Book Description

From the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed biographies Groucho and Ball of Fire comes a definitive look back at the Yiddish Theater. In this soulful and entertaining elegy Stefan Kanfer traces its meteoric rise, its precipitous fall, and its lasting mark on American theater, film, and culture in general. 



The Yiddish Theater’s star seems to have burned out. The venues in New York City have all gone. So have the performers and their immigrant audiences. But in Stardust Lost they live again as Kanfer brings the colorful stage roaring back to life. Meticulously unraveling the history of Jewish theater, he begins with the drama of the Old Testament and moves through time and space to the cultural explosions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the oppressions of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and the pogroms of early twentieth-century czarist Russia. Fleeing anti-Semitic edicts, the Jews of Eastern Europe push westward, migrating first to England and then to America. With them come the extravagant personages who bring drama—in every sense of the word—to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 


Stardust Lost invokes the energy, belief, and pure chutzpah it took to establish and run the thriving, influential theaters. En route, Kanfer reveals the nightly drama and comedy that played out behind the scenes as well as onstage, and introduces all the players—actors, divas, playwrights, directors, designers, and producers—who made it possible. Along with the beating pulse of the Yiddish tradition come the larger-than-life stars: Boris Thomashefsky, Jacob P. Adler, Molly Picon, Paul Muni, Bertha Kalisch, David Kessler, Maurice Schwartz, and many others, most with libidos to match their oversized egos. The book grants us views of genuine artistic achievement along with tales of cutthroat competition, adulterous liaisons, and hilarious wrangles. As we see in detail, assimilation, world events, and great shifts in American entertainment—the very entertainment that the Yiddish Theater encouraged by providing talent to uptown stages and film studios—lead to a poignant finale.


 From the daring Yiddish interpretation of The Merchant of Venice to Stella Adler’s influence on young actors to John Garfield’s and Marlon Brando’s impact on the screen, Kanfer traverses lower Manhattan, Broadway, and Hollywood to give us the tumultuous birth, flourishing, and decline of a great art form. It is a richly evocative chronicle that resurrects the forgotten landmarks and the vital personalities of the Yiddish Theater, whose work has gone but whose achievements can never be lost.

About the Author

Stefan Kanfer is the author of The Eighth Sin, A Summer World, The Last Empire, and Serious Business. He was a writer and editor at Time for more than twenty years. A Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and the recipient of numerous writing awards, Kanfer is currently in the Distinguished Writer program at Southampton College, Long Island University. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.

Review from Publishers Weekly

In this highly readable social history of Yiddish theater, Kanfer traces the genre from its genesis in eastern Europe to its flowering on New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century. He explores its success within the New World's intellectual ferment, as Jewish writers and performers introduced greenhorn audiences to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in a bid to enlighten the masses and stoke their social aspirations. But the plays' irony and rapid-fire timing made their flavor uniquely Yiddish, as they expressed and framed the immigrant experience—tackling issues from poverty to assimilation that elevated them above mere escapism.


With the character-driven narrative skill and assiduous research that mark his biography of Lucille Ball (Ball of Fire), Kanfer limns delightful portraits of genre stalwarts like playwright/director Abraham Goldfaden and actor Jacob Adler. Though Yiddish theater had faded by mid-century, its demise hastened by Hollywood, Kanfer makes a salient case that it was more than a momentary fad. He argues for the pliancy of the "Velcro language," its DNA carried in the era's most influential acting teacher, Adler's daughter Stella—whose students included Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando. Through them, the legacy endures. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)
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Review from Booklist

The Yiddish theater sprang up in Crimean War-era eastern Europe when a ragtag group of writers, actors, and hangers-on began cobbling together plays in Yiddish and performing them in any place large enough for two planks and passion. The form reached its ultimate expression two generations later in New York, where artists of the stature of actor Jacob Adler and playwright Sholem Aleichem transformed it into highly literate entertainment and set the stage for the American theater's ascent to world-class status.

Kanfer's fascinating, sprightly book charts the Yiddish theater from Ukraine, Russia, and Romania to transplantations to London and, later, New York.

He briefly (sometimes too briefly) sketches the actors, writers, and producers who helped it evolve from provincial crudity. Major players, Adler in particular, are given larger coverage, as are such other important figures of the era as Abraham Cahan, founder-editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. A book to satisfy both lovers of Yiddish culture and aficionados of the golden age of American theater and its immediate antecedents.
Jack Helbig, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved