Jacob Adler
Jacob Pavlovich Adler was an American actor and star of Yiddish theater, first in Odessa, and later in London and in New York City's Yiddish Theater District.
Nicknamed "Nesher haGadol", he achieved his first theatrical success in Odessa, but his career there was rapidly cut short when Yiddish theater was banned in Russia in 1883. He became a star in Yiddish theater in London, and in 1889, on his second voyage to the United States, he settled in New York City. Adler soon started a company of his own, ushering in a new, more serious Yiddish theater, most notably by recruiting the Yiddish theater's first realistic playwright, Jacob Gordin. Adler scored a great triumph in the title role of Gordin's Der Yiddisher King Lear, set in 19th-century Russia, which along with his portrayal of Shakespeare's Shylock would form the core of the persona he defined as the "Grand Jew".
Nearly all his family went into theater; probably the most famous was his daughter Stella, who taught method acting to, among others, Marlon Brando.
Childhood and youth
Adler was born in Odessa, Russian Empire. Adler's father, Feivel Abramovitch Adler, was a grain merchant. His mother, née Hessye Halperin was a tall, beautiful woman, originally from a wealthy family in Berdichev. She became estranged from her family after divorcing her first husband to marry Adler's father. The marriage to a divorcée cost Feivel Adler his status as a Kohen. His paternal grandfather lived with them for some eight years; he was a pious man, and the family was much more observant of Jewish religious practices during the time he lived with them. However, according to Adler, the real patriarch of the family was his wealthy uncle Aaron "Arke" Trachtenberg, who would later be the model for his portrayal of roles such as Gordin's Jewish King Lear.Adler grew up with one foot in a traditional Jewish world and one in a more modern, European one. His granddaughter Lulla Rosenfeld writes, "Of the haskala as an organized system of ideas, he probably knew little or nothing." His education was irregular: as the family fortunes rose and fell, he would be sent to cheder or to a Russian language county school, pulled out of school entirely, or have a private tutor for a few months. He wrote that "the sum of my learning was a little arithmetic, some Russian grammar, and a few French phrases."
He grew up with both Jewish and Christian playmates, but also survived one of the Odessa pogroms around 1862. He played hooky; as a 12-year-old he started going to witness public floggings, brandings, and executions of criminals; later he would develop more of an interest in attending courtroom trials. At 14 he began working in a textile factory, and soon rose to a white collar job there at a salary of 10 rubles a month, which would have been decent even for an adult. Still living at home, he began to frequent the disreputable district of Moldovanka. His first brush with stardom was that he briefly became a boxer, known as Yankele Kulachnik, "Jake the Fist". He soon got bored with boxing, but not with his new connections to the "sons of rich fathers, attorneys without diplomas", etc. A good dancer, he became part of a crowd of young toughs who regularly crashed wedding parties. His local celebrity continued, with a reputation as Odessa's best can-can dancer.
He left the factory, becoming a raznoschik, a peddler; his memoir hints at back-door assignations with "servant girls and chambermaids"; by his own description, his life at this point was just a step from a life of crime. Through his uncle Arke, "a hot theater lover", he became interested in the theater, at first in the beauty of Olga Glebova and the cut of Ivan Kozelsky's clothes, but he had the good fortune to be in one of the great theater cities of his time.
At 17 he became the leader of Glebova's claque, was working as a copyist for lawyers, and going out to a theater, a tavern, or a party every night. He would later draw on his own life at this time for his portrayal of Protosov in Tolstoy's The Living Corpse. Over the next few years he had numerous love affairs, and was prevented from a love marriage with one Esther Raizel because his own dubious reputation compounded the taint of his mother's divorce. He survived another pogrom, but his family was financially ruined by the destruction of their possessions and the theft of their money.
In writing about this period in his memoir, Adler mentions attending and admiring performances by Israel Grodner, a Brody singer and improvisational actor who would soon become one of the founders of professional Yiddish theater. A song of Grodner's about an old father turned away by his children would later be the germ of the idea for The Yiddish King Lear. He writes that he would have become a Brody singer, like Grodner, except "I had no voice". This lack of a singing voice would be a major factor in the direction of his acting career: according to Rosenfeld, although Yiddish theater was long dominated by vaudevilles and operettas, "He was the only Yiddish actor to rely entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays."
''Sanitar'' and Inspector
The outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War brought on universal conscription of young men. At his family's urging, Adler bribed his way into becoming a sanitar, an assistant in the Red Cross Medical Corps. He was selected by Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshersky to work at a German hospital in Bender, Moldova, dealing mainly with typhus patients. In his four months there, he became a favorite with the established Jewish families there, and earned a Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement for his brief service to the Tsar.Returning to Odessa, he got a job distributing newspapers. This respectable work required getting up at 6 a.m., not good for a carouser. Still, newspaper connection meant that he soon heard of one of the war's other effects: the many Jewish merchants and middlemen war brought to Bucharest were a boon to Abraham Goldfaden's nascent Yiddish theater there. Two of his Odessa acquaintances—Israel Rosenberg, a personable con-man, and Jacob Spivakofsky, scion of a wealthy Jewish family—had become actors there, then had left Goldfaden to found their own company, touring in Moldavia. Adler wrote them to urge them to bring their troupe to Odessa.
Adler managed to leverage a recommendation from Prince Meshersky and another from Avrom Markovich Brodsky—a businessman so successful as to have earned the nickname "the Jewish Tsar"—to get a job as a marketplace inspector for the Department of Weights and Measures, rather unusual for a Jew at that time. His mildly corrupt tenure there gave him good contacts with the police. These would soon come in handy for smoothing over certain problems of a young and unlicensed theater troupe when Rosenberg and Spivakofsky returned from Romania, penniless because the end of the war had meant the collapse of Yiddish theater in the provinces, and ready to start a troupe in Odessa.
Adler aspired to be an actor, but found himself at first serving the troupe more as critic and theoretician, making use of his now-vast knowledge of Russian theater. The first productions were popular successes, but Adler's own account suggests that they were basically mediocre, and his Uncle Arke was appalled: "Is this theater? No my child, this is a circus."
Acting career
Lulla Rosenfeld's remark that Adler "...rel entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays" does not quite tell the whole story. On one hand, he was also responsible for recruiting the Yiddish theater's first naturalistic playwright, Jacob Gordin, and he scored a great triumph in the title role of Gordin's Der Yiddisher King Lear, set in 19th-century Russia. On the other, until his 50s, he was not hesitant to take advantage of his prowess as a dancer, and even occasionally took on roles that called for some singing, although by all accounts this was not his forte.Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia
Adler wrote in his memoir that the passion of his future wife Sonya Oberlander for theater, and their vision of what Yiddish theater could become, kept him in the profession despite his uncle's view. When she was cast by Rosenberg opposite Jacob Spivakovsky in the title role of Abraham Goldfaden's darkly comic operetta Breindele Cossack, she pulled strings so that the role of Guberman would be reassigned to Adler.His success in the role was cut short by the news that Goldfaden, whose plays they were using without permission, was coming with his troupe to Odessa. Goldfaden's own account says he came there at the urging of his father; Adler attributes it to Rosenberg and Spivakovsky's "enemies". Rosenberg, never the most ethical of men, withdrew his troupe from Odessa to tour the hinterland.
By his own account, Adler took a leave of absence from his job to travel with Rosenberg's troupe to Kherson, where he made a successful acting debut as the lover Marcus in The Witch of Botoşani. He overstayed his leave, lost his government post, and the decision to become a full-time actor was effectively made for him. Adler was unhappy that under Tulya Goldfaden there were "No more communistic shares, no more idealistic comradeship". Still, under this same Goldfaden regime he had his first taste of real stardom when people in Chişinău camped in the courtyards awaiting performances. Even the police seemed to have "fallen in love" with the troupe, dressing up the actors in their uniforms at riotous parties after shows, while trying on the troupe's costumes themselves.
Unsatisfied with the low pay, in Kremenchuk Adler led an unsuccessful actors' strike. A series of intrigues almost led to a breakup with Sonya, but ultimately led both back into Rosenberg's troupe and led to their marriage in Poltava. When this particular troupe broke up, the Adlers were among the few players to remain with Rosenberg to form a new one that included the actress who later became famous under the name of Keni Liptzin. In Chernihiv, Adler turned down the opportunity to act in a Russian-language production of Boris Gudonov. Around this time Goldfaden appeared again and, after using an elaborate intrigue to demonstrate to the Adlers that Rosenberg had no loyalty to them, recruited them to his own troupe, which at the time appeared to be headed for a triumphant entry into Saint Petersburg.
All that changed with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The mourning for the tsar meant there would be no performances in the capital; in addition the political climate of Russia turned sharply against the Jews. Goldfaden's troupe soldiered on for a time—to Minsk, to Bobruisk where they played mainly to Russian soldiers, and to Vitebsk, where he and Sonya ended up having to sue Goldfaden for their pay, and left to rejoin Rosenberg, who was playing in a tent theater in Nizhyn. However, matters there proved even worse: Nizhyn soon fell prey to a pogrom. The troupe managed to avoid bodily harm, partly by convincing the rioters that they were a French theater troupe and partly by making judicious use of the money the Adlers had won in court from Goldfaden.
In Łódź, Adler triumphantly played the title role in Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta, the first of a series of roles through which he developed a persona he would later call "the Grand Jew". After Łódź, they landed in Zhytomyr, under an incompetent investor/director named Hartenstein. They thought they had found "a quiet corner" of the Russian Empire in which "to make a bit of a livelihood", but in fact Hartenstein was simply running through his money.
The financial consequences of the collapse of their company were mitigated by a series of three benefit performances, in coordination with the local Russian-language theater company. Sonya returned to Odessa to give birth to their daughter Rivka; Adler stayed on six weeks in Zhytomyr and had sort of a belated apprenticeship with two Russian character actors of national fame, Borisov and Philipovsky. However, he returned to Odessa thinking that he would most likely leave theater behind.
Late in life, when he looked back at his years acting in Adler and Goldfaden's companies, Adler saw it as merely the "childhood" of his career. He describes his thoughts toward the end of this period, "For three years I had wandered in the cave of the Witch in the clown's rags of Shmendrick and what did I really know of my trade?... If someday I return to the Yiddish theater, let me at least not be so ignorant."
Returning to Odessa, he discovered that no one would employ him in any job other than as an actor. In 1882, he put together a troupe of his own with Keni Liptzin, and brought Rosenberg in as a partner. This troupe toured to Rostov, Taganrog, around Lithuania, to Dünaburg. Aiming to bring the troupe to Saint Petersburg, they brought back their sometime manager Chaikel Bain. They were in Riga in August 1883 when the news arrived that a total ban was about to be placed on Yiddish theater in Russia.
The troupe were left stranded in Riga. Chaikel Bain took ill and died. With some difficulty, passage to London for the troupe was arranged on a cattle ship, in exchange for entertaining the crew. However, about this time Israel Grodner and his wife Annetta reappeared. Adler wanted to include them in the group headed for London. According to Adler, Rosenberg, who played many of the same roles as Israel Grodner, essentially told Adler "it's him or me". Adler attempted to convince him to change his mind, but insisted on including Grodner in the travel party: Adler considered him one of the best actors in Yiddish theater, a great asset to any performances they would give in London, while he felt Rosenberg lacked depth as an actor. He tried to get Rosenberg to come with them to London, but Rosenberg would not budge.