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The legendary actor’s juicy memoirs, nicely fleshed out with his granddaughter Rosenfeld’s explanatory commentary. Jacob Adler (1855—1926) was Yiddish theater’s greatest star, first in London and then in America, where his towering portrayals of Shylock and King Lear (transformed by Jacob Gordin’s adaptation into a Jewish merchant prince) won the praise of uptown gentile critics as well as the Lower East Side audiences who worshiped him. Modern-day readers may at first be disappointed that this memoir, the bulk of which was originally published in a New York Yiddish newspaper from 1916 to 1919, deals more with his apprentice years in Russia than his triumphs after fleeing its anti-Jewish laws in 1883. Most will soon be won over, however, by his warts-and-all depiction of the Yiddish theater’s birth (in the fourth quarter of the 19th century) as a decidedly low art form composed primarily of vulgar comedy and light music.
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