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Because of her sweet singing, people
called her “Pasarika.” This is a Romanian word meaning
“little bird.” And Goldfaden convinced her to consent to
play a role in the play that he had chosen to produce.
She performed just one evening, after which her mother
declared with harsh words that she would never let her
daughter act in the theatre again, and Sara’s match with
the stage in Galatz was ended for the other evenings.
But nevertheless, the young Sara had a desire to act and
she made an agreement with her mother. But the agreement
didn’t help her, and her mother declared categorically
that while Sara lived with her, the mention of theatre
was forbidden and only after she was married could she
do what she wanted. Sara let Goldfaden know the verdict
that her mother pronounced, and the founder of Yiddish
theatre called together his two actors [Yisrael Grodner
and Shakhar Goldstein] and consulted with them. He
himself had a wife. Grodner was also a married man, and
thus Shakhar Goldstein was the one who could marry her,
with the purpose of putting her on stage. Goldfaden and
Grodner persuaded him to do it. It began to sound like
an ingenious idea. In a few months, Shakhar Goldstein
actually travelled to Galatz, married her, and brought
her to Iasi to act.” The same story is confirmed by
Julius Sand, who was the controller of the “Lebanon”
union, which, in February 1877 invited Goldfaden with
his troupe to come and perform in Galatz. But Goldfaden
was searching for female talent for his troupe. Sand
says that they erected a simple wedding canopy in the
union hall, and three days after the wedding the young
wife, Madame Goldstein, played the
grandchild in "The
Grandmother with her Grandchild" in the place of her
husband, who had to play the role previously.
But according to Goldfaden,
it happened that her first role was definitely the role
of “Rakhele” in his play, "The Intrigue, or, Deborah the
Gossiper." Because K. had never had any stage
experience, Goldfaden wrote a small role for her, more
“to shine on the stage” than to act. Also for her, he
inserted into the play two light numbers called by the
name of “a kiss-duet”, and a song that was also a
translation from the era’s popular couplet “Madame Anna”
from Le Cocq’s operetta, "The Daughter from Hell [La
fille de Madame Angot]."
When the troupe travelled from there to Braila,
K. did not go with them, because her brother did not
permit her due to certain formalities. After Passover of
1877, Goldfaden took his troupe to Bucharest, and there
we find K. again acting with them. Despite the small
number of Yiddish actors, Goldfaden did not maintain
hegemony over his troupe for long. It divided, and
Grodner created his own troupe, and “Prof.” Hurwitz
created a troupe. The actors changed sides from one
troupe to the other, and Gorin explains that “Grodner
could not tolerate the applause that people granted to
Sara Goldstein (later know as Sophie Karp). The jealousy
between the actors and the actresses was so great, that
they could no longer stay together.”
Goldfaden’s first manager,
Itzkhok Libresco, says in his memoirs:
“The leading lady in our
troupe was Sarale Goldstein, but in secret she and her
husband came to an agreement with Mogulesko, that they
would travel to him in Odessa. Grodner’s wife in turn
was angry that Sarale was the leading lady, and she,
together with with husband, left the troupe, and Sarale
Goldstein remained our whole attraction.”
Libresco further relates how
he borrowed money so that the troupe could perform in
Iasi, but he discovered that K. and her husband had
departed to travel to Mogulesko in Odessa. He registered
a complaint with the police, saying that they had robbed
him, and subsequently they were detained in the middle
of their journey. They were brought back to Iasi to
perform there, and during a sharp discussion about the
matter, Libresco struck Sara, and immediately
afterwards, she and her husband left for Odessa.
There, she and her husband
performed in different troupes, including Goldfaden’s
and others.
Gorin says that K. performed
for Y.Y. Lerner in Odessa during the time that he staged
his translation of Gutzkow’s "Uriel Acosta," and Skrib’s
"The Jews [Zhidovka]," and the leading roles in those
two plays were played by Aba Shoengold and Sophie
Goldstein (Karp) [“Yehudis” and “Rokhl”], and they
excelled in their roles.
