He was from the first
prompters of Goldfaden and as such he reported to Goldfaden, who traveled with the
troupe, B. remaining in Odessa. Itzhak Libresko came in
1880 to Odessa [nokh] plays for the Gradner-Horowitz
troupe in Iasi, and he made a connection with Berger,
who had written several plays "Gedenkt
er oyfn kop". But at the last moment he decided that
Libresko and Berger should put together their own troupe, and
they traveled to Brody, where they searched for the old Broder Singer Khayim Shmuel Lukatsher and also several
young singers, and under the name of "Rumenish-yidish
teater under the direction of Izak Libresko and
Leon Berger", they staged six of Goldfaden's plays, and
as such they stayed in the repertoire, taking the
troupe in January 1881 across to Berlin and under the
firm "German-Yiddish" they acted in a variety of
Goldfaden's "Recruits". But soon anti-Semitic students
created a scandal in the theatre for their second
production, and the play had to be transferred.
B. returned to Odessa and
when Yiddish theatre in Russia was forbidden, B. became
the guide for the Zuckerman, Spivakovski, Shoengold,
Sarah Goldstein-Karp, Joseph Goldschmidt, Weinstock,
Saul Wallerstein troupes and the Koyfman's with whom he
traveled as the director and prompter to Kenigsberg in
Meyer's Local, where the troupe acted with a great
success for two months. Through a theatrical agent the
troupe performed for two weeks in Danzig and traveled to
Berlin, where it came with great hardships, (due to the
first scandal), to act in the theatre in Kvarks-platz.
Here the troupe performed for eight months under the
pseudonym "Di yidish-orientalishe troupe".
The theatre had done very
good business, but due to Berger's changing the name of
the troupe to "Orientalish", announcing the Yiddish
actors as Turkish and Romanian, and due to the breaking
of the contract with Berlin and their acting in Hamburg,
it became a public scandal, such that the troupe had to
gnbet
itself back into the Yiddish quartal under its earlier
name, and after two months of acting they returned to
Berlin, where they acted with maternish for four
months and then disbanded.
-
B. Gorin --"History
of Yiddish Theatre", Vol. I, pp. 238-240.
-
Zalmen Zylbercweig --
"Hintern forhang", Vilna, 1928, pp. 109-116.
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