Background
Sara Adler was born on May 26, 1858 in Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire, the daughter of Pessye and Elie Levitzky. Little is known of her mother; her father was a well-to-do lumber merchant and the owner of a fashionable riding stable.
Sara Adler was born on May 26, 1858 in Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire, the daughter of Pessye and Elie Levitzky. Little is known of her mother; her father was a well-to-do lumber merchant and the owner of a fashionable riding stable.
Although the family was Jewish she was sent at an early age to a private pension in Odessa and received her education there, growing up in a Russian environment. Because of her talent for singing, she was accepted at sixteen into the Odessa Conservatory, where she studied with the master Morandy and was much admired for her solo renditions of Russian hymns.
After attending the Russian theater she formed an ambition for the stage, but she was told that she could achieve high position in the Russian theater only by entering the Orthodox church. Rather than convert she joined a Yiddish troupe and toured through South Russia, Poland, and Latvia. In the repressions that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Yiddish theater in Russia was forbidden by government decree.
In 1884 Sara Heine immigrated with her husband's troupe to America, where she played at the Oriental Theatre on the Bowery in New York City. She first gained popularity in the historical operettas that were the standard fare at that rather primitive era of Yiddish theater.
After her marriage to Jacob Pavlovitch Adler, she appeared with him in a number of theaters, passing from singing roles to a purely dramatic repertoire. Jacob Adler's great desire was the reform of the Yiddish theater, and Sara Adler helped him in his struggle to achieve this goal. Largely because of their efforts the Yiddish stage, until then a mere platform for song, dance, and entertainment, was brought to the level of serious theater.
In the next thirty years Sara Adler played leading roles in approximately 300 plays. These included works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Gorki, Gerhart Hauptmann, Alexander N. Ostrovski, and Eugène Brieux. Many of these plays had their first American production in Jacob and Sara Adler's theater on the Bowery. Her repertoire also included such popular dramas of the day as Sapho by Alphonse Daudet, Camille, Madame X, and Madam Sans Gêne, as well as important studies of Jewish life by Jacob Gordin, Sholem Asch, Ossip Dymov, Shomer (N. M. Shaikowitz), and others.
Sara Adler's portrayal of Katusha Maslova in Gordin's dramatization of Tolstoy's Resurrection established her as the greatest actress in the Yiddish theater. The role gave full scope to her emotional and intellectual powers, and she performed it with the strength and delicacy that were her unique characteristics.
Sara Adler's realism won her great acclaim in Homeless, Gordin's drama of immigrant life, in which she portrayed a simple Russian-Jewish housewife who goes insane when her husband leaves her for a woman who is a socialist and an intellectual. She reached great heights in the closing scene of this play, conveying with supreme tact and sensitivity the growing insanity of the simple woman, uprooted, alienated from her American children, and lost in a world she is unable to understand.
After the death of her husband she played only occasionally, but she continued to appear at least once a year until she was past her eightieth birthday. In 1939, at a special evening in her honor at the New Yorker Theater, she appeared once more as Katusha Maslova in the third act of Resurrection. The actor Morris Carnovsky, present on the occasion, commented that except for the supreme art of Eleanora Duse, he had never seen a greater performance.
Sara Adler died at the age of ninety-five in full possession of all her faculties. She had survived her husband by twenty-five years.
Sara Adler is best remembered for her numerous acting roles on the stage before the advent of movies and television. She played some 300 leading roles, including many from the popular theatrical repertoire of the day. Her greatest role, and the one that established her preeminence on the Yiddish stage, was that of Katusha Maslova in Gordin’s dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection.
Quotes from others about the person
Harold Clurman: "Sara Adler was simplicity itself, the very emblem of complete womanliness, reserved yet unequivocally authoritative, sensuous and discreet, with deep stores of elemental feeling which could emerge in a torrent of pathos or in the most acute shafts of perceptiveness. "
Harold Clurman: "When I saw her act, I realized that her realism never failed to convey a largeness of feeling, the kind of grandeur that comes through only when a sense of life's high drama is present. "
Whitney Bolton: "Sara Adler was an empress a star who could fill a theatre and set it on fire. "
Adler married the theatre manager, Maurice Chaimovitch Heine. In 1890 she divorced Heine in order to marry Jacob Pavlovitch Adler, the eminent Yiddish tragedian.
Her five children all had careers on the American as well as the Yiddish stage; two of them, Luther and Stella Adler, were founders of the Group Theatre and have played leading roles on Broadway and in motion pictures.
