Jacob Adler (Library of Congress)

Name: JACOB PAVLOVICH ADLER (1855-1926)

Born: ODESSA, RUSSIAN EMPIRE (UKRAINE)

Occupation: AMERICAN ACTOR, YIDDISH THEATRE

Jacob Adler is one of the few Jews in popular culture who is responsible for the wave of respectable Yiddish theatre that flourished in the 1890’s.  He glorified the tough life that Jews led in the Lower East Side by making himself into an aristocrat.  Nicknamed “the Great Eagle”, Jacob Adler was a terrific success, first in Odessa, where his career was cut short when theatre was banned in Russia in 1883, and later in London and New York City. While Yiddish theatre in New York City in 1889 thrived on humor and avoided realism, Adler brought created his own company, making realistic Yiddish theatre more popular.  He partnered with Thomashefsky and Kessler in Poole’s Theatre on the Bowery in 1890.  Between these three, they respected art and the power it could have on an audience instead of the shund (trash) that the Yiddish theatre was producing at the time.  Adler starred as the title role in Jacob Gordin’s Jewish King Lear, popularizing the first Jewish realistic playwright.  He also played Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which he spoke his lines in Yiddish while the rest of the company stuck to English.  He was largely involved in the People’s Theatre, where he performed the Gordin’s famous play.  Over the next decade, Adler would play in (or, in some cases, merely produce) numerous plays by Gordin, but also classics by Shakespeare, Schiller, Lessing; Eugène Scribe’s La Juive; dramatizations of George du Maurier’s Trilby and Alexandre Dumas, fils’ Camille; and the works of modern playwrights such as Gorky, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Victor Hugo, Victorien Sardou, and Leonid Andreyev.

Almost all of Adler’s family went into theatre.  The most famous being his daughter, Stella Adler, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting where Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Elaine Stritch.

Stella Adler (Vadamm Theatrical Photographs: NYPL)