Yankl commissions a Torah scroll and puts it in his daughter’s room to watch over her.
Finally, Yankl’s money has talked and the matchmaker has found a pious young groom. But the taint of the whorehouse has thwarted their dream of finding a respectable match for their teenage daughter Rivkele. Yankl Tshaptshovitsh and his wife Soreh run a brothel in the basement of their home in a typical Polish Jewish town. For many Europeans, he was also the first Yiddish writer to reveal small-town Jewish life in Poland in all its variety - capturing its intense spirituality and romanticism as well as its wretchedness and poverty. Asch dramatized the dreams and dilemmas of his people, bringing them to an international audience. A second play, Meshiekhs tsaytn - a kholem fun mayn folk (In the Messianic Era - A Dream of My People) was staged in Russian by Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s famous St Petersburg theatre in 1906. His first full-length drama, Tsurikgekumen (The Return) - later retitled Mitn shtrom (With the Current) - was produced in 1905 in Polish translation in major theatres in Cracow and Warsaw. In five years, he had published dozens of short stories in Hebrew and Yiddish, and an acclaimed lyrical novella A shtetl (A Small Town). The former yeshiva student had absorbed the latest trends in Polish, German, and Russian modernism and was now a cosmopolitan European writer.
My great-grandfather Sholem Asch was twenty-six and a rising star of Yiddish literature’s new wave when he wrote Got fun nekome in the summer of 1906.
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