Jacob P. Adler

Acosta (1585-1640) was a marrano (a Christianized Jew of medieval Spain) who fought for enlightenment in the Jewish community of Holland, which was under Spanish suzerainty. The play was hugely popular, but the popularity of the Yiddish theater and its tackling of serious, didactic fare rather than melodramas and musicals beloved by the masses made it suspect as a subversive influence. The "modern" Yiddish theater can be seen as evolving out of the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) rather than from the religious Purimspiel.

Adler was born in Odessa in Imperal Russia on February 12, 1855 and was stricken with the theatrical bug as a teenager.

He joined a Yiddish theatrical company, the Rosenberg Troupe, in the 1870s. The Rosenberg Troupe was one of three Yiddish theatrical companies in Russia, the other two being Goldfaden's Troupe and Sheikevitch's Troupe. During his theatrical apprenticeship with Rosenberg, Jacob Adler proved himself to be an outstanding actor and a superb dancer but a bust as a balladeer. His poor singing thus cut off the lucrative operetta field for him. He compensated by becoming a great actor. Adler gained experience as a member of the Rosenberg Troupe, touring Imperial Russia and putting on shows in Yiddish speaking communities. His first wife, Sonia Oberlander, was a member of the troupe. Adler was mentored by the eponymous head of the Troupe. Jacob Adler became famous in the Polish and Russian Yiddish communities by playing the title role in Karl Gutzkow's drama, "Uriel de Acosta".

The unenlightened and viciously anti-semitic Russian oligarchy launched a series of pogroms in the 1880's that almost wiped out Jewish culture in Russia. Jews started emigrating from Russia en masse, with whole villages sometimes uprooting and leaving for more hospitable climes such as North America. Jewish culture was dealt a further blow when Czar Alexander III issued a ukase banning the Yiddish theater.

Jacob Adler had no choice but to leave Russia; he emigrated to England at the end of November 1883. Adler caught on as an actor with 'Dramatic Clubs'. In London, the Odessa-born Adler had a hit with the play "The Odessa Beggar. " He had an even bigger hit in Schiller's "The Robber," which brought him international fame. However, after six years in England, Adler decided to emigrate to the United States of America, moving to the great melting pot that was New York City. In his memoirs (written in Yiddish), Adler recalled that ". . .

Father with stage actress Sophia Oberlander (aka Sonyz Michelson - d. 1885) of stage actor Abram Adler.

when I came to America in 1889, I was already known by the proud name 'Nesher Hagadol' ('The Great Eagle') and was an actor famous throughout the Yiddish theatrical world. "In the Big Town, The Great Eagle starred in various Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue in the Bowery, the "Jewish Broadway. " There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the New York Metropolitan Area in the Gay Nineties, and many spoke Yiddish as their first or only language. The theater was their major entertainment form in an era in which there was no radio, let alone television. It was not unusual for an impoverished Jewish family to spend half of its week's wages wrestled from laboring in Lower East Side sweatshops at a night at the theater. Adler was successful enough to be able to open his own theater in the Bowery, the Union Theater on Broadway and Eighth Street. (He also later opened the National in the same area. )Adler focused on producing dramatic plays as he was not successful in operettas and had a didactic bent. He wanted the theater to be socially significant rather than remain just a vehicle for vulgar entertainment like the melodramas beloved by the Jewish denizens of the Lower East Side. Adler linked up with playwright Jacob Gordin and revolutionized the Yiddish Theater, and, a generation later, American theater as a whole. Gordin wrote "Sibina", "The Wild Man", and "The Yiddish King Lear", Adler's greatest triumph.

First assaying the role in November 1891, King Lear brought Adler even greater fame and solidified his reputation a great actor. Sara Heine Adler, his second wife, said of the night he first took the stage as Lear: "He was not an actor that night, but a force. "The great success of Ader in Gordin's Lear represented the incorporation of the world classical canon into the American (and international) Yiddish theater. It also meant that "better" or more high-brow theater targeting the Yiddish-speaking Jewish audience could thrive. It had been an axiom that the 'Shund' tradition of Jewish Broadway, a focus on sensational melodrama, was the vehicle for success as it attracted the Jewish masses. The undisputed champion of the 'Shund' tradition was Boris Thomashefsky, who had mocked "The Great Eagle" as he had been more financially successful with his cheap melodramas than Adler was with his more prestigious theatrical offerings. However, with King Lear, Adler had not only an artistic triumph but a great financial success. Jacob Adler had made the "Jewish Broadway" safe for "better theater.

"Adler achieved even greater success when, in 1903, he trod the boards on Broadway as Shylock in a production of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice. " He had another supreme triumph, humanizing a character that until then had been a one-dimensional, stereotypical villain, nearly always played by a gentile in a red fright wig.

In 1910, Adler made his first and only feature film for the Selig movie studio, "Michael Strogoff" an adaptation of Jules Verne's adventure story directed by J. Searle Dawley. The movie was one of the first full-length adaptations of a Verne work. "Michael Strogoff" was a first rate production with lavish production values, which were unusual for a movie from the Selig studio, but which bears testimony to the fame and respect Adler engendered. The film was notable for its climax, which entailed the burning of a Siberian city.

Adler' wrote his memoirs in Yiddish, which were published in the Yiddish-language socialist newspaper 'Die Varheit' ('The Truth') from 1916-19.

Adler fell ill in 1922, and though he recovered, his illness had aged him and sapped his powers. When he returned to front his theater before the adoring crowds, putting back on the grease-paint to play in Gordin's drama "The Stranger", he was a success, but had clearly lost the stamina necessary for the stage.

He died on April 1, 1926 in New York City, aged 81.

" A similar process would happen in the 1930s and 1940s when the Group Theatre, a company that included two of his children and which had roots in the quality Yiddish theater Adler had pioneered, would revolutionize the Great White Way of Old Broadway itself with a socially conscious "better theater". Jacob's daughter Stella Adler, the Yiddish- and Group Theatre-affiliated actress who became a premier acting coach in the US, said about her father's success with The Yiddish King Lear that "The whole profession caught fire. Good theater apparently could 'make it'. . . Every actor wanted to play Gordin. Every actor wanted to play the classics, and the people came.

His son Luther and daughter Stella, as members of the Group Theatre, an organization with roots firmly planted in the Yiddish theater, helped do the same to Broadway in the 1930s.

His second wife Sara Heine Adler, herself a great actress who regaled a young Marlon Brando with tales of her late husband and his acting philosophy that had a great influence on the tyro thespian, died in 1953. They had brought into being an acting dynasty, most notable in the successes of their son, Luther, and their daughter, Stella. Stella's grandson David Oppenheim is an actor who runs the influential acting school she founded. Jacob Adler's legacy was to effect the transformation of the Yiddish Theater into quality theater.

Adler's son-in-law Harold Clurman, co-founder of the Group Theater with Lee Strasberg, described Adler as "an extraordinary personality, always larger than life." His early memoir, "A Life on the Stage", was translated from the Yiddish by his granddaughter Lulla Rosenfeld and re-published in 1999 by Knopf. Includes intro by daughter Stella Adler.

Jacob Adler, the legendary "Great Eagle"' ("adler" is the German word for "eagle") of the Yiddish theater, was one of the great American stage actors, ranking with Edwin Booth, John Barrymore and Marlon Brando. Adler also is famous as the patriarch of an acting dynasty that stretched over 100 years from the late 19th century to the 21st and was essential to the evolution of the American theater from melodrama to a new heights of realism and seriousness. Adler's life story not only elucidates the Golden Age of the Yiddish theater but is a testament to the survival of a culture in a world where many elements threatened to extirpate it.