When President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he would not seek reelection after all, one of my first thoughts went to a Russian-born Jewish playwright who revolutionized Yiddish theater in turn of the century New York. The playwright, Jacob Gordin, in 1892 penned what became his most famous work, Der Yidisher Kenig Lir , or The Jewish King Lear .
Perhaps even better than Shakespeare himself, Gordin foresaw the dénouement of what promised to be tragedy turn into something more hopeful. And this is the promise of Biden’s belated decision to step aside.
Biden’s withdrawal was only the latest in a series of unprecedented events that have jolted our country over the past month. First, the jaw-dropping spectacle of Biden’s blank stare at last month’s presidential debate, and then last week’s eye-rubbing sight of an attempted assassination, all capped by the gob-smacking jingoism at the Republican National Convention: Even the most seasoned political analysts struggle to find the words to describe the unfolding events.
At such moments, we turn to literary giants who always managed to find the right words. During the Trump presidency, our common predicament was most often described as “Orwellian,” with “Kafkaesque” running a close second. Over the last four years, those authors have been upstaged by the playwright for whom all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
Of course, that playwright is William Shakespeare, the player Joe Biden, and the play seemed to be King Lear .
King Lear as Biden’s cautionary tale
Over the past several months, and with even greater frequency over the past several weeks, pundits have been drawing lots of water from Shakespeare’s tale of a doomed king. Lear’s misjudgement of his successors leads him to give power to his two daughters who offer him insincere devotion, while ignoring his truly deserving third daughter, Cordelia; in the end, he realizes his mistake too late, and Lear and Cordelia die with the kingdom in shambles.
The parallels were too clear to ignore. The longtime New York Times columnist — and recent convert to the classics — Maureen Dowd opined this month that while “ King Lear gave up power too early,” Biden’s tragedy is that he “will give it up too late.” Meanwhile, for the Yale historian Samuel Moyn, the Biden saga was a reminder that “there is no particularly good way to deal with the succession crises of aging and unfit men.”
Shortly after Biden’s announcement, The New Yorker ’s reliably brilliant essayist, Adam Gopnik, also turned to the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies . Biden, he wrote, reminded him of “ Lear in his sense of self-loss; Lear in his inability to understand, at least at first, the nature of his precipitous descent; and, yes, Lear in the wild rage, as people sometimes forget, that he directs at his circumstances. ”
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All of this is true and important, but also, it turns out, not enough. The funny thing about Shakespeare’s King Lear is that audiences found the tragedy simply unbearable. Even Samuel Johnson, in his 18th-century edition of Shakespeare’s works, confessed that “ many years ago I was so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. ”
Giving Lear — and Biden — a happily ever after
During Johnson’s own time, Shakespeare’s play was relegated to the library, replaced on stage by a revised version by Nahum Tate titled The History of King Lear . Tate, an Anglo-Irish poet and lyricist, turned the tragedy into a comedy. Not only does Cordelia not die in the final act, she goes on to marry Edgar, while Lear himself lives long enough to bless the union with the ringing words, “Our drooping country now erects its head/Peace spreads her balmy wings, and Plenty booms.”
Recent scholarship reveals that Tate, far from being a sappy romantic, was instead a sharp-eyed realist. Knowing that the English had had tragedies enough, he reshaped this specific tragedy to fit a kingdom only recently rocked by civil war. Rather than writing for the Hallmark channel, Tate was writing to establish the restoration as a much-needed hallmark of stability.
So, too, with Jacob Gordin two centuries later. The Jewish King Lear inaugurated what is known as the “golden age” of Yiddish theater — an age, as the theater historian Leonard Prager remarked, in which “tens of thousands of poor Jewish proletarians were to discover the expressive power of the téater. ”
In Gordin’s loosely adapted version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Lear figure is Dovid Moyshele, a wealthy businessman who distributes his riches among his three daughters, two of whom treasure these gifts while pretending to treasure the old ways dear to their father.
Moyshele’s third daughter, Taybele, expresses little but scorn for material wealth. Instead, she goes off to St Petersburg to study medicine and serve not herself, but humanity. At the same time, Moyshele — who in a rage left everything to his other daughters — is turned into a beggar when the daughters refuse to send him the money they had promised.
In the last act, a blind Moyshele — blinded, it must be noted, by cataracts, not gouging — is led by his faithful fool Shammai to Taybele’s home, where father and daughter are happily reunited and a bridge between generations is built.
With a nod to the Bard, Gordin was offering a less-than-subtle message: that the recently arrived immigrants from an Old World racked by religious violence and tyrannical government had to embrace a New World where the rule of God and the role of religion were private affairs, while the rule of law and the role of citizens were very much public ones.
While he lacks the eloquence of Gordin, not to mention Shakespeare, Biden has nevertheless revised in stunning fashion the tragedy that loomed for his legacy. Like Tate and Gordin, he has transformed his story into one of hope, which just might climax in a new president who represents not just a different generation but also, at last, a different sex and race.
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