Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

Abstract

The author analyses Isaac Leib Peretz’s play Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) through the lens of the ambivalences of the carnival, which give rise to various transgressions of socio-political and cultural, as well as metaphysical and existential, orders. The carnival category positions Peretz’s drama in the dialectic of beginning and end, and it suggests the violation of the existing normative order in order to expose the tension between the traditional world of the shtetl and the modernity that is impinging on it. Moreover, the carnival spectacle reveals metaphysical and historiosophic dimensions, since it tackles the question of the human condition, which is defined by the opposition of life and death and is entangled in the course of history.