Miriam Kressyn

Miriam Kressyn (March 4, 1910 – October 28, 1996) was a performer, playwright, and educator recognized as one of the First Ladies of the Yiddish Theater, whose career spanned stage, film, and radio. Born in Białystok, Poland, the seventh child of Mashe and Yankev Kressyn, she grew up in a poor household whose father earned a living traveling to village fairs before emigrating to the United States. Kressyn eventually made her own way to America, arriving in Boston in 1925 fluent in six languages. Her mother sold a feather-bed to fund her education. Kressyn won a five-thousand-dollar scholarship to study music abroad after placing first in a competition among the top high school singers in New England, and she also attended the New England Conservatory of Music on scholarship. During this period she was simultaneously studying law at Northeastern University, not yet viewing performance as a vocation.

Her entry into Yiddish theater came when Julius and Anna Nathanson, performing in Freeman's Goldene Kaleh in Boston, heard Kressyn and persuaded her to join their chorus. She went on to play small roles alongside Max Gebil in Khuppah-kleyd, Ludwig Satz in Der gazlen, and Leon Blank in The Three Brides. Hy Jacobson drew her more deeply into the Yiddish theater world, and she performed with him and Aaron Lebedeff at the Londiel Theater. In 1930 and 1931 she appeared at Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater, managed by Hymie Jacobson, May Sieman, and Simone Woolf. Her dancing ability was noted for bordering on the acrobatic, including a backward bend from which she could retrieve a rose from the stage floor with her teeth.

In 1933 Kressyn married Jacobson, and the two toured together in Argentina, Berlin, England, France, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. That same year she appeared in the film Geleb un gelakht alongside a large ensemble cast. She had previously appeared in The Jewish Gypsy in 1930 and The Sailor's Sweetheart in 1933, both directed by Sydney Goldin and co-starring Jacobson. In 1937 she played the leading role of Esther in Joseph Green's film Der Purimshpiler, opposite her husband and Zigmund Turkow; the shtetl set was constructed on a backlot in Warsaw, with exterior scenes shot partly in Kraków and dialogue by Itzik Manger. After further touring in America, Kressyn and Jacobson returned to Poland in 1938 and traveled to South Africa in 1939.

Back in the United States, the couple joined Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater for a production of Sholem Aleichem's Ven ikh bin Rotschild. Following additional tours in Argentina, Brazil, and London, Kressyn married actor Seymour Rechtzeit in 1943. Together they performed at the National Theater, the Public Theater, the Second Avenue Theater, and other venues, sharing the stage with Menasha Skulnik, Michael Mikhalesko, and Irving Jacobson, among others. Kressyn and Rechtzeit became known as the romantic idols of Yiddish musicals, frequently appearing alongside such figures as Reizl Bozyk, Ben Bonus, Leo Fuchs, Mina Bern, and Jacob Jacobs. In the late 1940s she created a Yiddish adaptation of Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta, with Ben-Zion Witler in the romantic lead, to considerable success.

Kressyn was also a significant presence on radio. She performed on The Forward's Hour, interpreting works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Osip Dymov, Moshe Dluznowsky, and Kadia Molodowsky. For many years she hosted her own program on WEVD as both singer and commentator, writing the material herself; another such program was Treft zikh mit Miriam Kressyn. She also composed Yiddish lyrics for the song Misirlou.

Her Broadway career extended from 1970 to 1975, with credits including Light, Lively and Yiddish and The Fifth Season. In the 1960s she had joined the faculty of Queens College in New York as a professor of Yiddish, where she also directed Yiddish plays and continued teaching drama until shortly before her death. In 1984 she was interviewed in Almonds and Raisins, a documentary examining Yiddish talking films produced in the United States and Europe between 1927 and 1939. Kressyn received numerous awards over the course of her career. She died on October 28, 1996, at the age of 86. Rechtzeit survived her, dying in 2002 at age 91; the couple had no children and are buried together in Block 67 at Mount Hebron Cemetery, a section maintained by the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance and reserved for members of the Yiddish theater community.