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Reassessing Obscurity: Data, the Vilna Troupe, and Digital Humanities Praxis

Debra Caplan

Assistant Professor of Theater

Baruch College, City University of New York

This essay includes material from my forthcoming book, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe,

Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (University of Michigan Press, 2018), as well as some

additional meditations about data visualization and Jewish theater history.

Yankev Blayfer. Sonia Alomis. Leola Vendorf. Baruch Lumet. Wolf Barzel. Who were

these individuals and what were their contributions to theatre history? Their names do not appear

in any theatre history text or reference work. In fact, these figures are almost entirely absent from

the historiographic record. Googling their names reveals a few IMDB and IBDB references, a

handful of Wikipedia stubs, and perhaps a mention or two in a little-known memoir.1

And yet, Yankev Blayfer studied with Max Reinhardt and, in his later career as a

Hollywood actor, performed alongside Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Kirk Douglas, Clark

Gable, and Hedy Lamarr. Sonia Alomis was close friends with actress Sophie Tucker.2 Leola

Vendorf acted with Jack Nicholson, Cary Grant, Doris Day, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Sidney

Poitier, and Leonard Nimoy. Baruch Lumet worked with Woody Allen and Jerome Robbins,

discovered Jayne Mansfield, and got his son, Sidney Lumet — later a giant of American cinema

— his very first acting gig.3

Wolf “Wolfie” Barzel acted under the direction of Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg,

was close with Zero Mostel, with whom he had a lifelong rivalry, and performed with Ethel

Barrymore, Sanford Meisner, Natalie Wood, and Stella Adler.4 Even more significantly, Barzel

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inspired the theatrical careers of his niece Judy Graubart and nephew Manny Azenberg. Wearing

his signature purple pants and a black beret, Barzel would take Graubart and Azenberg to the

theater and bring them backstage; inspired by their uncle, the siblings pursued their careers as a

comedian and a producer, respectively.5 Judy Graubart became a star in the The Electric

Company with Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, and Bill Cosby. Manny Azenberg went on to

produce nearly every Neil Simon play since 1972, along with dozens of other plays and musicals

both on and off Broadway.6 In 2012, Azenberg received a lifetime achievement Tony Award, an

award whose former recipients have included Steven Sondheim, Harold Prince, and Arthur

Miller. “Wolfie was the inspiration for everyone in the family to go into the entertainment

business,” Azenberg told me over coffee in the now defunct Cafe Edison, “because who would

have thought of it otherwise? I would give him credit for planting the seed for the next

generation of our family.”7 Blayfer, Alomis, Vendorf, Lumet, and Barzel may not be well

known, but they certainly had an impact on the course of twentieth century theatre and film.

Yiddish theatre tends to be thought of by theatre historians as a somewhat obscure

tradition whose influence was limited to a certain geographical sphere (Eastern Europe and the

Lower East Side) and confined to a particular period (the sixty-odd years between the mid-1870s

and the Holocaust). As such, it is often passed over. Yiddish theatre does not appear even once in

Oscar Brockett and Franklin Hildy’s seminal History of the Theatre, nor is it mentioned a single

time in John Russell Brown’s The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, David Wiles’s and

Christine Dymkowski’s The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, or Phillip B. Zarrilli,

Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s otherwise relatively

comprehensive Theatre Histories: An Introduction.8 To be fair, Yiddish theatre has not been

absent from the field altogether. Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and TDR have each published

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several articles on Yiddish theatre and readers of these publications could be expected to have

some familiarity with the subject.9 Still, Yiddish theatre is often excluded from the historical

narratives that define our field and the canons that we teach to our students. When included,

more often than not, it is treated as peripheral, arcane, or a mere prelude to the rich history of

American Jewish actors performing in English.10

I argue that quantitative data analysis and visualization can offer an important corrective

to our understanding of what is central and what is peripheral in theatre history. I apply these

data-driven methodologies to Yiddish theater to argue for its centrality to modern theater history.

Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Stella Adler, Leon Schiller, Max Reinhardt, David Belasco, Harold

Clurman, Eugene Ionesco, and hundreds of other key figures worked alongside, were related to,

were friends with, or were directly inspired by encounters with Yiddish performers in the early

twentieth century. These interpersonal connections may have vanished from our theatre

historiography, but if one looks carefully, their traces remain: in cast lists in theatre programs, in

records of letters written and received, in invitation lists to weddings and registers for funerals, in

recollections of conversations over dinner in actors’ memoirs, and in the memories of surviving

actors and their kin. While these sources are often consulted by theatre historians, it is typically

in relation to a particular production or in comparison with other sources of that type.11 Instead, I

suggest that theatre programs, cast lists, and correspondence are equally valuable as repositories

of historical data. These sources are full of relational data: long lists of names, dates, places, and

texts that all connect to one another. Compiling, aggregating, and analyzing the data points

contained in these sources, I contend, can offer new perspectives on the conventional wisdom of

theatre history: its key figures, its major events, and its dominant narratives about historical

significance.

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Data-driven theater history, at its best, can reveal previously invisible patterns about

relationships between diverse groups of artists working across languages and cultures.

Visualizing the data from Yiddish theatre programs and ephemera reveals how actors like

Blayfer, Alomis, Vendorf, Lumet, Barzel and hundreds of others, who scarcely appear in the

annals of theatre history, were in fact influential figures. But the potential implications of data

visualization and other data-focused methodologies for theatre history go far beyond elucidating

the impact of one particular tradition. Data offers a fresh perspective on figures in theatre history

that have often been marginalized or overlooked: like the actors in minor roles at the bottom of

cast lists, the assistants to designers and technical directors, or the advertisers in program

booklets. If applied to datasets from other marginalized traditions, who knows what other

obscure major players a data-driven approach to theatre history might reveal?

***

The Vilna Troupe was the entry point for hundreds of actors, directors, and designers to

begin their theatrical careers; as such, it cultivated the talent pool for Yiddish theater worldwide.

In Poland, former Vilner were at the helm of dozens of professional and amateur Yiddish theater

companies including the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater, Yung Teater, the Ida Kaminska Theater,

the Warsaw Nayer Yidisher Teater, the Studio of the Yiddish Drama School, the New Yiddish

Theater, Azazel, Ararat, Khad Gadyo, Teater Far Yugnt, Balaganeydn, Nay Azazel. In Latvia, a

group of Vilna Troupe affiliates founded the Nayer Idisher Teater. In the United States, Vilner

performed in and directed for the Jewish Art Theater, Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater,

the Folksbiene, Artef, the Second Avenue Theater, Unzer Teater, the Chicago Dramatishe

Gezelshaft, and the Yiddish Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project, among others. In Paris,

a group of former Vilner founded the Parizer Yidisher Arbeter Teater. In Belgium, a team of

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Vilner ran the Yiddish Folk Theater of Brussels. In Russia, half a dozen former Vilner performed

with the Moscow Yiddish Art Theater, GOSET. In Brazil, Yankev Kurlender directed the São

Paulo Dramatic Circle. In South Africa, Vilna Troupe members led five different Yiddish theater

companies; in Mexico City, Vilna Troupe founders Alexander Asro and Sonia Alomis ran a

Yiddish drama school; in Australia, former Vilna Troupe affiliates were among the founding

members of the Kadimah Art Theater and its long-lived successor, the Dovid Herman Theater; in

Argentina, the Yiddish Folk Theater (IFT) was developed by one-time Vilner; in Johannesburg,

Natan Breitman and Hertz Grosbard performed with the Breitner-Teffner Yiddish Theater.

