Celia Adler was the most famous and influential Yiddish actress of the early 20th century. Nicknamed the “First Lady of Yiddish Theater,” Adler’s career spanned over 20 years and included plays, movies, music, and more. Her first major role was in Der Yidisher Kenig Lear (The Jewish King Lear) in 1893, at the age of four.
Celia was born in 1889, right on the cusp of the golden age of Yiddish theater in America. Her family was a tumultuous one, and full of actors. She was the daughter of Dina Adler, the second wife of Celia’s father, Jacob Adler, who ended up eloping with another woman and leaving Celia behind . (Celia went by Celia Feinman, after her adopted father, but changed her name to Adler later in life). After separating, her parents continued to perform together in the same acting troupe . Celia’s life on the stage started at infancy when her mother used her as a prop in her own shows.
Celia had five half- siblings, three of whom were actors, who were the result of her father Jacob’s three marriages. Her mother later remarried another Yiddish actor, Sigmund Feinman, who adopted Celia and gave her another sibling, Lili.
Celia’s personal life was interesting for many reasons, including her relation to multiple other famous Yiddish actors. Her brother in-law, Ludwig Satz, was the best Yiddish comic actor of all time. Her sister was Stella Adler, another famous Yiddish movie and play actor who created the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. The school’s alumni include Salma Hayek, Warren Beatty, and John Ritter.
Like her father, Celia was married three times. Her first husband, Lazar Freed, was another Yiddish actor. The pair married in 1914, had a son, Selwyn (Zelig), and divorced in 1919. Celia married her second husband and her manager at the time, Jack Cone, in 1930. He died in 1959; that same year, she met her third and final husband, Nathan Forman, a businessman. The two were married until his death in 1978.
In the aftermath of World War II, Adler switched her focus from the stage to the military. She began singing in American military camps, in both English and Yiddish . Despite a promise to her fans to return to the Yiddish stage , it became clear that Yiddish theater was fading into obscurity in the United States. Adler still returned to the stage, this time for a more mainstream audience.
Her most impactful body of work was her leading role in A Flag is Born, a 1946 play whose cast included Marlon Brando. Celia, who was fifty-seven at the time, played a Jewish survivor of the Treblinka death camp who was attempting to move to the then British controlled Mandatory Palestine. The play was incredibly controversial – it had a Zionist message and included monologues by Brando’s character, a young Holocaust survivor, which included the lines: “You Jews of America! Where was your cry of rage that could have filled the world and stopped the fires?” and “Where were you when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” Brando later claimed that these lines would make Jewish girls in the audience fall out of their seats in anguish and that the latter caused one woman to stand up and scream “Where were YOU?” back at him.
The play was revolutionary, and not only because of its harsh language. The creators of the play, the Bergson Group, used the money they made from it to procure ships to take Jews to the land of Israel. In solidarity with this cause, the actors agreed to work for minimum wage to raise as much money as possible. The play was only supposed to run for a month, but its popularity led to a 37-week run.
After A Flag is Born and a smaller part in a movie called Naked City in 1948, Celia retired. She spent her final years with her son, granddaughters, and husband. She died on January 31, 1979, at the age of ninety.
