MY LIFE, MY THEATRE

by Ida Kaminska ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 1973

Ida Kaminska, former director of Poland's Yiddish State Theatre, but best known to Americans as the dear old lady who kept The Shop on Main Street, certainly has had a life to write about. The daughter of Esther Rachel Kaminska, the ""Mother of the Yiddish Theatre,"" she grew up on the stage boards, acting, directing and translating by the age of seventeen. ""My life was always intertwined with great political happenings in which I was not an active participant which so often intruded into my personal life"" -- World Wars I and II, the Russian Revolution, anti-Semitic campaigns under Stalin and Gomulka. Kaminska fled the Nazis into the Soviet Union where she was elected a deputy to the Lemberg City Council (boycotting meetings because she felt she was a rubber stamp), but refused to say ""Long Live Stalin""; left Poland in protest against the persecutions which followed the Six Days War (""We simply couldn't tolerate and endure the torture of the Jewish minority through the monstrous and cleverly manufactured hate campaign""); found, upon immigrating to the U.S., that the American Jewish community was not going to support a Yiddish theater as it had said it would. In this memoir one gets the chronology of her wanderings and relationships (she was always ""surrounded with love"") but not enough beyond the surface and little of the vitality of Yiddish culture at its apogee. Kaminska is a survivor -- a spunky gal. But the impression she leaves is often like a faded snapshot in a photo-album.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION