Jacob Pavlovich Adler
Jacob Pavlovich Adler | |
---|---|
Odessa, Russian Empire | |
Died | April 1, 1926 , U.S. | (aged 71)
Other names | Jacob P. Adler |
Occupation | Actor |
Years active | 1878–1924 |
Spouses | |
Children | 9; including Celia, Jay, Julia, Stella, Luther |
Relatives | Allen Adler (grandson) Francine Larrimore (niece) |
Jacob Pavlovich Adler (
Nicknamed "nesher hagodol",
Nearly all his family went into theater; probably the most famous was his daughter Stella, who taught method acting to, among others, Marlon Brando.[8]
Childhood and youth
Adler was born in
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 [Jewish Enlightenment] as an organized system of ideas, he probably knew little or nothing."[10] His education was irregular: as the family fortunes rose and fell, he would be sent to cheder (Jewish religious school) 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."[11]
He grew up with both Jewish and Christian playmates, but also survived one of the
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.[16]
At 17 he became the leader of Glebova's
In writing about this period in his memoir, Adler mentions attending and admiring performances by
Sanitar and Inspector
The outbreak of the
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.[23]
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.[24]
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 (Goldfaden's Grandmother and Granddaughter and Shmendrick) 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."[25]
Acting career
Lulla Rosenfeld's remark that Adler "...rel[ied] entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays"[21] 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 (The Jewish King Lear), set in 19th-century Russia.[26] 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 (including his own) this was not his forte.[27]
Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia
Adler wrote in his memoir that the passion of his future wife
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 Odesa. 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 Odesa to tour the hinterland (soon, though, he would come to an accommodation by which his troupe would be an officially recognized touring company attached to Goldfaden's own troupe).[29] (For greater detail on Adler's time with Rosenberg's company, see Israel Rosenberg.)
By his own account, Adler took a leave of absence from his job to travel with Rosenberg's troupe to
Unsatisfied with the low pay, in
All that changed with the assassination of Tsar
In
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 Odesa thinking that he would most likely leave theater behind.[37]
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
Returning to Odesa, 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 (now Daugavpils, Latvia). 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.[39]
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.[40]
London
Of his time in London, Adler wrote, " if Yiddish theater was destined to go through its infancy in Russia, and in America grew to manhood and success, then London was its school."[41] Adler arrived in London with few contacts. In Whitechapel, the center of Jewish London at that time, he encountered extremes of poverty that he describes as exceeding any he had ever seen in Russia or would ever see in New York. The Chief Rabbi of the British Empire at that time, Dr. Nathan Marcus Adler, was a relative. Adler's father had written him a letter of introduction in Hebrew, but nothing could have been farther from the rabbi's desires than to assist Yiddish-language theater. Nathan Marcus Adler viewed Yiddish as a "jargon" that existed at the expense of both liturgical Hebrew and the English necessary for upward mobility, and his Orthodox Judaism "could not endure so much as a blessing given on stage, for such a blessing would be given in vain"; further, he was afraid that the portrayals of Jews on stage would give aid and comfort to their enemies.[42]
At this time, Yiddish theater in London meant amateur clubs. The arrival of professional Yiddish actors from Russia worked great changes, bringing Yiddish theater in London to a new level and allowing a modest professionalism, though never at much more than a poverty wage. Adler's memoir acknowledges many people who helped him out in various ways. Eventually, with the aid in particular of Sonya's relative Herman Fiedler—a playwright, orchestra leader, and stage manager—the Adlers and the Grodners were able to take over the Prescott Street Club. There they presented generally serious theater to audiences of about 150. Fiedler adapted The Odessa Beggar from
Two months later, he played Uriel Acosta at the Holborn Theatre to an audience of 500, including the "Jewish aristocrats of the West End". The piety of the London Jews was such that they had to use an (unplayable) cardboard ram's horn so as to avoid blasphemy. Chief Rabbi Adler and his son and eventual successor Hermann Adler were present, and both, especially the younger rabbi, were favorably impressed. There were even mentions in the English-language press.[44]
Playing to small audiences, on tiny stages, in communal troupes where all but the stars had day jobs, and playing only Saturday and Sunday (the pious London Jews would never have tolerated Friday performances), Adler focused on serious theater like never before. However, he and Grodner soon fell out: they wrangled over ideology and over parts, and their verbal duels boiled over into improvised stage dialogue. The Grodners ultimately left to do theater in a series of other locations, notably Paris, but eventually came back to London, where Israel Grodner died in 1887.[45]
