Jacob Spivakofsky

Jacob Spivakofsky, a Ukrainian Jew, was an actor in the early years of Yiddish theater.

Scion of a wealthy Odessa Jewish family, Spivakofsky had an academic education and was already a well-traveled young man who, by Jacob Adler's account "acted with talent and taste in Russian amateur theatricals" and "recited the poetry of Pushkin with something close to genius" when he was sent in 1877 to Bucharest, Romania as a foreign correspondent for an Odessa newspaper, to cover the Russo-Turkish War. He crossed paths with Abraham Goldfaden and abandoned journalism to become a romantic leading man in Goldfaden's theater troupe, at that time about a year old, and the world's only professional Yiddish theater troupe.

He soon left Goldfaden's troupe along with fellow Odessan Israel Rosenberg. They briefly toured (with Goldfaden's purloined repertoire) in Moldavia, but the end of the war dried up the supply of free-spending merchants and middlemen who had briefly made Yiddish theater in Romania a prosperous enterprise. At the suggestion of Jacob Adler, they came back to Odessa, where Spivakofsky participated in Rosenberg's new Yiddish theater troupe, the first in Imperial Russia.

References

• Adler, Jacob, A Life on the Stage: A Memoir, translated and with commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld, Knopf, New York, 1999, ISBN 067941351.