After the prohibition on
Yiddish theatre in Russia, she travelled to other
countries.
B. Gorin says that a troupe
was formed by Tsukerman, Spivakovski, Shoengold, Sara
Goldstein, Goldschmidt, the Vaynshtoks, Vaynshteyn, the
Koifmans, and after others, immigrated to Germany.
David Kessler writes in his
memoirs that from Berlin, K. was brought to Iasi.
M. Heine-Chaimowitz says in
his memoirs that Max Karp travelled to Europe and on
Erev Yom Kippur brought her to America, where she
starred as “Dina” in "Bar Kokhba" in the Oriental
Theatre and was a flop, and he says:
“Sophie was not at fault;
rather, it was the musician in the theatre. It was
another case of a Yiddish theatre composer or musician
not knowing about such a thing as orchestrating the
music, that it should be adapted for the voice of a male
or female singer. Sophie Karp definitely had a very
pleasant voice and yet on this occasion, she was a
failed actress. The music was not orchestrated, so she
had to adjust her voice. No one bothered to correct such
a “trifle,” and this was the reason why Sophie Karp’s
first appearance in America was a failure. She was
certainly not at fault.”
But her later appearances
were a big success. At that time, she married Max Karp
and began to appear as Sophie Karp.
Regarding her acting in
"Romeo and Juliet" in Yiddish, Boris Thomashefsky says:
“Girls used to bring their
young men, so that they would learn from Thomashefsky
and Sophie Karp how to make love. At each performance of
"Romeo and Juliet," the theatre was packed with young
boys and young girls. Husbands also brought their wives
and wives their husbands so that they would also get a
lesson [a lecture] in love.”
In another place, Boris
Thomashefsky writes that Prof. Hurwitz wrote (1896) an
operetta, "Brakha [Blessing]," and K. played the title
role. In the play, there was a scene where a Jewish girl
has to flee from anti-Semites and had a sin on her
conscience. She is sentenced to be crucified in the
middle of the market. She is bound to a great wooden
cross and all those who pass by spit in her face and
throw stones at her. For the cross scene, the playwright
wrote a long monologue of several pages. K. had toiled
several days and nights to learn the monologue, and she
simply cried that for her they should cut out the
monologue because it was too long. But the playwright
would not hear of any change. Given that she could not
learn the monologue, Thomashefsky insisted to the
playwright that instead of the monologue he should write
a song that the heroine would sing. T. took a verse from
the prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
and added Yiddish text. The choirmaster of the troupe,
Yankev-Kopl Sendler, wrote the music, and thus was
created what was later the famous song, “Eli, Eli”. As
to how far this song became the center of the play,
Thomashefsky writes later that when Dina Feinman took
over the role of “Brakha” and instead of singing began
to declaim, a scandal broke out in the theatre and they
had to bring in K. to sing the song.
In 1902 K. played in
Shomer’s "Golden Land." K. was also instrumental in
building the first Yiddish theatre stage in New York,
the Grand Theatre on Grand Street, in the very heart of
the Jewish neighborhood. The partners in the theatre
were: Sophie Karp, Morris Finkel, Yosef Latayner, Louis
Gottlieb, Berl Bernstein, and Louis Friedsell. The
theatre was built by Harry Fishel and was opened on
February 5, 1903 with Latayner’s "Zion, or, by the
Rivers of Babylon."
Regarding that, the
historian of Yiddish theatre, B. Gorin, wrote:
“In this theatre, the
company sought to defend against the new stream that was
just then flooding the stage … but they did not make
much headway, and the company realized that they could
not hold back the stream. The consequence of the
unfortunate undertaking was, that the company did not
endure, and Sophie Karp soon died of a broken heart.”
K. passed away on March 30,
1904 in New York. She left a daughter, Rose [“Rokhl”
from the name from her first role, “Rokhl” in "Deborah
the Gossiper"], who is also a Yiddish actress.
