mensh un Khaye, which consciously alludes to Gordin's Got, Mensh un Tayvl. Liptzin singles out Kobrin's tragedy Yankel Boyle as the "apex" of his work, and describes its title character as "a kindhearted but dull-witted Jewish youth … embroiled in a complex moral and emotional dilemma to which he could find no solution short of suicide". Kobrin's 30 or so plays spanned both "golden ages" of Yiddish theater in America. When he started as a playwright at the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish theater was bringing to America challenging modern classics, such as the works of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, and Leo Tolstoy, sometimes before these had yet been presented on the English-language American stage; and his career continued into the era of the art theater movement in Yiddish, exemplified in New York by Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre. Kobrin continued, throughout his life, to contribute to Yiddish-language newspapers. He also worked extensively as a translator of modern classics from French and Russian into Yiddish. Among the authors whose work he translated were Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov. His wife, Pauline, collaborated on some of these translations.
