Mount Hebron Cemetery

Category: Famous

Story Summary:

Maurice Schwartz became an actor and a producer of Yiddish plays. He founded the Yiddish Art Theater in Manhattan. Schwartz also started an acting school to nurture budding talent. One of his students was Paul Muni who went on to star in 25 of Schwartz's productions. His theater performed a rotating repertoire of nearly 200 plays. Later on in his career, Schwartz was billed as the greatest of all Yiddish actors and the "Olivier of the Yiddish stage". ~Blog by Renee Meyers

Maurice Schwartz: The Olivier of the Yiddish Stage

Avram Moishe Schwartz (AKA Maurice Schwartz) was born on June 18, 1890 in Sudilkov, Ukraine, Russia. Isaac and Rosa Schwartz were Maurice’s parents. His father was a grain dealer, a Rebbe and a Talmudic scholar, and his mother cared for the family. Moishe was the oldest in a family of 6 siblings including three boys and three older sisters.

In 1898, Isaac Schwartz emigrated to the United States with his three teen-aged daughters. Isaac made the decision to take his three daughters along with the idea that they could get jobs in the sweatshops generating additional revenue. The money they earned would then be earmarked for the boat passage for Rosa and their three young sons ages 7,9 and 11. It took Isaac one year to save up enough money but once he did, he sent the tickets to his family.

Rosa and her sons got to London where they planned to then go to Liverpool where they would travel to the USA. Isaac purchased three half price children’s tickets for the Liverpool trip. However, Moishe was not allowed to use the half- price ticket since he exceeded the height requirements. Rosa located a Jewish family in London and made the split-second decision to leave Moishe with this family while she traveled with her remaining two sons to Liverpool.

Moishe ended up alone in England. At eleven years of age, he took any type of job he could find. Moishe even found odd jobs working backstage at the theaters in London. He became sick from the difficult work, and he had trouble finding a means of support. Moishe became a homeless vagabond, wearing torn dirty clothes and roaming pointlessly around the streets. At night, Moishe slept in the underground trains.

Isaac’s many attempts to locate Moishe were unsuccessful until he decided to put an ad in a Yiddish newspaper. Eventually someone recognized the homeless 13-year-old boy. In 1901, Isaac got on a boat to London to get his son. Once they found each other, Isaac and Moishe traveled together to New York. After Moishe rejoined his family on the Lower East Side, Moishe, at some point, changed his name to Maurice. Maurice’s experience in London left him a changed person. He became disinterested in having a Bar Mitzva or in any type of Hebrew Studies. He had become highly independent and Rosa could not keep him down. When speaking to a relative, she referred to Maurice as “a wild boy.”

Isaac enrolled Maurice in an immigrant school called The Baron de Hirsch School. After school, Maurice went to his job in Isaac’s small factory recycling rags for the clothing industry. Maurice learned in the evening with a German teacher, who read German classics to him as well as Shakespeare.

Maurice had an uncle named Mendel who was a patriot of the Delancy Street Theater Group. With the help of Uncle Mendel, Maurice secretly attended the Yiddish theater and he was absolutely captivated. Every day, Maurice neglected the work at his father’s rag shop and instead went down to the Delancy Street theater and did anything he could: either backstage or on stage.

Issac was an Orthodox Jew and opposed Maurice’s desire to act. Maurice, on the other hand, absolutely refused to give up his dream to be in the theater. Maurice felt that he felt that he was left with no alternative but to leave home. He had no money and therefore began sleeping on benches in the various gardens around New York. Maurice found some work as a “messenger” for the Western Union Telegraph Company. Eventually, Maurice returned home and resumed work at his father’s rag shop. As he worked, Maurice taught the other workers the songs he had learned in the theater and they sang as they worked. Maurice also “made theatre” to entertain his coworkers and he imitated the actors he had previously watched. Maurice soon became a frequent theater attendee. He also took a variety of jobs before finally finding the work he most desired: acting.

Maurice gradually started getting parts in this theater and in other Yiddish theaters. At times, Maurice’s parents did not even know where he was. Maurice traveled to Philadelphia, the Midwest, or anywhere that he could get a part in a Yiddish play. At that time, groups of boys and young men became followers of different theatres and actors. Maurice, who admired two actors named David Kessler and Jacob Adler, began voraciously reading plays. He especially gravitated toward classic plays by such authors as William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen.

Maurice joined various traveling theater troupes, including one that toured the Midwest. On his return to New York City in 1907, Maurice finally met the very actors that he had been admiring, Kessler and Adler. Soon after Maurice’s return to the city, he signed a contract with Michael Thomashefsky’s Green Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

In 1911 Maurice was hired by David Kessler for his company at his Second Avenue Theatre. In 1913, Maurice was awarded a Hebrew Actors Union card. After a total of six years with Kessler, Maurice felt that it was time to move on.

In 1911, Maurice was briefly married to a singer named Eva Rafalo. They were divorced the same year. Maurice remarried Anna Bardofsky who was also involved in Kessler’s Yiddish theater. Anna soon became Maurice’s business partner and helped him run the theatre.

In 1918, Maurice founded the Yiddish Art Theatre. He had had dreams of starting a people's theater that would produce classic, literary works. Maurice placed an ad in a Yiddish-language newspaper regarding his theater saying he wanted "a company that will be devoted to performing superior literary works that will bring honor to the Yiddish Theatre."

