The publication of “Stardust Lost” (Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95), Stefan Kanfer’s new history of the Yiddish theater in New York City, is well-timed. The recent deaths of two former Yiddish stage stars, Luba Kadison and Lillian Lux, not to mention their onetime hangout, the Second Avenue Deli, reminded the public of that bygone world. So did a recent dustup over how best to rescue the decaying artifacts inside the old Hebrew Actors Union on East 7th Street. What was needed was a volume that set down in clear terms what exactly was lost.

Mr. Kanfer’s book does that handily. Past histories of the Yiddish rialto have been either overly academic or highly subjective. The former got bogged down in minutiae and highbrow analysis. The latter, usually memoirs of stage celebrities, were hampered by self-interest and selective memory. Mr. Kanfer has no agenda — aside from a certain defensive nostalgia as to the Yiddish theater’s legacy — and his prose is clear, breezy, and entertaining.

The books structure is invitingly simple.After a brief, and rather unnecessary history of the Jewish people, Mr. Kanfer gets down to business with a chapter titled, “The Father.” This refers to playwright and composer Abraham Goldfaden. Unlike almost any art movement you could mention, the Yiddish theater began life on a specific day in a specific place: the Green Tree café in Jassy, Romania, on Oct. 5 and 8, 1876. There and then, Goldfaden, a failed teacher and reporter with great ambition, presented a self-described “hodge-podge”of farce and song. The reaction was so great that by the end of the century the idea and practice of Yiddish theater had spread across Europe and on to New York and points west.

Goldfaden hailed from Russia, as did most of the early leaders in the field. These included Odessa bon vivant Jacob Adler, whom Mr. Kanfer calls “The First Son”; Boris Thomashefsky (“The Second Son”), a zaftig Kiev refugee and scenery-chewer who would grow up to be the most unlikely sex symbol the stage has ever seen; and David Kessler, another Odessan, who ran away to New York to bring naturalistic acting to the highly unnaturalistic world of Yiddish theatricals.

All three were blessed with vanity and chutzpah to spare. Thomashefsky brokered his first production and stage role at the tender age of 13. Adler, crowned “The Great Eagle” after successes in London, made his American debut in Chicago; he had left New York in a huff when an adoring crowd failed to meet him at the boat. As for Kessler, he once told a performer backstage that his wife was ill so that he might play a tragic scene more effectively.

While Thomshefsky wanted mainly to be “America’s Sweetheart,” the other two frequently strove for high art. This wasn’t easy in the 1880s and 1890s. The hungry, semiliterate immigrant theatergoers wanted adventure and escape. Shund (the Yiddish word for “trash”) prevailed. Matters weren’t helped by the likes of playwrights Moishe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner, self-aggrandized sausage-makers who eternally churned out bastardized Bible stories and thinly disguised bits of plagiarism. Hurwitz was such an operator that, after converting to Christianity to take a lucrative job as a missionary, he reconverted when the Yiddish theater called.

Still, strides were made. Kessler teamed with headstrong playwright Jacob Gordin, who found a model in Ibsen and railed against the prevailing tastes of “Moishe” — the acting community’s nickname for its demanding, proletariat audience. Adler also worked with Gordin, scoring a historic success with “Two Worlds,” the writer’s Yiddish version of “King Lear.” Uptown critics and audiences took notice. Adler won even more respect in 1903 when he played Shylock in his own highly edited version of “The Merchant of Venice.” Adler’s ennobled moneylender was so heralded citywide that the cultured producer Arthur Hopkins moved it to Broadway — with Adler speaking Yiddish to the ensemble’s English.

Further advances came through the plays of S. Ansky, David Pinski, Peretz Hirschbein, Sholem Aleichem, Sholom Asch and H. Leivick. Between them, they produced the lasting works of the Yiddish Stage: “The Dybbuk,” “The Treasure,” “The Golem,” “God of Vengeance,” and “Green Fields.” Many of these were produced by Maurice Schwartz, the most significant auteur of the post–World War I era. The conventional take on Schwartz is that he was the Yiddish theater’s most daring genius. As depicted by Mr. Kanfer, however, he comes off as the Joseph Papp of his day: erratic, megalomaniacal, responsible for as many hits as flops, and commercially canny as often as he was artistically brave.

Schwartz lasted until 1960, long enough to see Second Avenue decline and all but die, the victim of the rapid assimilation of Jewish New Yorkers, and a sharp decline of Jewish immigration, particularly following the Nazis’ murderous reign. It comes as something of a shock to realize the entire heyday of the New York Jewish stage lasted roughly half a century.

That said, it’s equally surprising the form didn’t kill itself off even earlier, for the machers of the Yiddish rialto had a collective genius for chaos. Gordin waged a personal war against the Forwards’ Abraham Cahan, the leading Yiddish stage critic of the day. Thomashefsky’s adulterous sister Emma was crippled when her jealous husband, producer Morris Finkel, shot her and then killed himself. Spotlight-loving Schwartz forced two acting masters out of his company when they threatened to steal focus: first Jacob Ben-Ami, who went on to form the Jewish Art Theatre; and then Paul Muni — née Muni Weisenfreund — who could upstage an actor while facing upstage. As for the Hebrew Actors Union, when it was not propelling producers in bankruptcy by forcing them to take on more artists than they needed, it was keeping out younger members through a villainously brutal audition process.

Rivalry. Jealousy. Sabotage. Histrionics. Then as now, that’s entertainment.