Boris Thomashefsky

Boris Thomashefsky, born Boruch-Aharon Thomashefsky on in 1868 in Osytnyazhka, a village in the Chyhyryn county of the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine), was a Ukrainian-born American Jewish singer, actor, and book writer who became one of the most prominent figures in Yiddish theater history. He died on July 9, 1939. His name appears in various transliterations, including Thomashevsky and Thomaschevsky, and in Yiddish as באָריס טאָמאשעבסקי.

Thomashefsky spent his early childhood in the nearby town of Kamyanka, in what is today the Cherkasy Oblast of Ukraine. At the age of eleven, he traveled to Berdychiv to train as a meshoyrer, or choir singer, under cantor Nisan Belzer, whose synagogue choir was widely regarded as distinguished. In 1881, he emigrated with his family to the United States. Within a year of his arrival, while still a teenager, he played a central role in organizing the first performance of Yiddish theater in New York City, in what would develop into the Yiddish Theater District. He has been credited as a pioneer of Borscht Belt entertainment. At the time he helped stage that first performance, Thomashefsky had never actually seen Yiddish theater performed, having left Imperial Russia before encountering it. He had been exposed to songs from the Yiddish theater through fellow workers at a sweatshop where he made cigarettes, and he also earned money singing on Saturdays at the Henry Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side.

To mount that inaugural production, Thomashefsky persuaded a local tavern owner to invest in bringing performers to New York. The program was Abraham Goldfaden's Yiddish operetta The Witch. The event was disrupted by opposition from prosperous German Jewish community members who objected to Yiddish theater, including a bribe paid to the soubrette to feign illness. Thomashefsky stepped into her role, effectively launching his performing career. Shortly afterward, he became the first to take Yiddish theater on tour across the United States, staging Goldfaden's plays in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Chicago throughout the 1880s, with Chicago serving as his base for much of that decade. As Yiddish theater was banned in Russia in September 1883, his touring companies came to include notable performers such as Siegmund Mogulesko, David Kessler, and Jacob Adler, alongside new works by playwrights including Moses Ha-Levi Horowitz.

In 1887, while performing in Baltimore, Thomashefsky met fourteen-year-old Bessie Baumfeld-Kaufman, who had come backstage expecting to meet the actress she had watched onstage, only to discover that the performer was Boris. Bessie left home to join the company and eventually took on ingenue roles as Thomashefsky transitioned to romantic male leads. The two married in 1891. That same year, with Mogulesko, Kessler, and Adler occupied with launching the Union Theater, producer Moishe Finkel brought Thomashefsky to New York to headline at the National Theater. His success there in Moses Halevy Horowitz's operetta David ben Jesse was significant enough to compel the Union Theater to temporarily set aside its more serious programming and compete directly with him.

When Jacob Adler collaborated with playwright Jacob Gordin on The Yiddish King Lear and subsequently staged Shakespeare's Othello, Thomashefsky responded by producing the first Yiddish-language version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The production was not a straightforward translation but an adaptation shaped for a devout European Jewish audience. In this version, Hamlet had been studying at a rabbinical college, his uncle had broken King Hamlet's heart by seducing the Queen Mother, and Claudius spread a rumor that the prince had embraced nihilism while away. The scheme is ultimately exposed, and Claudius is sent to Siberia. The play concludes with Hamlet ceremonially marrying Ophelia at her funeral before dying of a broken heart. Thomashefsky's Hamlet was reported by contemporaries to have been performed with considerable skill. His other notable productions included Yiddish adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Goethe's Faust, and Wagner's Parsifal. These productions contributed to what is broadly recognized as the first great era of Yiddish theater in New York, a period that lasted roughly until a new wave of Jewish immigration between 1905 and 1908 shifted popular taste back toward broad comedy, vaudeville, and light operettas. The Thomashefskys embraced this shift, particularly through performances of Leon Kobrin's plays about immigrant life.

By 1910, Thomashefsky owned a twelve-room home on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, a bungalow by the sea, and twenty acres in Hunter, New York, which included an open-air venue called Thomashefsky's Paradise Gardens. In 1915, however, he filed for bankruptcy, listing assets of $21,900 against debts of $76,297.65.

Thomashefsky's Broadway career included an appearance in 1931 in the musical The Singing Rabbi, for which he also served as book writer. In 1935, he appeared as an actor and singer in Henry Lynn's Yiddish film Bar Mitzvah, in which he played a melodramatic role and served as co-producer. In that film he performed the song Erlekh Zayn, drawn from a 1924 Yiddish play of the same name.

With Bessie, Thomashefsky had three sons and a daughter who died at the age of six. His third son, Theodore, changed his name to Ted Thomas and became a stage manager; Ted Thomas's son is conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. His first son, Harry, directed the 1935 film The Yiddish King Lear under the Federal Theatre Project and later relocated to Los Angeles with his mother. His second son, Mickey, was involved in a dramatic incident in 1931 in which a jealous partner attempted murder and suicide; Mickey was left paralyzed and died in 1936 from complications related to his wounds. Thomashefsky carried on a long-term affair with Austrian-born Yiddish actress Regina Zuckerberg, who was twenty years younger than Bessie, which led to the couple's separation. Despite the separation, Bessie never divorced him. Thomashefsky became impoverished during the 1930s.

Thomashefsky is buried alongside Bessie in the Yiddish theater section of Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York.