When Maurice opened his theater, it became a gathering place for his parents, siblings and their families as well as other relatives. Most of his family members came to Manhattan from the different boroughs including the Bronx and Brooklyn. Then they would congregate in the vicinity of the theater on 2nd Avenue, eat at Ratner’s and hang out at the Theater with Maurice. Maurice took advantage of his family’s regular visits. In order to avoid spending money hiring theater workers, Maurice decided to put the family to work. He gave them “jobs” staging activities, doing props and scenery, working backstage and even sewing costumes.

Maurice believed that an actor needed to develop by taking on a wide variety of roles. Therefore, he founded an associated school with the purpose of nurturing talent by giving students chances to learn. Maurice felt that by taking on 25 roles, it would teach a person a lot about "the possibilities of voice, gesture and make-up." Among the actors Maurice helped develop were Paul Muni, who played 40 roles in Schwartz’s productions. In a 1931 interview, Maurice described Muni saying: "He is a sincere actor. The theatre is more to him than just a job."

In 1913, Maurice gained a Hebrew Actors Union card. He reportedly had to take the test twice and do some politicking with such influential leaders, as Abe Cahan, editor of The Jewish Forward, in order to get voted in.

The Yiddish Art Theatre was open for more than three decades, until 1950. In over 30 years, the actors performed a rotating repertoire of nearly 200 plays including classics of Yiddish, European, and English theatre, performing well known works by Sholem Aleich.

Maurice’s inexhaustible energy, unwavering commitment to his mission, and shrewd managerial skills made the theater’s longevity possible in spite of increasing financial and sociological oddsThe repertoire included works by major Yiddish playwrights and by major Russian and European dramatists. In the 1930s the repertoire became almost exclusively Jewish in content, offering depictions of the Old World of eastern Europe, plays directly or implicitly related to contemporary concerns, and dramas about Jewish historical personalities and events. Plays based on I. B. Singer’s novels—The Brothers Ashkenazi (1931), The Family Carnovsky (1931), and Yoshe Kalb (1932)—were particularly popular. Yoshe Kalb turned out to be a sensational success and engendered unprecedented interest in this country and abroad.

Schwartz’s productions were recognized as full of color, movement, emotion, and pathos. Therefore, these productions gained the admiration of many critics, notably Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times. Maurice was an extremely talented character actor. While always the star of his productions, he also made certain to surround himself with top talent. Famous Yiddish performers associated with Maurice’s theater included Ludwig Satz, Jacob Ben-Ami, Celia Adler, Stella Adler, Jacob Buloff, Paul Muni, Bertha Gerstein, and many others. Maurice also worked with top level musical directors and stage designers. Maurice collaborated with Boris Aronson, who later became one of Broadway’s most celebrated set designers.

Maurice’s most celebrated roles were as "Reb Malech" in Israel Joshua Singer's Yoshe Kalb, "Luka" in Maxim Gorki's The Lower Depths, Oswald in Henrick Ibsen's Ghosts, Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, at the Palace Theatre, and the title role in King Lear. After Maurice’s role in the Yiddish film Uncle Moses, in 1932, he was billed as the "greatest of all Yiddish actors" and in that era Maurice was also called the "Olivier of the Yiddish stage".

By the 1930s, as Jews became more assimilated and audiences decreased and as a result, the Yiddish theatre started declining. In an interview in 1931, Maurice stated "The Jewish stage was once a night school to which people came to learn the language [English]. Now Jewish playwrights are confused. They cannot go back to the old themes because the Americanized Jew does not know that life, and they have not sufficiently assimilated the life here to understand and write about it." In the same interview, he said, "The theatre is my life. It is the only interest I have."

In 1928, Maurice starred on Broadway in The Inspector General and Anathema. Between 1931 and 1952, he starred in four Broadway-theatre productions in New York City, some of them produced by Maurice. In 1931 he appeared on Broadway in Ernst Toller's play entitled, Bloody Laughter. It had been produced in the UK in a cockney English version, and in Yiddish it was called The Red Laugh. Maurice later traveled to Israel and performed on stage there.

After the war, Jewish groups had worked to reunite families and place Jewish orphans with Jewish families. Maurice met a boy named Moses at the Wezembeek Orphanage in Belgium in 1946 while he was on a theatrical tour. He decided to adopt Moses and his sister through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). JDC had originally located Fannie and reunited the siblings. Maurice and Anna initially met Fannie when she arrived with Moses at the Airport. They renamed the children Marvin (or Norman) and Risa. In New York, they taught their children Yiddish and English, and about the Jewish religion. Risa went on to become an actress in the United States.

Throughout his career, Maurice had great success as an actor. However, he was also drawn to Hollywood and in 1910, he appeared in his first silent film. Maurice performed in more than twenty films between 1910 and 1953; the majority were silent films. Maurice also wrote, produced, or directed several films.

Included in Maurice’s major roles in motion pictures were: Broken Hearts (1926), Uncle Moses (1932), Tevya (1939), Mission to Moscow (1943), and as Ezra in the Biblical drama Salome (1953).

Maurice Schwartz died in 1960 at the age of 69 following a heart attack in Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel near Tel Aviv. He is buried in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in New York.