Papers of Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison

Joseph Buloff was born December 6, 1899, in Vilna, Lithuania, to a father who worked in the fur trade. He joined the Lodz Dramatic Theater in 1919 and then began acting with the Vilna Troupe in 1920, where he soon became a lead actor. Luba Kadison, born December 13, 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, was the daughter of Leib Kadison, a founder of the Vilna Troupe, which performed serious plays by Yiddish writers as well as Yiddish translations of Russian and French playwrights throughout much of Eastern Europe. The troupe moved to Warsaw in 1916 where Luba, as a young girl, was cast in boys’ roles. She had a small role in the first staging of Sholem Ansky’s The Dybbuk on December 9, 1920 at the Elyseum Theatre in Warsaw. She would soon go on to play Leah, the female lead in the play, which would become one of her most well-known roles. In 1922 the troupe went to Romania, where they were enthusiastically welcomed, particularly in Jassy, famous as the birthplace of Yiddish theater. While in Romania, Buloff directed and acted in many of Ossip Dymow’s plays, including Der Zinger Fun Zayn Troyer (The Singer of His Sorrow). Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison married in Romania in 1924.

In 1927 Maurice Schwartz brought Buloff and Kadison to New York to act in his Yiddish Art Theater at Second Avenue and 12th Street. In addition, they established their own theater, the Folks Theater, at 149th Street, where they tried unsuccessfully to run the Vilna Troupe. They returned to Romania for a short time but were back in New York by 1930. Kadison played many roles in Schwartz’s company, including Leah in The Dybbuk, while Buloff began to direct in addition to acting with Schwartz’s company. Kadison was the female lead opposite Schwartz in many plays, including I.J. Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi and Sholem Asch’s Three Lilies as well as opposite Stella Adler in Asch’s G-d of Vengeance. In the 1930s, the company toured Europe and South America and Buloff and Kadison also went to various theater markets on their own and played with the resident Yiddish companies.

By the mid-1930s, Buloff was performing in English as well as Yiddish, acting on Broadway and in Hollywood. He made his Broadway debut in 1936 in Don’t Look Now, followed by roles in three Mike Todd productions. After the war, the New York Yiddish theatre declined and Buloff moved into more English-speaking roles, although he continued to act in Yiddish theater until his death. On Broadway, he created the charachter of Ali Hakim, the Persian peddler, in the original 1943 Broadway production of Oklahoma and played the Greek landlord Mr. Appopolous in 1940’s My Sister Eileen and Fishel Shpunt in the dramatization of John Hersey's The Wall in 1960. He made his film debut in 1940 in Let’s Make Music and had roles in films such as Silk Stockings (1957) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). In the early days of television he played Pincus Pines in The Goldbergs (1949). Yiddish theater survived longer in Buenos Aires than in New York, and Buloff and Kadison toured their Yiddish version of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman there in 1949, in which Kadison played Linda, and a Yiddish version of Anna Karenina in the late 1950s, with Kadison in the title role. The Yiddish Death of a Salesman was also quite successful in its New York run. Mr. Buloff also frequently directed and produced plays, including Mrs. McThing in 1951, starring Helen Hayes. In 1980, Buloff starred in The Chekhov Sketchbook on Broadway, based on three short stories by Chekhov that he and Kadison had translated and dramatized. The 1968 Yiddish version of the play, which ran in Buenos Aires, had been Kadison’s last stage role. Thereafter, she worked mainly behind the set and in translating plays into Yiddish, including Anne Frank, Inherit the Wind, The Visit, and The Deadly Trap.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Buloff was a mainstay of the imperiled Yiddish theater, receiving praise for his performances in Hard to Be a Jew by Sholem Aleichem, The Brothers Ashkenazi, Yoshke Musikant (Yoshke the Musician, 1972), which he also directed, and The Fifth Season. He also began to make annual pilgrimages to Israel, where he appeared with local Yiddish acting groups. In 1974, he was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for his achievement on the Yiddish stage. Among his most successful roles was that of Gregory Solomon in The Price by Arthur Miller in 1979.

Joseph Buloff died February 27, 1985, at which time Kadison donated some of his papers to the Harvard College library. She also worked on publishing his book, From the Old Marketplace. Her memoirs, On Stage, Off Stage, written in collaboration with Buloff, won the 1994 National Book Award. Luba Kadison died May 4, 2006, having been the last surviving member of the Vilna Troupe.