184 MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE Must the Father Die? Reading King Lear Over A Lifetime BY MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE The Jewish King Lear of 1892 Mrs. Lear, wife and mother, is notoriously absent from Shake- speare’s 1601 tragedy, King Lear. It is thus a shock to fnd she is the frst character we meet in Jacob Gordin’s 1891-92 Yiddish revision, The Jewish King Lear. King Lear is the father-daughter plot of stubborn con- fict, blindness, recognition, care-giving, and death—the highest stakes possible—written in the most affecting language. By bringing in a wife and mother, transposing the setting to the Lithuania of his era, and writing in prose, Gordin (himself an immigrant) radically altered Shakespeare’s family dynamics, patriarchal subtext, and genre. But he held on tight to the initiating injustice of the plot, in which an all-powerful old man banishes his favorite daughter. Enormously popular for the next forty years in New York City, Gordin’s revision introduced the Jewish diaspora to the bewildering generational and gender relations of their new country. Today, thanks to the remarkable revival I saw at the Metropolitan Theater in New York in 2018, the play serves as a thread leading deep into father-daughter relations over a century later. Stranger yet, The Jewish King Lear took me some way along the unmapped journey of my feelings for my own father. As Gordin’s play opens, old Mrs. Lear, or rather “Khane Leah,” played by Diane Tyler, an actor of substantial motherly bosom and kindly