ten lesser companies competing as well. Mogulescu was a towering figure in Bucharest theatre at this point, lauded on a level comparable to the actors of the National theatre, performing at times in Romanian as well as Yiddish, drawing an audience that went well beyond the Jewish community. Goldfaden seems, in Bercovici's words, to have lost "his theatrical elan" in this period. He briefly put together a theatre company in 1886 in Warsaw, with no notable success. In 1887 he went to New York (as did Mogulescu, independently). After extensive negotiations and great anticipation in the Yiddish-language press in New York ("Goldfaden in America," read the headline in the 11 January 1888 edition of the New Yorker Yiddishe Ilustrirte Zaitung), he briefly took on the job of director of Mogulescu's new "Rumanian Opera House"; they parted ways again after the failure of their first play, whose production values were apparently not up to New York standards. Goldfaden attempted (unsuccessfully) to found a theatre school, then headed in 1889 for Paris, rather low on funds. There he wrote some poetry, worked on a play that he didn't finish at that time, and put together a theatre company that never got to the point of putting on a play (because the cashier made off with all of their funds). In October 1889 he scraped together the money to get to Lvov, where his reputation as a poet again came to his rescue. Lviv Lviv was not exactly a dramatist's dream. Leon Dreykurs described audiences bringing meals into the theatre, rustling paper, treating the theatre like a beer garden. He also quotes Jacob Schatzky: "All in all, the Galician milieu was not favourable to Yiddish theatre. The intellectuals were assimilated, but the masses were fanatically religious and they viewed Jewish 'comedians' with disdain." Nonetheless, Iacob Ber Ghimpel, who owned a Yiddish theatre there, was glad to have a figure of Goldfaden's stature. Goldfaden completed the play he'd started in Paris, Rabi Yoselman, oder Die Gzerot fun Alsas ("Rabbi Yoselman, or The Alsatian Decree"), in five acts and 23 scenes, based on the life of Josel of Rosheim. At this time he also wrote an operetta Rothschild and a semi-autobiographical play called Mashiach Tzeiten (Messiah Times) that gave a less-than-optimistic view of America. Kalman Juvelier, an actor in Ber Ghimpel's company, credited Goldfaden with greatly strengthening the calibre of performance in Lviv during his