Lulla Rosenfeld's remark that Adler "...rel[ied] entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays" 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.
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. 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). ''(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 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 (Belarus), 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 (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. 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.
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." 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. 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
Felix Pyat's
The Ragpicker of Paris, a tragicomic play written on the eve of the
Revolutions of 1848. Adler starred in it, in a role he would continue to play throughout his career. 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. 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. 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
Sigmund Mogulesko,
David Kessler,
Abba and Clara Shoengold, and
Sara Heine (the future Sara Adler), gave guest performances when they passed through London. 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. 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." 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.
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. 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.
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
Yiddish Theater District, with plays such as Scribe's
La Juive, Zolotkev's
Samson the Great, and Sinckievich's
Quo Vadis. However, after Thomashefsky became an enormous popular success in
Moses Halevy Horowitz's operetta
David ben Jesse at Moishe Finkel's National Theater, the Union Theater temporarily to abandon its highbrow programming and competed head on, with operettas
Judith and Holofernes,
Titus Andronicus, or the Second Destruction of the Temple, and
Hymie in America. 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. Having already famously played
Shylock in Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice on the Yiddish stage at the People's Theater, he played the role again in a 1903
Broadway production, directed by
Arthur Hopkins. In this production, Adler spoke his lines in
Yiddish while the rest of the cast spoke in English. The
New York Times review of Adler's performance was not favorable: in particular his naturalistic acting style was not what audiences of the period expected in a production of Shakespeare. Some other reviews (such as that in
Theater magazine) were friendlier; in any event the same production was revived two years later. Lulla Rosenfeld writes that
Henry Irving, the great Shylock before that time, played Shylock as "morally superior to the Christians around him... driven to cruelty only by their more cruel persecutions." In contrast, "Adler scorned justification. Total vindication was his aim." In Adler's own words, "Shylock from the first was governed by
pride rather than revenge. He wishes to humble and terrify
Antonio for the insult and humiliation he has suffered at his hands. This is why he goes so far as to bring his knife and scales into the court. For Shylock, however, the desired climax was to refuse the pound of flesh with a gesture of divine compassion. When the verdict goes against him, he is crushed because he has been robbed of this opportunity, not because he lusts for Antonio's death. This was my interpretation. This is the Shylock I have tried to show." , some time before 1906. In 1904 Adler had the
Grand Theater built in what was to be the
Yiddish Theater District at the corner of
Bowery and
Canal Street, the first purpose-built Yiddish theater in New York. His wife Sara had branched out to do her own plays at the Novelty Theater in Brooklyn, and the family had taken up residence in a four-story brownstone, with an elevator, in the East Seventies. (They would later move one more time, to
Riverside Drive.) Around this time
Lincoln Steffens wrote a piece saying that Yiddish theater in New York had eclipsed English-language theater in quality. 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. In 1919–1920, Adler, despite his own socialist politics, found himself in a labor dispute with the
Hebrew Actors' Union; he played that season in London rather than New York. A
stroke in 1920 while vacationing in upstate
New York nearly ended his acting career, although he continued to appear occasionally, usually as part of a benefit performance for himself, often playing Act I of
The Yiddish King Lear: the title character remains seated throughout the entire act. In 1924, he was well enough to perform in the title role of a revival of Gordin's
The Stranger, inspired by
Tennyson's "
Enoch Arden": the character is "a sick and broken man", so the Adler was able to integrate his own physical weakness into the portrayal. However, March 31, 1926, he collapsed suddenly, dying almost instantly. He is buried in Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in
Glendale, Queens. ==Family==