How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government

Ester Rachel Kamińska (center) and her daughter Ida Kaminska (top row, third from left) with other members of their theater troupe VYKT (Varshever Yidisher Kunst-teater; Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater), Vilna, 1923. Photo by YIVO

By Mikhail Krutikov September 19, 2025

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At the end of the 19th century, a young woman chose, against her mother’s wishes, to become an actress. She ended up becoming the most popular Yiddish actress of all time.

Today, even those people who know about Esther Rachel Kamińska (1870-1925), known in Yiddish as Ester Rokhl Kaminska, may not be aware that toward the end of her life, she wrote a memoir of her experiences. Unfortunately, she didn’t live to see it published in book form.

Between June 1926 and January 1927, the memoirs were serialized in the Warsaw newspaper, The Moment, under the title, “Thorns and Flowers: The Path of My Life – Memoirs.” Now, almost 100 years later, her memoirs are available in English. The book, translated and edited by Yiddish actor and playwright Mikhl Yashinsky, is called The Mother of Yiddish Theater: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska.

In his meticulously researched introduction, Yashinsky writes that the term “mother of Yiddish theater” fits Kaminska in more ways than one. Firstly, together with her husband, Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski, she founded Europe’s first professional Yiddish theater, where she played her most renowned role, the “mama” and heroine of Jacob Gordin’s play Mirele Efros. In real life, she was the mother of another acclaimed Yiddish actress, Ida Kaminska.

But the memoirs that Kaminska wrote when already ill with cancer only recounted her early years before she became known as “the mother of Yiddish theater.” She initially sent several chapters to the Forward, around 1924. The editor-in-chief, Ab Cahan, was interested but preferred she start with her career in the theater, rather than her childhood. Nothing came of this plan, though.

Although the story of Kaminska’s childhood and her maturation into an adult and artist seemed to interest the Polish readers of The Moment, it apparently wasn’t sensational enough for Cahan.

In her memoirs, Kaminska describes how, in 1883, the Russian government banned stage performances in Yiddish — just one element of its wider antisemitic policies. But this prohibition wasn’t publicized. Each local Russian “nachalnik” (administrator or police chief) was free to interpret the rule however he wanted.

In other words, Yiddish actors had to keep up the pretense that they were performing in German. To this end, special German translations were prepared of Goldfaden’s operettas, Shulamis, The Sorceress, and a few other plays. Whenever Kaminska’s troupe wanted to stage a production, they were required to get the nachalnik’s signature on the poster. Obtaining the signature itself demanded a bit of a performance, since it entailed convincing him that the play was in German. As a result, Kaminska herself was often sent on these missions.

To top it off, every nachalnik had his own quirks. One forbade the staging of Shulamis because, as a “biblical” story it could affect Christian members of the audience, yet he did allow The Sorceress. Often a nachalnik would plant an agent in the audience who could check that the performance was indeed in German. (God forbid a Yiddish word should slip out.)

Other nachalniks were friendlier, particularly when a pretty woman caught their eye and someone slipped them a little bribe. Because of this, in her personal conversations with a nachalnik, Kaminska occasionally “played” Queen Esther for the Russian “Ahasuerus.” It was probably no accident, she wrote, that she was born on Purim and bore the name Esther.

Kaminska was a very gifted woman. She not only possessed dramatic and musical flair, but was also fluent in Russian, German, Hebrew, Polish and, of course, Yiddish. (Her native dialect was Lithuanian Yiddish, but in Warsaw she quickly mastered the Polish Yiddish dialect.) Each language played a different role in her life, and multilingualism was an important trait in her literary style. In her memoirs she often threw in words or entire phrases in Russian or German to add some local color.

In the 1920s, this kind of multilingualism was normal for Polish-Yiddish readers, but today this could create problems for the translator. Yashinsky has come up with a successful strategy for dealing with these linguistic difficulties. When Kaminska uses German verbatim, Yashinsky writes it as is, adding the English translation. But when translating daytshmerish expressions — those words and phrases that certain Yiddish speakers once used to sound cultivated but which actually made them sound pompous — Yashinsky uses broken English with a pseudo-Germanic accent.

Sometimes Kaminska intentionally uses Russian rather than Yiddish words to stress the Russian context of a given situation, for example, “uzhin” (dinner) instead of the Yiddish term “vetshere.” In these cases, Yashinsky keeps the Russian, adding the English in parentheses. Yashinsky’s work results in an English translation that is idiomatic and flows well, helping to preserve, as much as possible, the multicultural richness of Kaminska’s prose.

Kaminska’s memoirs end around 1900. She describes her shtetl, Porzove, in Grodno guberniya (within the Russian Empire) with a nostalgic fondness, but expresses no regrets for leaving home when she was about 11. It was then that she moved to Warsaw with her older sister and her family. Like many small-town girls in the big city, she sought work as a seamstress, but her dream was to sing on the stage. For her parents, though, having a daughter in the theater would have been an embarrassment. Only after their deaths was she able to go on the road with a troupe of Yiddish actors, touring Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.

Ester-Rokhl had quite a few suitors among the young actors, but in the end, she married her older and more experienced colleague, Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski. As Yashinsky points out, this was probably not a case of romantic love but rather a pragmatic decision, allowing her to build a highly successful career.

Initially, the couple had a difficult life. In order to earn some money, Kaminska felt forced to go on the stage only a few days after giving birth to her first child, a girl, whom they called Leye-Shifre. She left the infant with family in Warsaw and went on tour to towns throughout the region. Tragically, the child died. Their son, Yoysef-Hirsh, born a year later, didn’t live long either. Three subsequent children — Regina, Ida and Yoysef — lived to adulthood and had active careers in theater and music.

It was only after 1905, when the Tsarist regime lifted the prohibition against the Yiddish theater, that the Kaminskis were finally able to establish a professional Yiddish theater in Warsaw. Sadly, the renowned actress didn’t live long enough to record her memoirs of the hugely successful years that followed.

The Mother of Yiddish Theatre: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska | By Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, edited and translated by Mikhl Yashinsky | Bloomsbury | 288 pp. (2025)