Jacob Pavlovich Adler (Yiddish: יעקבֿ פּאַװלאָװיטש אַדלער; born Yankev P. Adler;[Adler 1999] p.xxiii, [Prager 1997] February 12, 1855 – March 31, 1926)IMDB biography 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 "haNesher haGadol" (,Nahshon 2001[Rosenfeld 1977], a moniker also given to Maimonides, or "The Great Eagle", Adler translating to "eagle" in both Yiddish and German), he achieved his first theatrical success in Odessa. After Yiddish theater was banned in Russia in 1883,[Adler 1999] pp.98–102, 108, 114 et. seq. 222–225. his career flourished in London, and in 1889 he settled in New York City.[Adler 1999] pp.232–321. There, Adler 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's triumph in the title role of Gordin's Der Yiddisher King Lear (The Jewish King Lear), set in 19th-century Russia, and his portrayal of Shakespeare's Shylock would form the core of the stage and celebrity persona he defined as the "Grand Jew".[Adler 1999], pp. 200–209, 321–325.
Nearly all his family went into theater; most famously his daughter Stella, who founded the renowned studio and taught her interpretation of method acting to scores of influential performers including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro.
Childhood and youth Adler was born in Odessa in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). Adler's father, Feivel (Pavel) Abramovitch Adler, was a (rather unsuccessful) 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 (and leaving behind a son) to marry Adler's father. The marriage to a divorcée cost Feivel Adler (and therefore Jacob 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 1999] pp. 5, 7, 9–10; ibid. p. 33 for status as Kohen.
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."[Adler 1999] p.xxiv 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."[Adler 1999] pp. 11–13, 18
He grew up with both Jewish and Christian playmates, but also survived one of the Odessa pogroms around 1862.[Adler 1999] pp.6–7 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.[Adler 1999] pp.13–14, 30 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.[Adler 1999] p.19 Still living at home, he began to frequent the disreputable district of Moldovanka. His experienced his first brush with stardom when 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 grew with his reputation as Odessa's best can-can dancer.[Adler 1999] pp.19–22; ibid., p.29 for Yankele Kulachnik.
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.[Adler 1999] pp.22–24
By age 17 he became the leader of Glebova's claque, was working as a copyist for lawyers, and was going out to a theater, a tavern, or a party every night.[Adler 1999] pp.25, 29, 31 He would later draw on his own life at this time for his portrayal of Protosov in Tolstoy's The Living Corpse.[Adler 1999] p.32 Over the next few years he had numerous love affairs, and was prevented from a love marriage with one Esther Raizel because of his own dubious reputation compounded by 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.[Adler 1999] pp.32–35
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".[Adler 1999] p.36 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."Lulla Rosenfeld, "The Yiddish", New York Times, June 12, 1977. p. 205. (The quotation is in a continuation on p. 36.)
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 (apparently on little more than his appearance) 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.[Adler 1999] pp. 43–53
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 1999] pp. 54–55, 59–61
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 1999] pp.71–73 et.seq., 84–85
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."[Adler 1999] pp.76–97, esp. 82, 96
Acting career Lulla Rosenfeld's remark that Adler "...rel[ied] 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 (The Jewish King Lear), set in 19th-century Russia.[Adler 1999] pp. 321–325 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.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.
Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia Adler wrote in his memoir that the passion of his future wife Sonya Oberlander (and of her family) 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.[Adler 1999] pp. 98–102
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 (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).[Adler 1999] pp. 104, 118] (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 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 1999] pp.107, 111 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.[Adler 1999] p.124