Background
Mikhoels was born in Dvinsk into an Orthodox family (Vovsi) of eight children.
Shloyme
Mikhoels was born in Dvinsk into an Orthodox family (Vovsi) of eight children.
He received a traditional Jewish education. At the age of nine he wrote and produced a Yiddish play. Sins of Youth, and aged twelve wrote for a periodical put out by a Zionist youth group. When, in 1905, his father went bankrupt, the family moved to Riga and he gave private lessons while still attending school. In 1915 he began studying law at Saint Petersburg University, but in 1918 gave it up to join Alexander Granovsky’s Jewish drama studio, where he soon became adviser on Jewish tradition, literature, and drama. He took the stage name of Mikhoels.
On the evening of the theater’s premiere, a few moments before Mikhoels was due to go on stage, Chagall grabbed Mikhoels’s coat “and like one possessed took up his brush and colors and painted all sorts of signs on the coat and decorated his hat with birds and animals. Despite Mikhoels’s entreaties to unhand him and the urgent ringing of the bell summoning him on stage. Chagall refused to let him go until he had finished.’’
In 1923 Mikhoels directed his first play, 200.000. by Shalom Aleichem, in which he played the lead role. In 1928 the theater went on a European tour, and Mikhoels’s acting in original Yiddish plays and classical dramas were acclaimed by leading European critics. On his return to Moscow, he was appointed director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater and in 1929 he opened the Jewish Theatrical Studio to train young actors for his theater as well as for other Russian Jewish theaters.
During the Shakespeare Festival in Moscow, in 1935, Mikhoels appeared as King Lear,considered his greatest performance (partly preserved on film). His brilliant portrayal in 1938 of Tuvia in Shalom Aleichcm’s Tuvia the Milkman was his last role. On the occasion of the theater’s twentieth anniversary celebrations in 1939, Mikhoels was granted the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Republic and awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest award presented to an actor in the Soviet Union. In 194! he moved with the theater to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and also worked with the local theater, ballet, and opera companies.
In 1942 Mikhoels was appointed chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow fostered by the Soviet Bureau of Information to promote information about the Soviet war effort against the Nazis through press releases and radio broadcasts to Jews in the West. In 1943, with Stalin’s personal blessings, he traveled together with the Yiddish writer, Itzik Feffer. on behalf of the committee to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and England, where they were welcomed by the Jewish communities who raised nearly three million dollars for the benefit of the Russian people.
During his stay in the United States, when Mikhoels ended, an address to an audience of over 500 with a heart-rending call to the Jews to raise their voices against the annihilation of their brethren in Europe, the crowd stormed the stage to shake his hand. Suddenly the stage crashed to the ground and Mikhocls’s leg was injured; he was forced to carry out the rest of his journey in the United States on crutches. The accident left him with a permanent limp.
Mikhoels met his death in January 1948 in Minsk while on an official mission on behalf of the State Committee for Theater Prizes. The official version attributed it to a car accident, but later evidence was produced that his assassination had been ordered by the Soviet secret police as part of Stalin’s policy of liquidating Yiddish writers, actors, and artists. This was substantiated by a reference in Svetlana Stalin’s book One Year Only to the fact that she had been present when her father had given instructions to issue the official version of an accident and that “her father saw Zionist threats everywhere.”
After his death the Solomon Mikhoels Museum was founded in the Moscow Yiddish State Theater and his daughter Natalia appointed curator. The photographs, press-clippings of his roles, and stenographic records of his speeches were confiscated in 1949 by the Russian authorities as nationalist propaganda. They were later destroyed in a fire.
In 1920 the studio moved to Moscow, where together with Granovsky he set up the Moscow Yiddish State Theater whose walls and sets were designed by Marc Chagall.
