yt/placard/roh/01

Placards from the Yiddish Theatre

The Romania Opera House

The Romania Opera House was located on the Bowery near Grand Street in Lower Manhattan.

Here we see a placard from the Romania Opera House dated cir 1892. The production is "Dinah, oder, A gast fon yener velt [Dina, or, A visitor from the hereafter]" a drama in by Joseph Lateiner.

Per Wikipedia, "Joseph Lateiner (1853-1935) was a playwright in he early years of Yiddish theater, first in Bucharest, Romania and later in New York City, where he was a co-founder in 1903 with Sophia Karp of the Grand Theater, New York's first purpose-built Yiddish language theater building.

Lateiner got his start writing for theater in Iasi, Romania around the start of 1878, when Isrel Grodner, having left Abraham Goldfaden's Bucharest company, needed a playwright. He added some topical material to a comic German story Nathan Schlemiehl, and came up with a play Die Tzwei Schmil Schmelkes (The Two Schmil Schmelkes). By showing that Goldfaden was not the only person who could write a successful play in Yiddish, he opened the floodgates for other Yiddish playwrights."

photo: courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.