By November 1885, Adler had a theatrical club of his own, the Princes Street Club, No. 3 Princes Street (now Princelet Street, E1), purpose-built, financed by a butcher named David Smith. It seated 300; playing every night except Friday, he was earning about £3 s.10 a week, but with a fame well out of proportion to the meagre money. Many of the most prominent figures in Yiddish theater, including
One of Adler's roles from this period was as the villain Franz Moore in Herman Fiedler's adaptation of Schiller's The Robbers, which introduced Schiller into Yiddish theater. On at least one occasion in 1886, he played both Franz Moore and the play's hero, Franz's brother Karl Moore: in the play they never meet.[47]
In 1886, Adler's daughter Rivka died of croup; Sonya died of an infection contracted while giving birth to their son Abram; meanwhile, he had been carrying on an affair with a young woman, Jenny ("Jennya") Kaiser, who was also pregnant, with his son Charles. Depressed after Sonya's death, he passed up an offer to relocate to the United States, which was taken up instead by Mogulesko and Finkel. In winter 1887, an audience at the Princes Street Club panicked when they thought a simulated stage fire was real; 17 people died in the stampede. While the authorities determined that this was not Adler's fault, and the club was allowed to reopen, the crowds did not return; "the theater," he writes, "was so cold, dark, and empty you could hunt wolves in the gallery."[48]
Adler's affair with Jennya continued; he also took up with a young chorus girl from an Orthodox Jewish family, Dinah Shtettin. His memoir is extremely unclear on the sequence of events, and hints at other affairs at this time. The memoir does make clear that the "hot-blooded" Jennya had little interest in a marriage, while Dinah's father insisted on a marriage, even though he despised Alder and made it clear that he doubted the marriage would last.[49]
Coming to America
With the aid of a small sum of money from his distant relative the Chief Rabbi, Adler got together the money to travel by steerage to New York, with his infant son Abrom, Alexander Oberlander and his family, Keni and Volodya Liptzin, and Herman Fiedler, among others. Adler did not doubt that the rabbi was glad to see Yiddish actors leaving London. In New York, they promptly discovered that neither Mogulesko and Finkel at the Romanian Opera House nor Maurice Heine at the Oriental Theater had any use for them. They headed on to Chicago, where, after a brief initial success, the troupe fell apart due to a combination of labor disputes and cutthroat competition. The Oberlanders managed to start a restaurant; he and Keni Liptzin headed to New York that autumn, where she managed to sign on at the Romanian Opera House; failing to find a similar situation for himself, he returned to London, drawn back to the charms of both Dinah and Jennya.[50]
He did not remain long in London. After some major successes in Warsaw, which was under Austrian rule, he returned to London in the spring of 1889, and then again to New York, this time to play for Heine at Poole's Theater. After an initial failure in The Odessa Beggar (he writes that the New York audience of the time was not ready for "tragicomedy"), he was a success in the melodrama Moishele Soldat, and "a more worthy success" in Uriel Acosta. This gave him the basis to bring Dinah to America. Their marriage didn't last, though the divorce was amicable: she remarried, to Siegmund Feinman. Adler fell out with Heine, initially over business; at this time Heine's marriage was also falling apart, and Sara Heine would eventually become Sara Adler. Adler went on the road with Boris Thomashefsky, who at the time was pioneering the touring circuit for Yiddish theater in America. They played in Philadelphia and Chicago, where word arrived of an opportunity to take over Poole's, Heine having moved on to the Thalia. Adler returned to New York, where he managed also to win Mogulesko and Kessler away from Heine.[51]
New York
Renaming Poole's as the Union Theater, Adler attempted to produce the most serious Yiddish-language theater New York had yet seen in the
Adler was not content to continue long in this mode, and sought a playwright who could create pieces that would appeal to the Jewish public, while still providing a type of theater he could be proud to perform. He recruited Jacob Gordin, already a well-respected novelist and intellectual, recently arrived in New York and eking out a living as a journalist at the Arbeiter Zeitung, precursor to The Forward. Gordin's first two plays, Siberia and Two Worlds were commercial failures—so much so that Mogulesko and Kessler quit the company—but The Yiddish King Lear, starring Adler and his new wife Sara was such a success that the play eventually transferred to Finkel's larger National Theater. This play (based only very loosely on Shakespeare) played well with the popular audience, but also with Jewish intellectuals who until this time had largely ignored Yiddish Theater, ending for a time the commercial dominance of operettas such as those of Horowitz and Joseph Lateiner. The next year, Gordin's The Wild Man solidified this change in the direction of Yiddish theater.[26]
Over the next decades, Adler would play in (or, in some cases, merely produce) numerous plays by Gordin, but also classics by Shakespeare, Schiller,
Having already famously played
Lulla Rosenfeld writes that
