Jacob Spivakovsky

Jacob Spivakovsky was one of the first stars in Yiddish theatre.

The highly cultured scion of a wealthy Russian Jewish family, as a young man he had, according to his colleague and rival Jacob Adler, "acted with talent in taste in Russian amateur theatricals" and "recited the poetry of Pushkin with something close to genius" [Adler, 1999, 60]

Spivakovsky was in Bucharest Romania as a foreign correspondent covering the Russo-Turkish War when he encountered Abraham Goldfaden's troupe, which only a year earlier had become the first professional Yiddish-language theater troupe. Along with fellow Russian Jew Israel Rosenberg he soon left to found the first Yiddish theater troupe in Imperial Russia, where he was the first leading man in Rosenberg's troupe. [Adler, 1999, 60, 68]

References

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