Indeed, it was the rare Yiddish theater anywhere in the world that did not have a former member

of the Vilna Troupe involved.

But Yiddish theater was not the only field where the Vilner made contributions. Others left

the Yiddish stage behind to pursue careers in theater and film in other languages. In New York,

former Vilner Wolf Barzel and Jacob Ben-Ami performed in several Theater Guild productions.

In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, Barzel also acted on Broadway under the direction of Sanford Meisner,

Lee Strasberg, and Tyrone Guthrie and performed in major roles alongside Ethel Barrymore and

John Garfield.12 Alexander Asro acted on Broadway with Gene Kelly, Martin Martin, Jack

Lemmon, and Sophie Tucker, and had a briefly successful Hollywood film career starring in the

Marx Brothers 1938 film Room Service alongside Lucille Ball.13 Joseph Buloff also became a

Broadway and Hollywood star, performing alongside Paul Newman, Rita Hayworth, Edgar G.

Ulmer, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Diane

Keaton, Harold Clurman, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Agnes De Mille, Helen Hayes, and

others.14 In Dallas, former Vilner Baruch Lumet directed the Knox Street Theater and was the

founder of the Dallas Institute for the Performing Arts.15 Andrzej Pronaszko, who designed sets

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for the Vilna Troupe in Poland between 1932 and 1934, continued to design sets for the National

Theater in Warsaw, Krakow’s Narodowy Stary Teatr, and the Słowacki Theater, among others.

Pronaszko also became an important Polish painter and scenic design teacher.16 Szymon Syrkus,

who designed sets for the Vilna Troupe in the early 1930s, was an influential Polish architect and

architecture teacher.17 Gertrud Kraus, who choreographed for a branch of the Vilna Troupe in the

early 1930s, moved to Tel Aviv in 1935, choreographed and performed with Habima and the

Israel Ballet Company and shaped the first generation of Israeli dancers through her teaching.18

In the 40s and 50s, other Vilner also played a seminal role in shaping the nascent Israeli theater.

Zygmunt Turkow directed the Tel Aviv-based company Zuta, Zalmen Hirshfeld acted in

Habima, Dovid Likht directed for Habima, Josef Kaminski composed music for Habima, and

Reuven Rubin designed sets for Habima and the Ohel Theater.19

Paradoxically, it is only in examining the disintegration of the Vilna Troupe and the

dispersal of its members that the full measure of its impact comes into focus. As members left

the struggling company for brighter horizons in the 1930s, they brought their distinctive training,

repertoire, and style to new enterprises around the world.

The Vilna Troupe’s influence did not vanish with the dissolution of the branches. Instead,

like Théâtre Libre after 1896 or the Group Theater after 1941, echoes of the ideology, aesthetic,

and repertoire developed by the Vilna Troupe continued to linger long after the company’s

demise. Without the Vilna Troupe, we might never have had a Eugene Ionesco or a Harold

Clurman, or at the very least, their careers would have unfolded differently. An entire generation

of groundbreaking scenic designers – including Mordechai Gorelik, Sam Leve, and Boris

Aronson in the United States; and Szymon Syrkus and Andrzej Pronaszko in Poland – cut their

teeth working in the Yiddish art theaters alongside Vilner. Without the Vilna Troupe, the world

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might have never known The Dybbuk. The Vilna Troupe was a pivotal node in a vast global

network that included many of the leading figures of the interwar stage, a network forged

pathways for the circulation of theatrical ideas across borders.

The Vilna Troupe’s role at the nexus of the interwar stage has long remained invisible to

theater historians. Details of the company’s connections to other theater artists and companies

have remained buried in actors’ archives and in never-translated Yiddish books, letters, and

theatrical ephemera. The Vilna Troupe’s size, multiplicity, and geographical instability add

further challenges. In Yiddish, there are dozens of well-documented studies of other Yiddish

theaters of the period. But to the great consternation of the Vilner, nobody ever wrote a book

about them. This was a frequent topic of conversation among Jewish theater historians, who

lamented the paucity of scholarship on the subject without ever attempting a book-length study

of the Vilna Troupe themselves.

Even those who were most closely involved with the company were reluctant to take up

the task. For example, the critic Nakhmen Mayzel would have been a perfect candidate. Mayzel

had a uniquely accurate sense of the Vilna Troupe’s scope and structure because he had often

embedded himself in different branches of the company to conduct research for his reviews. But

even Mayzel believed that writing a book about the company was beyond his ability. In his

otherwise comprehensive book about Polish-Jewish cultural life between the two World Wars,

Mayzel explained the absence of the Vilna Troupe thus:

Yes, we have long needed [a history] about that very Vilna Troupe […] It has long

needed to be written, and more than once somebody decided to write the history of the

Vilner and solemnly vowed as much before the open graves of former Vilna Troupe

members, swearing to complete it. But it seems that there is not the right person who will

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do it, nor is there the organization to subsidize such an important cultural and historical

monograph.20

Similarly, Vilna Troupe actor Joseph Buloff often remarked that in order to pen a history of the

Vilna Troupe, a writer would need to know Yiddish, German, Polish, Romanian, Hebrew,

French, Dutch, Russian, English, Lithuanian, Spanish, and other languages just to be able to read

the company’s multilingual reviews. “The trouble is the languages, who is going to read all these

languages, you know?” Buloff told Jack Garfein. “There’ll always be people who part of me they

wouldn’t know because it’s in Romanian, or South African, or American, or Yiddish.”21

Moreover, the Vilna Troupe’s complex organizational structure made writing about it a

contentious career move. In a theatrical landscape in which the livelihoods of hundreds depended

upon a fluid definition of the term Vilner, any attempt to specifically situate “the Vilna Troupe”

was bound to spark controversy. No Yiddish writer, no matter how accomplished, was immune.

When Alexander Mukdoni wrote a brief profile of the Vilna Troupe that focused primarily

(though not exclusively) on Asro and Alomis’s company, he received a flurry of letters from

furious actors claiming that he had gotten it all wrong. Mukdoni may have been a renowned

writer who had more or less invented the field of Yiddish theater criticism, but his reputation did

not prevent angry Vilner and their fans from calling him a fraud.22 And so Mukdoni, like many

of his colleagues, turned his attention elsewhere – continuing to review occasional Vilna Troupe

productions without ever again trying to analyze the company’s broader contours. One must

always be careful when mentioning the Vilna Troupe in public, Mukdoni cautioned readers, for

even the most casual conversations almost always end in heated argument.23

The erstwhile Vilna Troupe historian may no longer have to contend with angry letters

from outraged Vilner, but Mayzel, Buloff, and Mukdoni’s warnings still ring true three-quarters

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of a century later. The actors’ ever-fluctuating relationships with multiple branches of the Vilna

Troupe present a complex historical puzzle. Like the famous joke about a lone Jew stranded on a

desert island who builds two synagogues just so he can reject one of them, one of the most

salient characteristics of the Vilna Troupe was the staunch refusal of its members to publicly

acknowledge the existence of other branches.24 Compounding the problem is the Vilner’s

tendency to treat their individual pathways through a myriad of companies as though it were a

single “Vilna Troupe” affiliation. For example, Leyb Kadison wrote in his memoirs that he

performed with the Vilna Troupe for fifteen years.25 In truth, Kadison’s fifteen year career with

“the Vilna Troupe” actually included work with three different Vilna Troupe branches. For

Kadison, “the Vilna Troupe” was shorthand for the overall trajectory of his career during this

period. If we judge by the actors’ memoirs, the real Vilna Troupe was simply whichever branch

the writer happened to be working with at that moment.