In the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, Adler went back briefly to Eastern Europe in summer 1903, where he tried to convince various family members to come to America. Although he was greeted as a hero, he was only partially successful in convincing people to leave; his mother, in particular, was determined to finish out her life where she was. (His father had died some years earlier.) He persuaded his sister Sarah Adler to follow him to America as her husband had died of heart disease in Verdun in 1897 and she was raising seven children on her own. She emigrated in 1905.[56]
Returning to New York, he and Thomashefsky jointly leased The People's Theater, intending to use it on different nights of the week. Adler, exhausted from his Russian trip, was often leaving his nights unused, and Thomashefsky offered to buy him out for $10,000 on the condition that he would not return to performing in New York. Adler was so insulted that the two did not speak for months, even though at the time they were living across a courtyard from one another, and could see into each other's
In 1904 Adler had the
This golden age was not to last. The years 1905–1908 saw half a million new Jewish immigrants to New York, and once again the largest audience for Yiddish theater was for lighter fare. Adler hung on, but the Thomashefskys were making a fortune at the Thalia; plays with titles like Minke the Servant Girl were far outdrawing fare like Gordin's Dementia Americana (1909). It would be 1911 before Adler scored another major success, this time with Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (also known as Redemption), translated into Yiddish by Leon Kobrin.[59]
In 1919–1920, Adler, despite his own socialist politics, found himself in a labor dispute with the
He is buried in Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens.[61]
Family
Adler was married three times, first to Sophia (Sonya) Oberlander (died 1886), then to Dinah Shtettin (m. 1887- divorced. 1891) and finally to actress Sara Adler (previously Sara Heine) (m. 1891), who survived him by over 25 years.[62]
His and Sonya's daughter Rivkah (Rebecca) died at the age of 3. Sonya died from an infection contracted while giving birth to their son Abram in 1886.[63] Abram's son Allen Adler (1916–1964) was, among other things, the screenwriter of Forbidden Planet.[64] While still married to Sonya, Adler had an affair with Jenny "Jennya" Kaiser, with whom he had a son, stage actor Charles Adler (1886–1966).[65]
Adler and Dinah Shtettin had a daughter, Celia Adler (1889–1979).[66]
He and Sara Heine had six children: the well-known actors Luther (1903–1984) and Stella Adler (1901–1992) and the lesser-known actors Jay (1896–1978), Frances, Julia, and Florence.[67] Jacob and Stella Adler are both members of the American Theater Hall of Fame.[68]
His sister Sarah/Soore Adler and her seven children emigrated to New York in 1905. His niece, Francine Larrimore, Sarah's daughter, became a Broadway actress, who also appeared in films. He was the great-uncle of actor Jerry Adler.[69][70]
Memoir
Adler's memoirs were published in the New York socialist Yiddish-language newspaper Die Varheit in 1916–1919, and briefly resumed in 1925 in an unsuccessful revival of that paper;[10] his granddaughter Lulla Rosenfeld's English translation was published only in 1999. The 1916–1919 portion of the memoir gives a detailed picture of his Russian years. The 1925 portion gives a comparably detailed picture of his time in London,[71] although with some evasions around the relative timing of his relationships with his wife Sonya and with Jennya Kaiser and Dinah Shtettin.[72] It contains only a relatively fragmentary description of his New York career. In the English-language book of these memoirs, Rosenfeld attempts to fill the gaps with her own commentary.[3][71]
Adler writes vividly and with humor. He describes the director Hartenstein as "a young man from
In a small essay, "Shmendrick, My Mephistopheles", one of the last passages he wrote, Adler describes the last time he saw Shmendrick played, at a memorial for Goldfaden in 1912. Lamenting the choice of play for the memorial—"Goldfaden has written better things"—he nonetheless acknowledges, "that same bitter Shmendrick was our livelihood... I gritted my teeth. I called on the ghosts of Aristophanes, of Shakespeare, of Lope de Vega. I wept and swallowed my own tears... And I cursed the fate that bound me to him... Yet even as I cursed and condemned, the tears rose. For my whole life, my whole past, was before me on that stage... Poor weak first step of our Yiddish theater... I thank you for the happiness you gave us... I thank you Shmendrick—my beloved—my own."[74]
See also
- Solomon the Wise, 1906 play starring Adler
Notes
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.xxiii, [Prager 1997]
- ^ a b IMDB biography
- ^ a b Nahshon 2001
- ^ a b c d e f [Rosenfeld 1977]
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.98–102, 108, 114 et. seq. 222–225.
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.232–321.
- ^ [Adler 1999], pp. 200–209, 321–325.
- ^ "Stella Adler biography". stellaadler.com. Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Archived from the original on August 29, 2006. Retrieved September 29, 2006.
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 5, 7, 9–10; ibid. p. 33 for status as Kohen.
- ^ a b [Adler 1999] p.xxiv
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 11–13, 18
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.6–7
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.13–14, 30
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.19
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.19–22; ibid., p.29 for Yankele Kulachnik.
