Throwback Thursday: A Yiddish Actress of Many Names
By Chana Pollack January 30, 2014
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives.
Shaindel Kalish is pictured here, in 1934, in her role as Manuela the young heroine from the acclaimed Weimar production “Madchen in Uniform,” which was translated and re-staged for American audiences as “Girls in Uniform.” (First produced as a film in Germany in 1931, by Christa Winsloe, it was directed by Leontine Sagan and noted for its pro-lesbian storyline.)
The daughter of Yiddish theater producer Abraham Kalish, Shaindel transformed herself many times as she journeyed into American pop culture, first going by Ann Preston, then Judith Blake and finally as Mrs. Charles K. Freeman when she married the noted producer, who worked with Mae West.
In 1933, she starred on radio’s “Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy” and NBC’s radio-horror show “Lights Out.” As Ann Preston she was featured in Universal’s 1936 film “Parole!” and as Judith Blake she acted in a 1945 made-for-television version of “The Bourgeois Gentleman.”
Photo credit Forward Association/Maurice Seymour Photo Studio
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