The Vilna Troupe’s historical impact is even more difficult to pin down. As Yiddish

actors entered non-Jewish theater culture, many shed their Jewish identities by changing their

names and rewriting the narratives of their careers. In the process, the role that Yiddish theater

played in their emergence was often willfully obscured. The Jewish actors and directors who

were most successful at entering mainstream theater culture were often those were most skilled

at these acts of erasure, like Paul Muni. Those who were less skilled assimilators – like

Alexander Asro, who, try as he might, could not shake the thick Yiddish accent that doomed his

brief Hollywood career – rarely achieved mainstream success and were largely forgotten in the

annals of theater history.

But the Vilna Troupe historian of the twenty-first century has access to digital

methodologies that offer new ways to account for the artistic networks of the Vilner. In the

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beginning, based on the extant historical record, I initially believed that the Vilna Troupe was a

small company with a core group of performers. But I soon realized that this was not the case.

Who was in the Vilna Troupe? Every artist had a different answer that said more about their own

relationships with other actors than the company as a whole. Where did the Vilna Troupe

perform? Why, everywhere, it seemed. How many Vilna Troupes were there? Each source had a

different answer. The more I learned about the Vilna Troupe, the more riddles I encountered. In

seeking to understand the Vilna Troupe as a discrete theater company, I was asking all the wrong

questions. It was only when I began to think of the Vilna Troupe as a cultural phenomenon that it

began to come into focus.

This shift in my thinking was inspired and enabled by digital tools. Initially, I began to

explore digital humanities tools for data management. My roster of Vilna Troupe actors had

grown to include nearly three hundred names; my list of locales where Vilna Troupe branches

performed had turned into a massive collection of geographical data points; my hand-drawn

network map of how Vilna Troupe actors were connected to other theater artists had so many

names that it was illegible. Digital tools enabled me to compress the data drawn from archives

and actors’ memoirs into visual forms that I could analyze.

I developed a project called Visualizing the Vilna Troupe (http://www.vilnatroupe.com) as

a digital companion to the book I am writing about the Vilna Troupe (1915-1936), an

experimental Yiddish theatre company that became famous for its world premiere of The Dybbuk

in 1920.26 Part methodological experiment, part visual aid, and part research organization tool,

my data visualization work ultimately expanded the scope of my book and deepened my

argument about the Vilna Troupe’s influence and historical significance. The following pages

document both my process in developing this project (as an aid to future researchers) and an

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account of my findings using data visualization. While similar methods have been utilized in a

wide range of fields, my project is one of the first to apply data visualization to a theatre history

question and thus demonstrates the potential and the challenges of data-driven theatre history.

Building this visualization took longer than I anticipated. From start to finish, it took

almost two years to populate the dataset and build the project, with most of that time spent on

data collection. I began by compiling a dataset about the personal and professional relationships

of the 290 Yiddish theatre artists I was able to identify who worked on at least one Vilna Troupe

production between 1915 and 1936 (the complete dataset can be downloaded online as an Excel

file at http://vilnatroupe.com/data/current_database.xlsx). The first step was to identify which

artists were involved in the Vilna Troupe and the roles that they played (actor, designer, director,

musician, etc.). Most of these people were obscure even within Yiddish theatre history and had

little written about them outside of a single brief encyclopedia entry, if that. Some had no

mentions in secondary sources in any language. Interviews that I conducted with descendants of

Vilna Troupe members, along with theatre reviews and memoirs, helped to fill in some, but not

all, of these gaps. Even after extensive research, there were still dozens of individuals for whom I

was never able to find even the most schematic biographical details. Only a few of these

performers (like Joseph Buloff, Luba Kadison, and Ida Kaminska) made it into the Yiddish

theatre histories of the period. For hundreds of others, their names never appeared outside of

theatre programs and other archival ephemera. This problem, of course, is not limited solely to

Yiddish theatre. Traditional scholarship requires that scholars manually identify figures of

significance; as such, theatre historians have tended to write about well-known artists who

attained major acting, directing, and design roles. Those who remained in the chorus or spent

their entire careers as assistants or stagehands recede into the background of theatre

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historiography more often than not. My project offers a model for using the data contained in

theatre programs to recover the role of the “minor” theatre artist.

Names presented another key challenge in populating and organizing the dataset. In some

cases when performers were listed with a first initial and a last name, I was never able to find out

their first name. Still others appeared under multiple names, especially women, who often

performed under maiden names, married names, stage names, and pseudonyms interchangeably.

For example, Molly Pickus also performed as Mania Pickus (her birth name), Molly Shlosberg

(her married name), Mania Shlosberg, and Molly Madko (a stage alter-ego). Roza Birnboym was

married twice, first to Vilna Troupe member Leyzer Zhelazo and later to Dovid Birnboym, also a

Vilna Troupe member. She performed interchangeably as Roza Birnboym, Roza Zhelazo, and

Roza Birnboym-Zhelazo. Others adopted stage names to hide their true identities in times of war

and political uncertainty. Noah Bushlewicz became Noah Nachbush. Leyb Shuster became Leyb

Kadison. And Yankev Sherman was occasionally billed in Vilna Troupe programs simply as

“Hamacabi” (“The Maccabee”). Still others changed names and spellings as they moved from

one country to the next. Simkhe Vaynshtok performed as Simi Weinstock in Western Europe,

Simon Weinstock in England, and Sam Weinstock in the United States. Chava Eisen performed

variously as Eva Eisen, Manya Eisen, Chawe Eisen, and Eva Zhelizshinska. Fortunately,

Leksikon entries and information from memoirs and interviews often provided these alternate

names. Each time I came across an alternate names or pseudonym, I cross-listed them in my

Excel file so that all name variants would be linked to a single entry. Whenever I came across a

new name in a program, I checked the alternate names column first to ensure that the individual

in question was not already present in the dataset.

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I drew data from Zalmen Zylbercweig’s seven volume reference work Leksikon fun

yidishn teater (Encyclopedia of the Yiddish Theatre) and from listings of names, dates, plays, and

locations from hundreds of Vilna Troupe programs found in the archival collections of individual

actors at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Harvard Library Judaica Division, the Billy

Rose Theatre Division and the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, and the

Columbia University Jewish Studies Collection. I also collected data from the Internet Broadway

Database, the Internet Movie Database, and from dozens of oral history interviews that I

conducted with the living descendants of Vilna Troupe members.27

I intentionally collected data from both quantitative (that is, lists of names and dates in

programs and the Leksikon) and qualitative (interviews, memoirs, and correspondence) sources.