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.22–24
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.25, 29, 31
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.32
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.32–35
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.36
- ^ a b Lulla Rosenfeld, "The Yiddish", New York Times, June 12, 1977. p. 205. (The quotation is in a continuation on p. 36.)
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 43–53
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 54–55, 59–61
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.71–73 et.seq., 84–85
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.76–97, esp. 82, 96
- ^ a b [Adler 1999] pp. 321–325
- ^ Besides the abovementioned "I had no voice" remark, see Stefan Kanfer, The Yiddish Theater’s Triumph, City Journal, Spring 2004, which quotes Adler, "I was weak as a singer. I had not a good voice nor, I confess it, a very good ear. But is this why I turned from the operetta to purely dramatic plays? I think not. From my earliest years I leaned toward those plays where the actor works not with jests and comic antics, but with the principles of art; not to amuse the public with tumbling, but to awaken in them and in himself the deepest and most powerful emotions." Accessed online February 21, 2007.
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 98–102
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 104, 118]
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.107, 111
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.124
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.138–157
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.168–170
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 172−179, 189, 192–197
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.200–209
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.215–216
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.218–220
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.218
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.222–225
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.93, 225–229
- ^ [Adler 1999], p. 256
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 232–236
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 239–246
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.246–247, 257
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.248–251
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.265–266, 268
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.282–283
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.284–299. Adler does not refer to "Jennya" by name, but translator/commentator Rosenfeld does.
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 292–293, 300–304
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 299–301, 305–309
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 309–315
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp. 316–321
- ^ [Adler 1999], pp. 329–331
- ^ "Yiddish Shylock Viewed..." 1903
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.349 quotes this review: "A striking and original conception, wrought out not only of careful study, but above all from a racial sympathy, an instinctive appreciation of the deeper motives of this profound and complex character." Several other reviews, favorable and unfavorable, are quoted.
- ^ a b [Adler 1999] p. 350
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.353–355, 359
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.359, 361
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.361–364, 367
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.230 (commentary), 372–378 (commentary)
- ^ Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More than 14000 Famous Persons, Scott Wilson
- ^ [Adler 1999], passim., but esp. pp. 152–154, 261, 294–295, 314, 323
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.284–286
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.386
- ^ [Adler 1999] p. 291 et. seq.. Adler does not refer to "Jennya" by name, but translator/commentator Rosenfeld does.
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.312
- IBDb and on Find-a-grave) list her as the mother of these six, but also incorrectly list her as Charles Adler's mother. Her New York Times obituary ("Sarah Adler Dies; Yiddish Stage Star", NYT, April 29, 1953, p. 29), mentions Luther, Stella, Frances, Julia, and "Jack" (presumably Jay) as surviving children by Adler; plus stepsons "Adolph" (presumably Abe) and Charles and stepdaughter Celia; plus her sons Joseph and Max Heine by a former marriage.
- ^ "Theater Hall of Fame members". Retrieved January 9, 2024.
- ^ "Jerry Adler Is In Transitions -- And 'Transparent'". Showriz. August 28, 2017. Retrieved April 23, 2019.
- ^ "The Sunshine Boys lights up Connecticut stage…with two veteran Jewish actors". Jewish Ledger. June 4, 2014. Retrieved April 23, 2019.
- ^ a b [Adler 1999] passim.
- ^ [Adler 1999] p.309 (commentary)
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.214, 233, 248
- ^ [Adler 1999] pp.365–367
References
- Adler, Jacob (1999). A Life on the Stage: A Memoir. Translated by Lulla Rosenfeld. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-41351-0. Commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link - Adler, Stella. The Art of Acting. ISBN 1-557-833737.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
External links
- Jacob Pavlovich Adler at the Internet Broadway Database
- Jacob Adler at IMDbAccessed September 29, 2006.
- "Yiddish Shylock Viewed From Ghetto Standpoint". The New York Times. May 31, 1903. p. 10.
- Berkowitz, Joel (2005). Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ISBN 9781587294082.
- Nahshon, Gad (October 2001). "The Great Eagle: great Yiddish actor-legend, Jacob Adler". The Jewish Post of New York. published online at Jewish-Theatre.com. Retrieved October 1, 2006.
- Prager, Leonard (November 6, 1997). "Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in Yiddish". Mendele: Yiddish literature and language. Vol. 07. Archived from the original on July 19, 2008. Retrieved September 29, 2006.
- Rosenfeld, Lulla (June 12, 1977). "The Yiddish". The New York Times. pp. 25, 32.
- "The Jacob P. Adler Family Photograph Collection, 1870s–1930s, Finding Aid" (PDF). library.hunter.cuny.edu. Hunter College.