Thieves

The Vilna Troupe was an international modernist theatrical sensation with inauspicious origins. Shortly after the outset of World War I, a small cohort of impoverished and unemployed Jewish actors, untrained teenagers, and war émigrés formed a nomadic Yiddish theater troupe in what was then German-occupied Vilna. By 1935 the Vilna Troupe had grown to about 250 actors and splintered into several independent subcompanies. Always on the move, their avant-garde Yiddish productions captivated Jewish and non-Jewish audiences throughout the troupe’s travels across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Their ability to adapt and disseminate global aesthetic innovations across national, cultural, and linguistic borders made the Vilna Troupe an essential contributor to global theatrical modernisms. The Vilna Troupe was the first company to stage the Yiddish version of S. An-ski’s The Dybbuk (1920).

In addition to writing Yiddish fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, Alter-Sholem Kacyzne was also a photographer of East European Jewish life in the interwar period. Born into a working-class family in Vilna, he opened a photography studio in Warsaw in 1910. In 1921, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of New York commissioned him to photograph the misery of Polish Jews who were seeking to immigrate to the United States. Soon after Abraham Cahan hired him to contribute photographs on a regular basis to the Forverts. Most of his photographic archive was lost during the Holocaust. Kacyzne was murdered by Ukrainians in July 1941.