These sources served different, yet complementary, purposes. The programs and encyclopedia

were instrumental in establishing the professional connections among this group of theatre artists

– for instance, who worked with whom, and in what capacity. Interviews, memoirs, and

correspondence, on the other hand, offered valuable insight into key social connections outside

of the professional sphere: romances, marriages, and affairs; family relationships and quarrels;

friendships; and – most difficult to ascertain, but perhaps most significant – networks of

influence. How did famous theater families like the Turkows and Waislitzes recruit new

members into the company from among their kin? Which actors remained close friends after they

stopped working together, and which friendships stood the test of time, as attested to by

correspondence? Whom did these artists cite as their primary artistic influences, and who later

cited them as influencers? These kinds of social connections are integral to how artists make

theatre, and yet they too often vanish from theatre history. My project offers a model for how to

recapture the social dimensions of historical theatre-making.

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Next, I traced the personal and professional relationships developed by each artist over

the course of their lifetimes: the actors, directors and designers whom they worked with; their

nuclear and extended families; their marriages, affairs, and divorces; the people that they studied

with and those whom they taught; their friendships; and the artists whom they inspired. My goal

was to capture every social connection that I could document in order to build a database that

accounted for the social networks of these artists. Ultimately, I hoped my database would

resemble what an early twentieth-century version of today’s social media might have looked like

if these artists had had access to it, a kind of Yiddish theatre Facebook for the 1920s and 30s.

The 290 artists associated with the Vilna Troupe formed a tightly interconnected artistic

network that stretched across five continents. Its members lived, worked, and correspondence

across Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and

Oceania. For the purposes of this project, I considered any individual who ever worked with the

Vilna Troupe – even if only for a single production – to be a member of the company, regardless

of their specific role or the length of their tenure. Leading actors and assistant stage managers,

set designers and build crews, producers and extras were all accorded equal attention in the

dataset. Some of the artists on my list, like Millie Alter, were involved with the Vilna Troupe for

only a single production, while others, like Joseph Buloff, performed with the company for

decades. Because members tended to cycle in and out of the Vilna Troupe frequently and because

many continued to leverage their Vilna Troupe credentials to market their work long after leaving

the company, I decided to consider all 290 artists as equal parts of the same phenomenon.

I deliberately use ‘phenomenon’ here, rather than theatre company. For most of its

existence, the Vilna Troupe was actually not a singular troupe, but rather, a global network of

companies that all adopted the same brand identity. A 1918 quarrel over a love triangle followed

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by a surprise elopement led to the creation of the first of many Vilna Troupe branches. Many

subsequent splits followed over the next fifteen years, for reasons that ranged from artistic

disagreements to family quarrels to immigration issues. Using hundreds of theatre programs and

their cast lists, I was able to identify ten distinct branches of the company, each of which used the

same Vilna Troupe name, logo, and repertoire. Some branches lasted for over two decades, while

others existed only for a season. Some branches traveled around the world, while others stayed in

a single city or region. All, however, marketed their strikingly similar productions under the

imprimatur “The Vilna Troupe.” More often than not, actors were members of more than one

Vilna Troupe company, as people changed their branch affiliations frequently to settle

interpersonal disputes, to negotiate for better roles and higher pay, or to facilitate travel to

particular places. The complexity, size, and remarkable interconnectedness of this theatre

company, I believe, offers an ideal case study for experimenting with data visualization.

Tracking a company with so many branches and such a large number of rotating

participants raises important methodological questions. How can one account for the ever-

changing dynamics of a theatrical phenomenon with multiple constituent parts with precision?

What is the best way to construct a dataset when one name refers to more than one object, as is

the case for both the Vilna Troupe with its multiple branches and its actors who often performed

under many names? How can one identify data about a particular company or individual with the

same name as others (for example, a particular “Theatre Royal” in a world full of Theatre

Royals)? A well-structured relational dataset offers the ability to link large quantities of complex

information together while still accounting for individual differences. That being said, however,

building such a dataset requires significant manual labor at the outset. For my project, I tagged

each individual artist with codes signifying their branch memberships, while simultaneously

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tracing the geographical pathways of each branch. A future visualization, currently in progress,

will layer the interpersonal connections between individuals on top of a map and timeline

indicating the comings and goings of the ten Vilna Troupe branches. This planned visualization

will demonstrate how the social connections formed within the Vilna Troupe sparked the creation

of dozens of theatre companies, schools, and organizations around the world.

I also built a second linked dataset of non-Vilna Troupe members whose names were

frequently mentioned in connection to one or more Vilna Troupe members (this dataset is in the

second tab of the Excel file). This dataset of second- and third-degree Vilna Troupe connections

included biographical information, fields of influence, and information about how these

individuals were related to Vilna Troupe members. Taken together, these two datasets offer an

account of how the members of the Vilna Troupe were connected to one another and to other

artists, writers, and thinkers who never performed with the company.

Finally, I worked with a data visualization programmer to create an online tool

(www.vilnatroupe.com) that demonstrates how these Yiddish performers were connected to each

other and to other artists.28 This visualization, built in D3 (a Javascript library for creating data

visualizations), allows users to interact with the data I collected using a series of responsive

filters. My visualization aims to animate the social relationships that shaped the careers of the

Vilna Troupe members and their colleagues and to bring the broader social context of the

interwar Yiddish stage to light.

Relationships in the visualization are expressed as colored lines, with each color

signifying a different type of connection. Viewers can manipulate the filters to choose which

relationships they see in order to compare how different types of social connections shaped the

Vilna Troupe and contributed to its impact. For example, a user interested in how gender

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impacted the formation of friendships in Yiddish theatre could choose to view only friendships

and compare the results by gender.

The filters organize the data into five types of connections. Family connections in the

visualization include kinship, marriages, and romantic relationships. Study connections

document relationships between teachers and their students. Professional connections reflect

people who worked together on theatre productions and/or films. The friendship category

includes close friendships as documented in actors’ letters and memoirs. Finally, the “inspired”

category shows how Vilna Troupe members influenced each other and other artists. For each of

these categories, I only included relationships that were well documented in the sources. For

example, for the friendship category I included only those who engaged in frequent

correspondence over a period of at least five years and/or described close friendships in letters or

memoirs. For the “inspired” category, I included only instances where one artist claimed to have

been directly inspired by another. A sidebar on the left side of the screen allows viewers to see

more information about the specific relationships between individuals, including lists of each

individual’s connections and the organizations and theatre companies with which they were

involved. A future visualization, in development, will further document how interpersonal

relationships in the Yiddish theatre forged connections between theatre companies, schools, and

other theatrical institutions.

Connection lines between Vilna Troupe members represent professional connections

outside of the company. For example, Hanoch Mayer is listed as performing with Yankev Mestel.

