But for absolute, intense realism Gordin's _Wild Man_, unrelieved by a problem idea, is unrivaled. An idiot boy falls in love with his stepmother without knowing what love is. He is abused by his father and brother, beaten on account of his ineptitudes. His sister and another brother take his side, and the two camps revile each other in unmistakable language. The father marries again; his new wife is a heartless, faithless woman, and she and the daughter quarrel. After repeated scenes of brutality to the idiot, the daughter is driven out to make her own living. Adler's portraiture of the idiot is a great bit of technical acting. The poor fellow is filled with the mysterious wonderings of an incapable mind. His shadow terrifies and interests him. He philosophizes about life and death. He is puzzled and worried by everything; the slightest sound preys on him. Physically alert, his senses serve only to trouble and terrify the mind which cannot interpret what they present. The burlesque which Mr. Adler puts into the part was inserted to please the crowd, but increases the horror of it, as when Lear went mad; for the Elizabethan audiences laughed, and had their souls wrung at the same time. The idiot ludicrously describes his growing love. In pantomime he tells a long story. It is evident, even without words, that he is constructing a complicated symbolism to express what he does not know. He falls into epilepsy and joins stiffly in the riotous dance. The play ends so fearfully that it shades into mere burlesque.
This horrible element in so many of these plays marks the point where realism passes into fantastic sensationalism. The facts of life in the Ghetto are in themselves unpleasant, and consequently it is natural that a dramatic exaggeration of them results in something poignantly disagreeable. The intense seriousness of the Russian Jew, which accounts for what is excellent in these plays, explains also the rasping falseness of the extreme situations. It is a curious fact that idiots, often introduced in the Yiddish plays, amuse the Jewish audience as much as they used to the Elizabethan mob.
One of the most skillful of Gordin's Yiddish adaptations is _The Oath_, founded on Hauptman's _Fuhrmann Henschel_. In the first act a dying peasant is exhibited on the stage. In Hauptman's play it is a woman; in Gordin's it is a man. He is racked with coughing. A servant clatters over the floor with her heavy boots. Another servant feeds the sick man from a coarse bowl and the steward works at the household accounts. The dying man's wife, and their little boy, enter and it is apparent that something has been going on between her and the steward. They and the servants dine realistically and coarsely and neglect the dying man. When they leave, the dying man teaches his son how to say "Kaddish" for his soul when he is dead. When he dies he makes his wife swear that she will never marry again. In the second act she is about to marry the steward, and the Jewish customs are here used, as is often the case with the Yiddish playwright, to intensify the dramatic effect of a scene. It is just a year from the time of her husband's death, and the candles are burning, therefore, on the table. According to the orthodox belief the soul of the dead is present when the candles burn. The little boy, feeling that his mother is about to marry again, blows out the candles. The mother, horror-stricken, rushes to him and asks him why he did it. "I did not want my father to see that you are going to marry again," says the little fellow. It was an affecting scene and left few dry eyes in the audience.