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M. was born around 1860 in
Odessa, Ukraine. His father was a hat maker. At the age
of sixteen he joined under the name of Mark Lazarovitsh
Meyerson with the Russian dramatic troupe, under the
auspices of N.K. Miloslavsky. In 1879 he saw Goldfaden's
troupe play, "Nye be, nye me," and although the
production had made a bad impression on him, he however
thanks to the good material conditions of the then
Yiddish theatre, through Spivakovski, he became taken
into Goldfaden's troupe, where he played in some small
roles, and soon went over to hoy?t-n ln. When
Goldfaden's troupe became divided into three provincial
troupes, M. went with the part under the auspices of
Spivakovski, where he also became stage director. Soon,
however, he returned to the troupe, on Goldfaden's roof,
to Odessa. From here M. went over to Morris Finkel's
troupe, and for several years he traveled with Yiddish
theatre across Russia, and he came back in 1887, due to
the ban on Yiddish theatre, to the Russian stage, where
he played for several years.
In 1895 he was invited
through his young friend Jacob P. Adler to New York,
where he became very warmly taken with the Yiddish
actors and of the troupe.
About the impression that
the Yiddish theatre made on him, M. wrote in his memoirs
(found in the Yiddish newspaper of Y.M. Leiptsiker in
the archive of the "Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre"):
"Here in America I became acquainted with a new method
of acting. The actors when acting used such gvaldeven,
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