A Life on the Stage: A Memoir (review)

Just past the middle of his memoirs, Jacob Adler describes a crisis that nearly ended his acting career. After three years of wandering through southern Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania with a traveling Yiddish theatre troupe, Adler has become a father, his company has disintegrated, and he returns to his native Odessa. His parents, who had never approved of his career, now expect that he will find more stable work, and this time, he tries to oblige them. All to no avail: "Like a shadow wherever I went, my 'bad name,' the name of an 'actor' followed me. My friends thought of me now as a merrymaker, a sort of clown. They asked for a song, a dance" (221). Fate thus forces his hand, and before long, he and his wife return to their lives of theatrical vagabondage.

This episode encapsulates several of the themes that run through this memoir written by one of the legendary figures of the Yiddish stage and the patriarch of a family that would leave a profound mark on both the Yiddish and the American theatre. One is the difficulty of keeping a theatre company together in the face of constant travel, unpredictable pay, dueling egos, and a turbulent political climate for Jews and actors, not to mention Jewish actors. And when Alexander III became Tsar after the assassination of his father in 1881, it did not take him long to pass a harsh set of anti-Jewish laws, and to ban Yiddish theatre altogether. A second theme is the social position of actors. Students of theatre history do not need to be reminded of the marginal status of actors in many societies, but additional factors make it especially difficult for people like Adler's parents to accept his chosen occupation. Adler himself predates the first professional Yiddish theatre company, so not only is theatre suspect in the eyes of Jewish tradition, but there is no counter-tradition of Yiddish theatre to which he can appeal. He will continue to champion the merits of his and his colleagues' endeavors in the face of traditionalist opposition, most vividly when he reaches London in the 1880s and faces the disapproval of his formidable uncle Hillel Adler, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain.

A third theme suggested by this crisis is crisis itself. Adler takes us from one predicament to another. There are the usual feuds among actors; personal crises, such as the premature death of his first daughter, followed shortly by that of his first wife; and the upheavals suffered by the Jews of Eastern Europe, who experience outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence such as one in the northern Ukrainian city of Nezhin, which Adler describes in heartrending detail. Here the outsider position of the theatre company helps them save their own skins—not without some sense of embarrassment on the part of the memoirist—for their clean-shaven faces, fancy clothes, and ability to speak French (or at least seem to) convince the marauders that they are not Jewish and should therefore be left alone.

Adler's memoirs contain enough moments of high drama to make them accessible to a general readership and enough details of the life of a wandering actor to appeal to theatre historians. They are particularly valuable to the student of Yiddish theatre, and Adler's niece Lulla Rosenfeld—who is also the author of an engaging biography of her famous uncle—has done readers a service by compiling and translating these recollections, which were originally serialized in the Yiddish press; the first half in 1919, the rest in 1925, just a year before Adler's death. One of the many challenges that face the historian of the Yiddish theatre is the phenomenon of serialized memoirs of Yiddish theatre personnel, some of which were ultimately published in book form but most of which were not. Having Adler's memoirs collected in...