Maurice Schwartz

Maurice Schwartz, born Avrom Moishe Schwartz on June 18, 1890, in Sudylkiv, in the Volhynia province of the Russian Empire, was a stage and film actor who became one of the most prominent figures in American Yiddish theater. He died on May 10, 1960. His father Isaac was a grain dealer, and his mother was Rose, née Bernholtz. Moishe was the eldest of three boys among six siblings, with three older sisters.

The family's immigration to the United States unfolded in stages. In 1898, Isaac Schwartz traveled first with his three teenage daughters so they could work and save money for the rest of the family's passage. The following year he sent tickets for Rose and the three boys, but the group was separated in Liverpool before they could board a ship to America. Rose departed without Moishe, who, speaking no English, made his way to London and survived there for two years with the help of strangers. His father located him in 1901, and the two traveled together to New York, arriving when Moishe was twelve years old.

Upon settling on the Lower East Side of New York City, Schwartz adopted the first name Morris. His father enrolled him in the Baron de Hirsch school, an institution founded to educate Jewish immigrants. After school he worked in his father's small factory, which recycled rags for the clothing industry. An uncle's introduction to Yiddish theater proved decisive: Schwartz became captivated by the form and began reading widely, including classic works by William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen. He particularly admired actors David Kessler and Jacob Adler. Because his Orthodox father opposed a theatrical career, Schwartz left home and supported himself through various jobs before securing work as an actor. He joined traveling theater troupes, including one that toured the Midwest, and later obtained a contract with Michael Thomashevsky's Green Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

Returning to New York City in 1907, Schwartz continued building his career. In 1911 he was hired by David Kessler for his company at the Second Avenue Theatre. Two years later, in 1913, he obtained a Hebrew Actors Union card after taking the qualifying examination twice and seeking support from influential figures including Abe Cahan, editor of The Jewish Forward. After six years total with Kessler, Schwartz pursued broader ambitions.

In 1918, Schwartz founded the Yiddish Art Theatre, taking a lease on the Irving Place Theatre in New York City's Union Square neighborhood. He announced his vision in the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Tog, stating his intention to build a company devoted to performing superior literary works that would bring honor to the Yiddish Theatre. The following year he established an associated school, believing that actors developed best by taking on a wide variety of roles. He argued that performing twenty-five roles would teach a student the possibilities of voice, gesture, and makeup. Among the actors Schwartz helped develop was Paul Muni, who played forty roles in his productions. In a 1931 interview, Schwartz described Muni as a sincere actor for whom the theater was more than a job. The Yiddish Art Theatre operated for more than three decades, until 1950, staging a rotating repertoire of 150 plays drawn from Yiddish, European, and English theater, ranging from works by Sholem Aleichem to Shakespeare. Schwartz led the company on a European tour in 1924 and a South American tour in 1929.

His most celebrated stage roles included Reb Malech in Israel Joshua Singer's Yoshe Kalb, Luka in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths, Oswald in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at the Palace Theatre, and the title role in King Lear. At the time of his appearance in the Yiddish film Uncle Moses in 1932, he was billed as the greatest of all Yiddish actors and was also referred to in that era as the Olivier of the Yiddish stage. In addition to his acting work, Schwartz worked in Hollywood as an actor in silent films and also as a film director, producer, and screenwriter.

On Broadway, Schwartz appeared between 1931 and 1952, with credits including Conscience, Wolves, Bloody Laughter, and If I Were You. By the 1930s, the Yiddish theater was declining as Jewish audiences became more assimilated, and in a 1931 interview Schwartz observed that Jewish playwrights were caught between old themes unfamiliar to Americanized Jews and a new American life they had not yet fully absorbed.

Schwartz was briefly married to Eva Rafalo, a contralto singer born in Cincinnati, Ohio, whom he met while touring with an acting company. Their marriage took place on July 11, 1911, in Hamilton, Ohio, and they divorced that same year, after which Schwartz returned full-time to New York. Eva and her older sister Clara Rafalo were both actresses in the Yiddish theater. In 1914, Schwartz married Anna Bordofsky, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, who had been in the United States for approximately a decade and had been involved with Kessler's Yiddish theater. She became his business partner in running the theater, and they remained married until his death.

In 1947, the couple adopted two Polish Jewish war orphans, a brother and sister named Moses and Fannie Englander, aged nine and eight respectively. The children had lost their parents, Abraham Joseph and Chana Englander, in 1942, and had been placed by the underground with Belgian Christian families during the German occupation. Schwartz first encountered Moses at the Wezembeek Orphanage in Belgium in 1946 while on a theatrical tour for displaced persons. He arranged the adoption of both children through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had located Fannie and reunited the siblings. The Schwartzes met Fannie for the first time when she arrived with her brother at LaGuardia Airport. The children were renamed Marvin and Risa, and in New York the family taught them Yiddish, English, and about Judaism. Risa later became an actress in the United States, known for her role as Evelyn Foreman in the Chayefsky play The Tenth Man.