Winogradoff, Joseph, 1866-1936

The collection contains play manuscripts, programs, playbills, posters, photographs, correspondence, agreements, scrapbooks, clippings, printed ephemera, and memorabilia relating to Yiddish theater primarily in the early twentieth century, especially the interwar period. Also included are items of printed ephemera related to Yiddish film, Hebrew theater, and a broad range of Jewish performers, including cantors, singers and dancers. Geographically, the materials originate predominantly in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, including parts of the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union; and, to a lesser extent, the United States, especially New York City. Also included are materials from Western Europe, Palestine (Eretz Israel), South America, and other regions around the world. Among the theater personalities represented in the collection with significant amounts of material are Herz Grossbard, David Herman, Joseph Winogradoff, Rudolf Zaslavsky, Zygmunt Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Moyshe Lipman, Ida Kaminska, and Esther Rachel Kaminska. The theater groups best represented include the Varshever Yidisher Kunst-Teater (VYKT; Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater), founded by Zygmunt Turkow and Ida Kaminska; the Vilna Troupe; Yung Teater / Nay Teater (Warsaw; Vilna), under the direction of Michael Weichert; the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (known by its Russian acronym "GOSET"); Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, of New York; and the Hebrew theater "Habimah." A wide variety of other professional as well as amateur theater groups are represented with smaller amounts of material.

Collection consists of concert programs, handbills, and other promotional material pertaining to the United States career of Joseph Winogradoff, a renowned, Russian-born operatic baritone between, 1920-1924.

This subseries contains personal papers of the Vilna-born baritone opera singer and, later, cantor Joseph Winogradoff. Included is correspondence, ephemera, clippings, and memorabilia documenting his career with opera companies in Russia, from 1888 through the early 1900s, and his concert tours in Eastern Europe and the United States, in the 1920s. The clippings include a serialized memoir that he published in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Der Moment, in 1919-1920, and various other autobiographical writings.

Winogradoff donated these papers to the YIVO Institute in Vilna in 1932.¹ A letter from him, dated 27 May 1932, New York, addressed to Max Weinreich, at YIVO Vilna, indicates that there was a plan to have a room at the Institute dedicated to the display of the Winogradoff collection.²

Localities: Łódź, Lublin, Hartford, New York, Paterson (N.J.), Philadelphia, Toronto, Vilna, Warsaw

Newspaper clippings and fliers pertaining to Winogradoff's concerts of operatic numbers and folk songs, or related to religious services. In two instances he is pictured in cantorial garb. 34 items.

Localities: Bayonne, Kharkov (Kharkiv), Danzig, Hartford, Lublin, Moscow, New York, Pińsk (Pinsk), Riga, Rostov, Saratov, Warsaw

Programs for the operas "Rogneda" by A. N. Serov and "Die Maccabäer" (The Maccabees) by A. Rubinstein, and various concerts of Winogradoff, and musical events in which he participated. Other performers highlighted include singer Ruth Réné, pianist Jakub Hirszfeld, violinist Vladimir Graffman, violinist Maurice Lenzer, singer Beatrice Phillips, and singer Róża Etkin. 17 items.

Includes one photo of Winogradoff in the role of Gérard in the opera "Andrea Chénier" by Umberto Giordano. The latter is by Klar, Tiflis (Tbilisi); and a second photo, a portait of him, is by I. Perkoff, St. Petersburg Studios, London. 2 items.

This subseries comprises approximately 1,000 oversize posters stored in map drawers. In Jonas Turkow's arrangement and cataloging of the items in the collection, oversize posters were fully integrated with the playbills found in Subseries 3; the item numbers they received fall within the same sequence as those of the playbills. Both types of items were categorized under the Yiddish heading "afishn" (posters, playbills; related to the French: affiche). The arrangement of the posters, therefore, mirrors that of the playbills in Subseries 3, with correponding folder titles and numbers (the folders containing posters are distinguished with the addition of a suffix "P" to the folder number).