Gordin, Jacob

(1853–1909)

   US Yiddish playwright. After unsuccessfully trying to promote his own sect in the Ukraine, based on Jewish ethics and farm labour, Gordin emigrated to the United States in 1891. He wrote or translated from European classics about one hundred Yiddish plays, and had a marked influence on the New York Yiddish theatre in its formative period. GORDON, Aharon David 1856–1922. Agricultural pioneer. Gordon was the ideological mentor of the Zionist agricultural pioneers of the Second Aliyah, in the first decades of the 20th century.

   He was born in Troyanov, Russia, into a well-to-do family, and for over twenty years worked as a clerk on the estates of Baron Joseph Guenzburg. In 1904, at the age of forty-eight, he decided to settle in Palestine. He left his wife and daughter behind while he prepared the way in his new homeland, and only five years later did they join him. Although he had no experience of manual labour and was ailing, he began working in the vineyards and orchards of Petah Tikvah and Rishon le-Zion. He finally settled in Degania. Gordon was the philosopher of the ‘sanctity of work’. He had a strong mystical streak, and his views carried echoes of Tolstoy. He believed in a return to nature and was opposed to Marxist socialism because it sought to change the social order rather than to change man himself. Man had to attain a spiritual revival by working the soil, and so ‘enter the great university of labour’. In Palestine he lived in accordance with these ideals. To younger pioneers, he became the revered ‘old man’ with a flowing white beard, who led them in dancing and singing after the day’s work in the fields.