This means that Mayer and Mestel worked together on at least one non-Vilna Troupe production

(they may well have worked together in the Vilna Troupe as well, but the visualization is

designed to document how the company fostered artistic networks outside of itself). The

18

connections between Vilna Troupe members thus document how the relationships that people

formed within this single company influenced Yiddish theatre at large between the two world

wars. For instance, this image depicts how many Vilna Troupe members worked with each other

outside of their work with the company. According to the data I collected, Vilna Troupe members

worked with one another in productions by at least 75 other theatre companies, including groups

performing in Yiddish, English, German, Hebrew, and Polish in Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok,

Moscow, Odessa, Kharkov, Lemberg, Krakow, Kishinev, Riga, Vilna, Brussels, Paris, Berlin,

New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg, among others.

In addition, my dataset reveals that the 290 Vilna Troupe members worked with a total of

132 theatre companies in some capacity over the course of their careers. This data offers insight

into how the Vilna Troupe members were connected, socially and professionally, to theatre artists

in other companies.

Users can also filter which Vilna Troupe members are shown in the center circle of the

visualization by gender, branch membership, and role (actor, director, designer, stage manager,

etc.). A second set of filters allows users to sort individuals who had second-degree connections

to the Vilna Troupe by gender, field of influence (theatre, film, literature, television, dance etc.),

and an impact rating that I assigned to track how famous these figures were. I assigned each

second-degree connection artist a numerical rating on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high) to signify

their historical impact. The “high impact” category (impact rating of 4-5) includes those who

made significant contributions to their fields that are well documented by historians. Most “high

impact” individuals have merited numerous entries in other encyclopedias and reference works

and all have met the notability criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. For example, Stella Adler,

Cary Grant, Eugene Ionesco, and Sanford Meisner all were assigned “high” impact ratings. “Low

19

impact” individuals (impact rating 1-2) are either lesser known or have made smaller

contributions to their fields. Most “low impact” individuals have neither standard encyclopedia

entries nor Wikipedia pages. In my dataset, this category includes figures like Max Wiskind, Liza

Schlossberg, and Paul Breitman. Those in the “medium impact” category received impact ratings

of 3 and their names may be somewhat familiar to viewers. “Impact,” in this schema, refers to

historiographic impact, not necessarily historical impact; indeed, as I have argued in this article,

these do not always line up. Paul Breitman, for example, was certainly a significant non-Vilna

Troupe member figure in Yiddish theatre history, but his name is probably unfamiliar to most

non-experts as it appears infrequently in secondary sources. Adler, Grant, Ionesco, and Meisner,

on the other hand, are so well known that most viewers of the visualization can be expected to

have some familiarity with them. The impact rating filter is subjective and is not intended to be a

precise measure of historical significance. Instead, I assigned impact ratings simply to enable

users to filter the visualization for names that are likely to already be familiar.

The responsive filters enable users to manipulate the dataset in real time in order to ask

and answer questions of their own. For example, to what extent was the Vilna Troupe and its

many branches a family affair? How did the Vilna Troupe’s professional network work

differently for men versus for women? Which branch of the company had the most social

connections? How were the members of the Vilna Troupe connected to well-known figures in

theatre, film, literature, and the visual arts, and what does this tell us about the company’s

impact? Visualizing the Vilna Troupe encourages users to experiment with the filters to answer

these questions and more.

To illustrate how this tool could contribute to historical analysis, let us examine what the

visualization reveals about the social connections of two seminal company members. Dovid

20

Herman (1876-1937) was one of the Vilna Troupe’s leading directors, best known for directing

the company’s world premiere production of The Dybbuk in 1920. Mikhl Vaykhert (1890-1967)

was another major Vilna Troupe director, known for his use of experimental theatre techniques

drawn from the Polish avant-garde. Both of these men were extraordinarily well connected.

Herman maintained close friendships with many leading Yiddish writers of the day, including

Peretz Hirschbein and Sholem Asch, as well as with Alexander Zelwerowicz, a major Polish

actor and director of the period. Vaykhert’s friendships, on the other hand, were firmly

concentrated in the world of the Polish avant-garde: Juliusz Osterwa, Arnold Szyfman, Leon

Schiller. Both directors ran influential theatre schools where many members of the Vilna Troupe

learned the craft of acting. Interestingly, the data reveals that while Herman’s classes enrolled

more future members of the Vilna Troupe, Herman and Vaykhert both taught many of the same

individuals, including Zalmen Hirshfeld, Ester Rapel, Simkhe Vaynshtok, Basheva Kremer,

Nokhum Melnik, Yankev Mansdorf, Dovid Birnboym, and Moyshe Potashinsky. Many of these

individuals enrolled in Herman’s classes early in their careers and studied with Vaykhert later on.

In both cases, education often led directly to employment in a Vilna Troupe production. Did

these directors offer complementary acting training, or did they actively poach students from one

another? Did aspiring actors sign up for classes with Herman or Vaykhert to improve their

chances of being cast in a future Vilna Troupe production?

For another example of how data visualization can raise new questions, let us consider

what the data suggests about theatre families and the Vilna Troupe. As Yiddish theatre historian

Nahma Sandrow has written, family troupes were common on the Yiddish stage, as they were in

most theatre traditions for centuries.29 Yet while the prevalence of family troupes in many theatre

tradition is well established, I have not been able to find any scholarly work that analyzes how

21

kinship influences theatre company formation, longevity, and productions. Collecting kinship

data and visualizing family networks among theatre artists can help us ask new questions about

how intrafamily relationships influence theatre making.

Out of the 290 members of the Vilna Troupe, 73 (more than one-quarter) were related to

one another. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children, cousins, in-laws –

these were the ties that connected many Vilna Troupe members to one another. Many likely

would have never become theatre artists were it not for the influence of their family members.

Noah Nachbush’s nephew, Wolf Faynzilber, for example, was recruited into a theatre career by

his famous uncle. Mila Waislitz grew up performing alongside her Vilna Troupe actor parents

Jacob and Yocheved Waislitz; after marrying a fellow Vilna Troupe actor Moyshe Potashinski,

they all traveled and performed together for several years. The filters in the visualization allow

the user to make comparisons and draw specific conclusions about the role of family

relationships in the Vilna Troupe. For example, Mordechai Mazo’s branch of the company had

more members with family connections than any other branch, including the largest number of

husband-wife pairs (22). Alexander Asro and Alomis’s Vilna Troupe, though run by a married

couple, had far fewer romantic partners among its members (9 spouse pairs, including the

founders). Was this because Asro and Alomis’s branch traveled across greater distances? Did the

prevalence of married couples in Mazo’s company contribute to its longevity (Asro and Alomis’s

company lasted for only 8 years, while Mazo’s lasted for 17)? Visualizing the data about the

Vilna Troupe’s intrafamily connections may not readily answer these questions, but it offers a

new way of looking at this company that suggests further avenues for research.

My visualization suggests that the Vilna Troupe was a central node in a vibrant artistic

network that connected hundreds of influential artists around the world and across the twentieth

22

century. The visualization also reveals how the members of the Vilna Troupe were transnational

cultural conduits, connecting theatre artists in Russia and Eastern Europe with their counterparts

in North and South America, and vice versa. Like all theatre companies, the Vilna Troupe did not

create its work in isolation. Its work was part of a complex web of entangled artistic

collaborations, interpersonal relationships, romantic dramas, and networks of influence.

