Grosbard, Herz, 1892-1994

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.

This subseries contains a small amount of correspondence, along with ephemera and clippings related to Herz Grossbard's career as a solo performer in recitations, or "word concerts." The correspondence includes eight letters and postcards that Grossbard wrote to the literary historian and newspaper editor Zalman Reisen, of Vilna, from various localities while on tour, spanning the years 1923 to 1939. The ephemera (playbills, programs, invitations, tickets) and clippings relate to appearances in Eastern and Western Europe, South America and South Africa, with the greatest number of items from Poland.

Localities: Chrzanów, Częstochowa, Grodno, Lwów (Lviv), New York, Paris, Šiauliai, Vienna, Tallinn, Włocławek, Złoczów (Zolochiv), Zurich

Mostly Grossbard in recitation evenings, or 'word concerts.' Two items pertain to performances of Grossbard together with Frida Blumental, in one instance in Hirschbein's play "Grine felder," and in the other, in a recitation evening, both in Paris. 18 items.

Localities: Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Cernăuți (Chernivtsi), Tallinn, Vilna

Programs for recitals, or "word concerts" by Grossbard. 8 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).