Review: 'Indecent' pays haunting tribute to a daring Yiddish play
LOS ANGELES - Paula Vogel's "Indecent" tells the tumultuous tale of another play, Sholem Asch's "God of Vengeance." First produced in 1907, this daring Yiddish drama revolves around a brothel keeper whose pretensions to conventional respectability are shattered when his daughter and one of the prostitutes who works downstairs from the family's home tenderly fall in love.
The intelligentsia by and large recognized the emergence of an important Yiddish literary voice. But if the presentation of a Jewish patriarch profiteering on sin wasn't bad enough, the purity with which Asch depicted the women's affection had conservative firebrands declaring war.
Was the artistic success of "God of Vengeance" good for the Jews? Not in the opinion
