My Mom Drank Ink: The "Little Negro" and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende's Stage Productions
The article examines the representation of Black people in Yente Telebende. She was one of the most successful characters in early twentieth-century American Yiddish culture, appearing in comic columns by humorist B. Kovner (pen name of Yankev Adler) in the socialist Forverts (1910s-1920s) and in several popular theater productions that the Forverts promoted. A recurring character was the friend of Yente’s son, called the “Little Negro/Niger” (ניגער’ל), the only nameless character in Kovner’s sketches. The article revises the historiographical convention, according to which Yiddish culture viewed African Americans as “America’s Jews” and demonstrates how the Yiddish press and theater were immersed in contemporary American racial imagery and vocabulary. Furthermore, the written and performed character of the “little Negro” shows that we should not take at face value much of the ideological line of Yiddish newspapers and their hierarchy between shund and “proper” culture, as the same authors commonly produced both.