A necrology in the Yiddish
press said, in the name of K., that this theatre was her
soul. She wanted to have her own place, and therefore
she had invested a great deal of money and effort for
her own theatre. “In the other theatres—so she said—they
oppressed her. Therefore, she decided to have her own
place.” But fate would have it, that she would not have
the theatre for long.
About this matter of the
Grand Theatre, the composer Joseph Rumshinsky wrote:
"Her death was bound up with
a struggle, and it was conjectured that the struggle
brought about premature death. The opposition emerged
over the partnership of those who built the Grand
Theatre, of which she was one of the partners. They were
undecided about who should remain in the theatre—Sophie
Karp or Jacob Adler. Sophie Karp, fearful of being
dispossessed [taken out], did not leave the theatre, ate
there, drank there, she even slept in the theatre. In
the theatre, she caught a bad cold and contracted a lung
inflammation (pneumonia), lingered two days, and died.
It was the first great funeral on the east side. People
were hanging over the rooftops. They were following each
other. It was not a quiet funeral, because her admirers,
who numbered thousands, were crying loudly. You could
hear such cries as: 'How can such a beautiful body and
such a bright face lie in the earth?' There was no order
… There were few police. There was never such a scene.
The Jewish street was in turmoil.”
Max Rosenthal says that she
was a charming actress, very delightful on the stage.
The public loved her very much. She used to sing a song
with taste and heart. In the New York Yiddish theatre,
she played an important rol,e and it was many years
before the audiences forgot her.
In her memoirs, Bertha
Kalich says:
“Sophia Karp was beautiful,
luminous, and an excellent actress. She had a great fan
base among theatre audiences. When I became the star,
and she—the second fiddle, she brought her glitter with
her from the Windsor (Edelstein's theatre) to our
theatre. … Her family life was not as happy as she
wished, and very often she was very bitter because of
it. … She performed with Adler in the Grand Street
Theatre and caught a cold, contracted a
lung-inflammation, and was gone from the world.”
Boris Thomashefsky
characterizes her thus:
“A whole world of charm was
in her smile. Sophie was a weak actress but with her
charm, with her beautiful singing, she captured the
hearts of the theatre audience. She had no musical
training, we had to study each song with her as though
she was a schoolchild, but nature endowed her with a
wondrous, beautiful voice and with a temperament.”
And Bessie Thomashefsky
expressed herself thus:
Sophie Karp suffered from
one weakness and that was, that she spoke deytshmerish,
a deytshmerish that reminded the listener of the famous
“Kalvarier German” which the immortal Morris Rosenfeld
so bitterly ridiculed … the roles of “Shulamis,” “Dina,”
and other such Jewish daughters, Sophie spoke in “Germanish.”
M. E. from Max
Rosenthal.
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B. Gorin –History of
Yiddish Theatre, Vol. I, pp. 192-194, 199, 229, 238,
II, pp. 52, 170.
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Julius Sand – He
recalls how Mogulesko became an actor, Forward. NY,
January 7, 1910.
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Bessie Thomashefsky –
My Life Story, New York, 1916, pp. 132, 262.
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Bertha Kalich –
[Memoirs] The Day, NY, September 9, 16, November 7,
1925.
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Zalmen Zylbercweig –
Behind the Curtain, Vilna, 1928, pp. 101-103.
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Zalmen Zylbercweig – Theatre Memories, Dort, pp.
27-31.
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M. Osherowitz – “A
Quiet War Between Two Yiddish Leading Ladies Because
of a Role,” Forward, NY, Nov. 1, 1931.
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Archive of the
History of Yiddish Theatre and Drama, Vilna-New
York, pp. 254, 263, 282.
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Boris Thomashefsky –
His biography, Forward, NY, April 1, 2, 6, 7, 8,
1936.
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Boris Thomashefsky –
My Life Story, New York, 1937, pp. 276, 334-35.
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Joseph Rumshinsky – Sounds of My Life, New York,
1944, pp. 284-85.
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