Visualizing the Vilna Troupe at the center of a network of personal and professional connections

reveals previously invisible relationships between theatre practitioners who otherwise might have

had little connection with one another.

For example, Stella Adler began her career performing in Yiddish with Maurice

Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, alongside many Vilna Troupe members. A few years later, she

enrolled in the Theater Arts Institute of the American Laboratory Theater, run by former

Moscow Art Theater actors Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. It was there that Adler

first encountered the Method acting techniques that became the foundation for her actor training

methods. It was also there that Adler met Lee Strasberg, her future Group Theater collaborator,

and Harold Clurman, her future colleague and husband. Like Stella Adler, Clurman’s first

encounter with the stage had also been via the Yiddish theater, and he remained fascinated with

the tradition for his entire life.30 Helen Krich Chinoy has suggested that a shared love of Yiddish

theater was what first brought Stella Adler and Harold Clurman together and helped spark their

ideas for the Group Theater.31 Meanwhile, Adler’s career continued to intersect with the Vilna

Troupe. In 1928, Adler starred opposite Luba Kadison in a production of Sholem Asch’s Di

kishefmakherin fun Castille [The Witch of Castille] at the Yiddish Art Theater. They became

friends and for years, Kadison would meet Adler and Harold Clurman at the Café Royal on

Second Avenue for coffee, dinner, and gossip.

23

Richard Boleslavsky, a former Moscow Art Theater actor and Adler’s first acting teacher,

had Vilna Troupe connections of his own. In 1923, Boleslavsky was a founding member of

America’s first Yiddish drama school, where he taught acting alongside former Vilna Troupe

director Mendl Elkin and playwrights Peretz Hirschbein, Dovid Pinski, and H. Leivick.32 A year

later, the teachers and pupils of this Yiddish drama school formed their own Yiddish art theater

called Unzer Teater [Our Theater].

Nearly everyone in the company was connected to the Vilna Troupe in one way or

another: besides Elkin and the playwrights from the short-lived drama school, the founding

members of Unzer Teater also included Vilner husband-and-wife acting team Chaim Shniur and

Bella Bellarina, and Egon Brecher, Dovid Herman’s director friend from Vienna. Other members

included an unknown but talented stage designer who had just immigrated to the United States

named Boris Aronson. In an explicit nod to the Vilna Troupe, Unzer Teater opened with a

production of one of its most successful plays: An-sky’s Day and Night. The directors gave Boris

Aronson free reign to experiment with the set, costumes, and lighting. None of them quite

understood his strange ideas about design anyway.

When Day and Night opened in 1924, Aronson’s designs catapulted him to instant fame.

After designing for Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, the Artef Theater, and the

Schildkraut Theater to steady acclaim, Aronson moved on to the English-language stage in 1932,

working first for the Group Theater and then Broadway, where he would go on to win six Tony

Awards for designing hit musicals like Cabaret, Company, Follies, and Pacific Overtures.

Aronson also famously designed the sets for the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Aronson’s designs were instrumental in bringing abstract sets to the mainstream

American stage.33 Robert Brustein called Aronson “the leader of a national movement.”34

24

Aronson was also responsible for training some of the American theater’s most important

designers. In the 1950s, one of his Broadway apprentices was a young unknown named Ming

Cho Lee. It was Aronson who first introduced Lee to the Constructivist aesthetics of the Russian

and German stage; years later, Lee would describe Aronson as “an outside comet that fell into

the Western world.”35 Today, Lee is a Tony Award-winning designer and Yale professor. The

American Theater Wing considers Lee to have exerted “a greater influence on American

scenography than any other contemporary designer,” and his former students include scenic

designers Tony Straiges, Santo Loquasto, and John Lee Beatty.36 Without the Vilna Troupe,

there would likely have been no Unzer Teater to give Aronson his big break. Perhaps he never

would have brought his unconventional ideas to American scenic design.

Aronson’s approach to theatrical design was developed during his early career in the

Yiddish theater, working alongside former Vilner in a company modeled after the Vilna Troupe.

Aronson’s conception of the stage as an artistic laboratory, his transnational aesthetic that drew

equally upon Russian, Jewish, Polish, and German material for inspiration, his interest in visual

abstraction, his technical prowess and ability to make beautiful sets regardless of budget – all

came from the Yiddish art theater movement. The contemporary American stage thus owes

significant debts to the Vilna Troupe for incubating Stella Adler’s early acting training and for its

influence on a young Boris Aronson.

A network model of the interwar stage that takes the Vilna Troupe as its starting point

reveals whole centers of activity that were concentrated around particular individuals like Dovid

Herman, who not only personally trained nearly every major Yiddish director of the interwar

period, but also maintained close professional ties to key figures in the Polish, Russian, and

German theatrical avant-garde, or Yankev Blayfer. The members of the Vilna Troupe were global

25

theatrical conduits, connecting theater artists in Russia and Eastern Europe with work that was

happening in North and South America, and vice versa.

Other kinds of connections happened outside of the theater. Vilna Troupe actor Baruch

Lumet, father of American film director Sidney Lumet, worked briefly at Camp Kindervelt, a

Jewish overnight camp outside of New York City. One of the kids enrolled in his drama class

was a young Martin Ritt, who drove his teacher crazy when he kept skipping rehearsal to play

baseball. Years later, when the elder Lumet (who went by the nickname “Bulu”) saw a Group

Theater play, he was shocked to see Martin’s name in the program.

I pick up a program, I see ‘Martin Ritt.’ I said, ‘What in the devil is he doing there? That

boy, he should be a ball player. I couldn’t believe it, it’s the same Martin Ritt. I go

backstage. I said, ‘Martin, what in the devil are you doing here?’ He said, ‘Bulu, you

poisoned me.’”37

For Martin Ritt, those rehearsals that he laughed off at Camp Kindervelt stayed with him and set

the direction of his future theater career.

There are many such stories of Vilner inspiring talented young people to enter the theater.

For Judy Graubart and Manny Azenberg, it was seeing their uncle Wolf Barzel, a former Vilna

Troupe actor, perform on Second Avenue. Wearing his signature purple pants and a black beret,

Barzel would take his niece and nephew backstage; inspired by their uncle’s bohemian lifestyle,

the siblings pursued theatrical careers as a comedian and a producer, respectively. Judy Graubart

went on to star in the The Electric Company with Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, and Bill Cosby

and to marry actor Bob Dishy. Manny Azenberg became a legendary producer who produced

almost every Neil Simon play since 1972, along with dozens of other Broadway plays and

musicals.38 In 2012, Azenberg received a lifetime achievement Tony Award for his contributions

26

to the American stage. “Wolfie was the inspiration for everyone in the family to go into the

entertainment business,” Azenberg told me, “because who would have thought of it

otherwise?”39 The Vilna Troupe was the connective tissue that bound hundreds of important

figures in the theater together, across language, geography, and time.

