Mark Arnshteyn

Born Marek Arnshteyn (Arnsztejn) in Warsaw and raised in Sanok in Austrian Galicia (today in Poland), Mark Arnshteyn returned to Warsaw after gymnasium and became active in both Polish-language and Yiddish-language cultural life there. In 1900, he launched a career as the Polish playwright and director Andrzej Marek by writing and producing for Warsaw’s Polish-language stage a series of plays on themes and figures drawn from East European Jewish life. Beginning in 1905, he also took part in some of the first efforts to create and perform Yiddish art theater in Warsaw, working as stage director with the well-regarded professional Yiddish acting troupe of Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski and Esther-Rokhl Kaminska to stage works by Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, Arnshteyn himself, and translations into Yiddish of Ibsen and leading Russian and Polish playwrights. In 1907, he and Kaminski cofounded the Literarishe Trupe (Literary Acting Troupe), which devoted itself exclusively to a literary repertoire and made manifest the possibility of a Yiddish art theater across East Europe on a 1908–1909 tour. At the same time, Arnshteyn played a pioneering role in early Polish cinema, where, as he had done on the Polish stage, he made a distinctive mark with stories drawn from Jewish life and the Yiddish stage. In the three decades that followed, he played an intermittently substantial directorial role in Yiddish art theater on both sides of the Atlantic while devoting his main energies to translating and staging Jewish plays (including S. An-ski’s The Dybbuk and H. Leivick’s The Golem) for the Polish stage in Warsaw and Łódź.