Bertha Kalich

Bertha Kalich, born Beylke Kalakh on May 17, 1874, in Lemberg, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), was a Jewish-American actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1905 to 1926. The only child of Solomon Kalakh, a brush manufacturer and amateur violinist, and Babette Halber Kalakh, a seamstress who regularly made costumes for local theaters, Kalich grew up in a household where the stage was a constant presence. Her mother's devotion to opera drew the two of them frequently to performances together, and the family pooled limited resources to enroll the young Kalich in private music and drama schools.

At thirteen, Kalich joined the chorus of the local Polish theater and later attended the Lemberg Conservatory. During this period she performed in Polish, Russian, and German, and sang in the chorus for a production of La Traviata at the Lviv Polish Theatre Opera. Actor Max Gimpel recruited her to his Yiddish-language theater group, Yankev Ber Gimpel, where she eventually became prima donna and took the title role in Avrom Goldfaden's operetta Shulamis. Goldfaden subsequently offered her a permanent position with his company, and Kalich relocated to Romania, where she learned the language within months and appeared in major roles with the state theater. Historian Daniel Soyer recorded that anti-Semitic audience members who arrived intending to disrupt her performances threw flowers instead. Kalich married Leopold Spachner in 1890 at the age of sixteen; the couple had two children, a son Arthur, who died young, and a daughter Lilian.

By 1894, rumors of an assassination plot by rivals prompted Kalich to leave Europe. She made her way to New York, where she joined the Thalia Theater, appearing in Di Vilde Kenigin and a Yiddish production of La Belle Hélène, and reprising earlier roles including Shulamis, Juliette, and Desdemona in Yiddish-language productions. The Thalia had built its reputation on Yiddish translations of Shakespeare, and Kalich performed in several of these productions, including the role of Hamlet. Yiddish theater scholar Joel Berkowitz described Shakespeare's plays as serving "as both sources and symbols" in helping Jewish immigrants cross from Yiddish into American culture. Newspapers of the era frequently referred to Kalich as the "Jewish Bernhardt," drawing comparisons to the celebrated Sarah Bernhardt.

Her performance in Leon Kobrin's The East Side Ghetto drew critical attention from audiences outside the Jewish community, and her work in playwright Jacob Gordin's plays brought further recognition to the Yiddish stage. In 1900 she starred as Freydenyu in the premiere of Gordin's God, Man and the Devil. That production led Gordin to write the role of Etty in The Kreutzer Sonata and the title role in Sappho and Phaon specifically for Kalich. These works moved beyond the Yiddish playhouses and reached Broadway. Theater historian Henry Bial noted that Kalich and her male counterpart Boris Thomashefsky were "celebrated in the Yiddish press and idolized by Jewish audiences," embodying the immigrant success story and attaining a celebrity reached by few Jewish artists of the period.

Kalich's Broadway roles frequently centered on worldly, emotionally complex women. Under the guidance of producer Harrison Grey Fiske, she appeared on Broadway in Maurice Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna at the Manhattan Theatre, opening October 23, 1905, playing the role of Giovanna. That same year she appeared in a revival of Victorien Sardou's Fedora at the American Theatre. Her Broadway credits also included The Kreutzer Sonata, adapted from Gordin's Yiddish play by Langdon Mitchell, as well as Magda, drawn from Hermann Sudermann's Heimat, and The Riddle: Woman. She additionally appeared in Jitta's Atonement during her Broadway career.

By 1910, Kalich was encountering difficulty finding roles suited to her more emotional and tragic performance style within mainstream American theater. She traveled to Hollywood in 1914 and appeared in several films, including a reprise of her stage role in Marta of the Lowlands. By 1915 she was returning regularly to Yiddish roles, and her standing in the American theatrical world elevated her profile at venues such as the Second Avenue Theatre, where she received top billing alongside performers including David Kessler.

In her later years, Kalich's eyesight deteriorated and she gradually became blind. She officially retired in 1931, though she continued to appear onstage at events held in her honor. Late in her life she recorded scenes from Goldfaden's historical plays for The Forward Hour on radio station WEVD, though her declining health required extended rehearsal even for brief segments. Her final public appearance took place on February 23, 1939, at a benefit held for her at the Jolson Theater, where she recited the final scene of Louis Untermeyer's poem Heine's Death. Bertha Kalich died on April 18, 1939, at the age of sixty-four. She was interred at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York. Fifteen hundred people attended her funeral. Historian Daniel Soyer observed that in the prime of her career at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kalich played a significant role in efforts to raise the artistic standards of the Yiddish theater and helped elevate its standing with English-speaking audiences.