Career
In 1881, shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Lerner leased the Mariinsky Theater in Odessa, Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) to present Yiddish theater. He first presented plays by North.M. Sheikevitch and Moshe Leib Lilienblum, then was the first to present classic European theater in Yiddish, translating the material but not radically altering it or adding songs. He was the first to present Yiddish-language productions of Karl Gutzkow"s Uriel Acosta and Eugène Scribe"s Louisiana Juive.
Jacob Adler, in his memoir, remarks that "both were works on Jewish subjects and both were in the repertoire of every important European stage of the time.".
