Moscow State Jewish Theatre
Under its founding artistic director, Alexander Granowsky, productions were heavily influenced by the avant-garde trends of Europe and many reflected an expressionistic style.
[1] Lunacharsky, the Soviet Minister of Enlightenment at the time, saw the company's potential to spread the Bolshevik message to the Jewish population of Russia and abroad.
[5] Once in Moscow, the company began utilizing a house which was confiscated from a Jewish merchant by the name of L. I. Gurevich who had decided to flee the city around the time of the Russian Revolution.
[2] By educating their own, inexperienced actors, the company hoped to avoid performers with the melodramatic style common in other Yiddish theatre troupes.
One of the best documented tours visited Kiev, Gomel, Odessa, and Kharkov in the summer of 1924 and offered a variety of short sketches called A Carnival of Jewish Comedy in addition to full-length productions, such as The Sorceress, 200,000, and God of Vengeance.
[9] At the end of GOSET's European tour that took place throughout the majority of 1928, Granowsky chose to remain in Germany, never returning to the Soviet Union.
[5][6][8] The theatre's repertoire included adaptations of classic works by Sholem Asch, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem—such as Tevye the Milkman (also adopted in the West as Fiddler on the Roof)—and Avrom Goldfaden—such as Bar Kokhba.
[10][11] Under Mikhoels' direction, the company began to produce works by contemporary Soviet Yiddish writers, such as Shmuel Halkin, Perets Markish, and David Bergelson.
[10][12] The international success of the production meant that Mikhoels had achieved one of the theatre company's founding goals: to make Yiddish a language of art for countries around the world.
Kaganovich chided Mikhoels and the company members of GOSET for not portraying Jewish people in a positive enough light and requested they stick to productions retelling events similar to Bar Kochba.
In October 1941, GOSET was officially restructured by the Committee of Artistic Affairs and its planned productions were replaced by Soviet wartime propaganda pieces.
[9] After World War II, the rise of antisemitism in Russia caused people once referred to as "Brother Jew" to be labeled "Rootless Cosmopolitan", and members of government began to interpret Mikhoels' artistic choices as proof of Jewish nationalism.
Zuskin was one of at least thirteen prominent Soviet Yiddish artists executed on August 12, 1952 in the event known as "The Night of the Murdered Poets" ("Ночь казненных поэтов").
