View source for Ni-be-ni-me-ni-cucurigu

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'''''Ni-be-ni-me-ni-cucurigu''''' is an 1878 play by [[Abraham Goldfaden]]. The somewhat nonsensical [[Yiddish]] title is variously translated as '''''Not Me, Not You, Not Cock-a-Doodle-Doo''''' or '''''Neither This, Nor That, nor Kukerikoo'''''; Lulla Rosenfeld says it had an alternate title '''''The Struggle of Culture with Fanaticism'''''. The title comes from a Russian expression "ни бе, ни ме, ни кукареку", meaning to understand nothing on the subject.
The play itself is lost. The plot centered on a [[shoemaking|cobbler]] who becomes a [[rabbi]]. [[Jacob Pavlovich Adler|Jacob Adler]] wrote of it that "this thin idea had been dressed out with so much stolen music that it was shameful to hear", but Lulla Rosenfeld, writing from a distance of over a century, argues that its combination of a "serious theme with an amusing nonsense plot" was emblematic of early [[Yiddish theater]]. "This emphasis on education, progress, enlightenment," she writes, "is found nowhere else in the popular [[comedy]] and [[melodrama]] of the nineteenth century. It is special to the Yiddish theater, which was, even from the beginning, a theater of ideas."
==References==
* [[Jacob Pavlovich Adler|Adler, Jacob]], ''A Life on the Stage: A Memoir'', translated and with commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld, Knopf, New York, 1999, {{ISBN|0-679-41351-0}}, 117.
* [[Israil Bercovici|Bercovici, Israil]], ''O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România'' ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998). {{ISBN|973-98272-2-5}}. Referenced only for the date of the play.
* Russian version or perhaps synopsis of the play: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx35u3&view=1up&seq=24&skin=2021
[[Category:Yiddish plays]]
[[Category:1878 plays]]
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