Theatre, as a medium that requires collaboration and interconnectedness, is ideally suited

to being analyzed through the artistic networks that it creates. These networks include all of the

individuals involved in a production – from the artistic director to the production intern – and all

of their contributions, no matter how small. In traditional theatre historiography, the

interconnectedness of individual artists is often invisible. Scholars may read though lists of

castmates and letter addresses, or memoir accounts of drinks with friends and backstage visits,

but we rarely account for all of this social networking data. Until recently, we have not had

methodologies for looking at these kinds of connections on a macro level, let alone for analyzing

or assessing their importance. Data visualization offers a way of doing precisely that.

Visualizing the Vilna Troupe is not yet complete, but it offers a starting point that

demonstrates what a data-driven approach to documenting the social connections of theatre

artists can offer our field. My project is a small-scale experiment about the social networks of a

single, albeit large, theatre company. But this tool would be even more useful if scholars

collaborated to share data about social connections across theatre history. If twenty scholars

worked together to collecting data about performers from a particular period, genre, or period,

what new connections might such a dataset reveal? Or a hundred scholars with different

languages, disciplines, and expertise? It is my hope that we will soon see an explosion of these

types of projects, including mechanisms for large-scale collaborative efforts that will allow

scholars to combine and compare theatre history datasets.

27

Drawing from my experience working on this project, here are some concluding

thoughts:

1. Data relationalizes theatre history

We know that theatre artists create work via processes that are extremely collaborative,

far more so than writers, painters, and musicians. And yet, these collaborations are often left out

of our scholarship. Visualizing a dataset focused on social connections like this one offers a

means of examining the relationships between large numbers of theatre artists while still

accounting for the individual differences between them.

A data-driven approach to theatre history would encourage scholars to think more

critically about how all of the many people who contribute to theatrical productions interact with

one another. What would theatre history look like if we could account for every single individual

contribution to a production, no matter how small? How does social connectedness and

networking impact the work that artists produce? Data visualization allows us to ask and answer

complex questions about collaboration and theatre.

2. Data offers new perspectives on what is significant and what is “obscure”

How accurate is our understanding of what is important in theatre history? Where have

long-held assumptions led us astray? Who are the understudied figures that merit closer

examination? Using the available tools at their disposal, theatre historians have traditionally

tended to engage in granular analysis that focuses on a particular topic, person, or tradition

through a relatively narrow lens. A data-driven methodology offers the opportunity to expand

that lens dramatically to include material that might previously have been disregarded as

insignificant or obscure. This is relevant even for topics in theatre history that have been more

extensively researched. For example, much has been written on Shakespeare’s global reception,

28

but the database developed by the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (http://a-s-i-a-

web.org) offers new insight into the contemporary landscape of Shakespeare productions in East

and Southeast Asia.

In a network visualization, data is significant only to the extent that it is connected to

other data. The more connections between artists and the fewer steps to get from one to another,

the more significant the individual. A data visualization of the social networks of one Yiddish

theatre company and its little-known actors reveals that they were not nearly as obscure as the

extant historical record might suggest. What other equally little-known but significant figures

might visualization of a larger dataset — say tens of thousands of cast lists across decades of

American theatre programs — reveal?

3. Data can offer a corrective for problems with sources and bias

As scholars who write about ephemeral events in the past, theatre historians must often

contend with sources that are not entirely reliable and that present thorny methodological

challenges. In many cases, including in Yiddish theatre, the most detailed accounts of

performances are often contained in memoirs and theatre reviews. While memoirs can provide a

level of detail about the visual elements, tone, audience, and affect of a production that is

difficult to find in other sources, these subjective accounts do not always offer strict historical

truths. Most memoir authors rely solely on their memories, and since memoirists often write their

recollections decades after the historical events they recall, their accounts often tell us more

about the author’s experience in the intervening years than about the event itself.

The job of a memoirist is to capture the lived experiences of an individual, not the

historical contours of a group. Taken together, the memoirs of individuals involved in the same

historical event often offer contradictory perspectives. In the case of the Vilna Troupe, for

29

example, most of the actors refused to acknowledge that multiple Vilna Troupe branches existed.

Like the famous joke about a lone Jew stranded on a desert island who builds two synagogues

(“the shul I go to, and the one I would never set foot in”) just so he can reject one of them, one of

the most salient characteristics of the Vilna Troupe was the staunch refusal of its members to

publicly acknowledge the existence of other branches.40 In their memoirs, the actors tended to

treat each of their individual pathways through a myriad of branches as though they were a single

company. If we were to take these memoirs at face value, the “real” Vilna Troupe was simply

whichever branch the writer happened to be working with at any given moment. My

visualization, in contrast, demonstrates just how flexible and dynamic the actors’ affiliations with

individual branches actually were. Performing this macro-level analysis of the extant data

enabled me to place the material gleaned from memoirs in conversation with the broader

contours of a many-headed Hydra of a theatre company.

Reviewers, on the other hand, may be writing immediately after the performance, but

they can be swayed by other kinds of bias: interpersonal rivalries, tight deadlines, seating, etc.

Moreover, theatre reviewers do not always accurately capture the audience’s reaction to a

production. Again, data can level the playing field and enable the scholar to examine these

subjective sources within a broader context. For example, scholars might close read reviews

alongside analyses of ticket sale figures, investment records, and other financial data.

4. A caveat: big data is not a methodological panacea

Big data is no cure-all for the problems of theatre history. Like any methodology, data-

driven analysis offers the historian a particular glimpse of a theatrical event or tradition. Unless a

theatre historian is somehow able to attend every rehearsal and the entire run of a production in

person, we will never be able to know everything about a show. Big data allows us to see a lot

30

more of the picture than we are accustomed to and it enables us to look at large quantities of

information at once. But there will always be missing data, even in the largest datasets. There are

still bits and pieces that have vanished from the archives: the conversations and disputes never

recorded, the scrapping of a song in the final dress rehearsal, the actor who was fired mid-run,

the understudy who stole the show but only for a single night, the set pieces that broke and had to

be replaced, the extras who were never listed in the program. Big data can only show what is

accounted for in the dataset, which is still curated by the scholar who chooses what to include

and what to exclude.

Critical caution is just as important with data-driven methodologies as with any other

approach. Caution is especially important in an environment in which “big data” is often invoked

as a solution to every problem. “We [humanities scholars] seem ready and eager to suspend

critical judgment in a rush to visualization,” warns Joanna Drucker.41 We would be wise to heed

Drucker’s warning and think carefully about what we choose to visualize, how we evaluate that

scholarship, and what kinds of analysis are better left to more traditional methods of scholarly

practice. Ultimately, I believe that data visualization scholarship works best when it is put in

conversation with more traditional scholarly methodologies. Digital data visualization is an

exciting new addition to our existing methodologies. But it is not a replacement.

Notes

1 Blayfer’s Wikipedia entry, under the name he adopted for film, John Bleifer

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bleifer) offers many details on his Hollywood career and

virtually nothing about his decades as a Yiddish actor (the article erroneously states that Blayfer

began his acting career in Hollywood in 1927). See also IMDB, “John Bleifer”

(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0088197/), IBDB, “John Bleifer”

31

(http://www.ibdb.com/Person/View/32298). Sonia Alomis has only a brief stub in the German

Wikipedia and no other encyclopedia articles (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Alomis).

Leola Vendorf has an IMDB page under the spelling “Wendorff”

(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0920906/).Baruch Lumet has a Wikipedia stub

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Lumet), an IMDB page

(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0525885/), and an IBDB page

(https://www.ibdb.com/Person/View/4435). An article I wrote about Lumet (“Advice from

Sidney Lumet’s Yiddish Actor Dad”) appeared on the blog of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project

on December 14, 2015 (http://www.yiddishstage.org/2014/12/15/lessons-from-sidney-lumets-

yiddish-actor-dad/). Wolf Barzel has an IBDB page under the spelling “Wolfe Barzell”

(http://www.ibdb.com/Person/View/31219).

2 Sharon Asro, interviewed by the author, Arlington, VA, November 28, 2014.

3 Baruch Lumet, interview with Anita M. Wincelberg, December 12-20, 1976. William E.

Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, New York Public Library.

4 Manny Azenberg, interviewed by the author. New York, February 7, 2014.

5 Ibid.

6 See Azenberg’s IBDB page at http://www.ibdb.com/Person/View/21830.

7 Azenberg, int. by the author.

8 Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theater, 10th edition (Harlow,

England: Pearson, 2014); John Russell Brown, The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, The

Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013);

32

Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre

Histories: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2010).

9 Debra Caplan, “Nomadic Chutzpah: The Vilna Troupe’s Transnational Yiddish Theatre

Paradigm, 1915-1935,” Theatre Survey 55.3 (September 2014): 296-317; Judith Thissen,

“Reconsidering the Decline of the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s,” Theatre

Survey 44.2 (2003): 173-197; Edward Portnoy, “Modicut Puppet Theatre: Modernism, Satire,

and Yiddish Culture,” TDR/The Drama Review 43.3 (1999): 115-134; Harley Erdman, “Jewish

Anxiety in ‘Days of Judgement:’ Community Conflict, Antisemitism, and the God of Vengeance

Obscenity Case,” Theatre Survey 40.1 (1999): 51-74; and Nina Warnke, "Immigrant Popular

Culture as Contested Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of

Americanization, 1900-1910," Theatre Journal 48.3 (1996): 321-335.

10 For example, see Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge

History of American Theatre, volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134

and 498.

11 For example, on theatre programs, see Marvin Carlson, “The Development of the

American Theatre Program” (101-114) in Ron Engle and Rice L. Miller, eds., The American

Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A theory of

production and reception (New York: Routledge, 2003), 136-138.

12 “Wolfe Barzell,” Internet Broadway Database, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-

staff/wolfe-barzell-31219.

33

13 “Alexander Asro,” Internet Broadway Database, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-

staff/alexander-asro-30279 and “Alexander Asro,” Internet Movie Database,

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0039729/.

14 “Joseph Buloff,” Internet Broadway Database, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-

staff/joseph-buloff-14313, and “Joseph Buloff,” Internet Movie Database,

http://gb.imdb.com/name/nm0120233/?ref_=filmo_li_st_3.

15 D. Troy Sherrod, Historic Dallas Theatres (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014),

111 and Finding Aid for the Baruch Lumet Papers, UCLA Library,

http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt2199p8q5/.

16 “Andrzej Pronaszko,” Culture.pl, http://culture.pl/en/artist/andrzej-pronaszko.

17 “Szymon and Helena Syrkus,” Culture.pl, http://culture.pl/en/artist/szymon-and-helena-

syrkus.

18 Judith Brin Ingber, “Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus,” Congress on

Research in Dance Conference Proceedings 39 (January 2007), 100-105.

19 Bułat, “Turkow Family;” “Zalmen Hirshfeld,” HaBait,

http://www.habait.co.il/document/80,62,29.aspx; Donny Inbar, “No Raisins and Almonds in the

Land of Israel,” in Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage, edited by Joel Berkowitz and Barbara

Henry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 314; Reuven Rubin, Rubin: My Life, My

Art (New York: Sabra Books, 1974), 12

20 Mayzel, Geven a mol a lebn, 120.

21 Joseph Buloff, int. with Jack Garfein, 1980.

22 Mukdoyni, “Alte bakantn,” 7.

23 Ibid.

34

24 Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews (New

York: William Morrow, 1992), 19-20.

25 Leyb Kadison, “A bisl zikhroynes,” 692.

26 The Dybbuk is arguably the most influential Jewish drama of the modern period. In the

first year of performances alone, the Vilna Troupe performed The Dybbuk over 390 times to a

cumulative audience of over 200,000 theatergoers. The Vilna Troupe’s world premiere

production of The Dybbuk (with two nearly identical productions by two distinct branches)

propelled the company to international acclaim and secured its reputation as an avant-garde

theater of significance. See Michael C. Steinlauf, “‘Fardibekt!’: An-sky’s Polish Legacy,” (232-

251), Seth L. Wolitz, “Inscribing An-sky’s Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters” (164-202),

and Vladislav Ivanov, “An-sky, Evegeny Vakhtangov, and The Dybbuk” (252-265) in The

Worlds of S. An-sky, edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2006); and Jacob Waislitz, “Der gang in der velt,” in Itzik Manger, Yonas

Turkow, and Moyshe Perenson, eds., Yidisher teater in Eyrope tsvishn beyde velt milkhomes:

Poyln (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1968), 35-49.

27 Special thanks to my research assistant Rebecca Galpern for her assistance in

collecting data from the Leksikon and to Vilna Troupe descendants Sharon Asro, Alexander

Zaloum, Barbara Buloff, Dr. Dan Ben-Amos, Madeleine Friedman, Carmela Rubin, Craig Rapel,

Dr. Ziva Ben-Porat, Irene Fishler, and Michael S. Levy for their interviews and access to private

family collections of Vilna Troupe epehemera.

28 D3 programming by Jessica Hamel. Support for this project was provided by a PSC-

CUNY Award, jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New

York.

35

29 Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theatre (Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press, 1996), 55.

30 Harold Clurman, “Ida Kaminska and the Yiddish Theater,” Midstream: A Monthly Jewish

Review 14.1 (January 1968), 53-7.

31 Chinoy, 22.

32 Sandrow, 276.

33 See June Mamana, “From the Pale of Settlement to Pacific Overtures: The Evolution of

Boris Aronson’s Visual Aesthetic,” Ph.D. Diss, Tufts University, 1997, 1-2.

34 Robert Brustein, “Design for Living Rooms (The Theatre of Boris Aronson)” in Brustein,

Reimagining American Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 232.

35 Mamana, 2.

36 “Ming Cho Lee” biography, American Theatre Wing, 2008.

http://americantheatrewing.org/biography/detail/ming_cho_lee.

37 Baruch Lumet, int. with Anita M. Wincelberg.

38 See Azenberg’s IBDB page: http://www.ibdb.com/Person/View/21830.

39 Manny Azenberg, int. by the author. New York, February 7, 2014.

40 Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews

(New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 19-20.

41 Joanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities

Quarterly 5.1 (2011). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.