Ida Kamińska

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Ida Kamińska (born September 18, 1899 in Odessa , † May 21, 1980 in New York ) was a Jewish - Polish actress .

biography

Youth and first theater roles

Ida Kamińska was born in Odessa in 1899 as the daughter of the actors and actresses Esther Rachel Kamińska (1870-1925) and Abraham Isaak Kamiński (1867-1918). Both parents were important figures in Yiddish-language theater in Poland and Russia . Ida Kamińska's father founded a theater company at the age of twenty, and her mother is considered to be a co-founder of Yiddish theater . Ida Kamińska grew up with her sister Regina Kamińska and her younger brother Josef Kamiński (1903–1972), who would later pursue a successful career as a composer .

At a young age, she followed in her mother's footsteps and, at the age of five, played a role in a play for the first time. By the time she entered adulthood, she had already played several leading roles at the family's Kamiński Theater in Warsaw and took part in a guest performance at the Yiddish Theater in Vienna in 1917.

First film experience

Ida Kamińska's film work always had to subordinate herself to her commitment to the theater and so she appeared in only seven films in the course of her career. She made her screen debut in 1912 in Mirele Efros by Andrzej Marek , in which she appeared alongside her mother and sister. The Russian silent film is based on the famous play of the same name from 1898 by Jacob Gordin (1853-1909), which is also known under the title Jewish Queen Lear . It tells the story of the old Jewish matriarch Mirele , who is estranged from her family.

Interwar period in Poland

In 1921 Kamińska was one of the founding members of the Yiddish Art Theater in Warsaw, together with her mother, her first husband Zygmunt Turkow and Diana Blumenfeld .

Three years later, Kamińska acted again on the side of Esther Rachel Kamińska in the romantic drama Tkies khaf (1924), in which Sigmund Turkow worked as an actor and director. The originally 81-minute US- Polish silent film was later provided with a soundtrack in Yiddish.

After Ida Kamińska had toured the Soviet Union with theater groups for three years , she founded her own theater in Warsaw after 1933, the Ida Kamińska Theater (in the Tatra Panorama Rotunda ). In her own theater, Kamińska took part in many stage plays, but also excelled as the first female theater director in Poland between the world wars, writing, adapting and translating plays into the Yiddish language. In 1938 she took over the management of the Nowości Theater in Warsaw for five years.

Kamińska's last film before the outbreak of World War II was also the last Yiddish film to be made in pre-war Poland. The drama On a hajm (Polish title: Bezdomni , US distribution title: Without a home ) by Aleksander Marten (1898–1942) is about an Eastern European family who, after their son's death, tries unsuccessfully to start a new life in America.

Emigration to the Soviet Union

Ida Kamińska escaped the systematic National Socialist genocide of around two thirds of the Jewish population of European origin. After the occupation of Poland she had worked for the Jewish State Theater in Lviv , but had resigned from management under pressure from the Soviet authorities. In June 1941 she fled east and survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, where she set up a Jewish theater group in Frunze (today's Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan ).

Post war in Poland

After the war ended, the actress returned to Poland in 1945 (1947 according to other sources) to revive Yiddish theater culture. Kamińska worked for the Jewish Theater in Wroclaw and other cities and from 1948 headed the Jewish Theater in Łódź for five years , where she organized 35 world premieres. In 1950 she founded the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw , which was named after her mother Esther Rachel Kamińska, and was its artistic director from 1955. Success on the theater stage also set in and Ida Kamińska appeared with the Yiddish Theater in Warsaw in France , Great Britain , Belgium , the Netherlands , East Germany and North and South America .

Success in film

After small roles in the Polish films The Jewish People live (1947) and Aleksander Ford's Holocaust drama Die Grenzstrasse (1949), international film critics were to gain recognition in the mid-1960s.

In 1965, Kamińska was hired for the female lead in the tragic comedy The Shop in the Main Street (GDR title: The shop on the Corso ). The film was directed by Ján Kadár from Slovakia and Elmar Klos from the Czech Republic , who in collaboration with Ladislav Grosman , the author of the literary model, wrote the script and produced the film. The shop in Hauptstraße tells the story of the carpenter Tono (played by Jozef Kroner ), who was appointed trustee for the business of the Jewish widow Rosalie Lautman in a small Slovak town in 1942 as part of the Nazi "cleansing policy" . Tono's hopes for profit are not fulfilled - the haberdashery store is bankrupt, has no inventory and the former owner does not seem to understand the danger she is in. Tono urges the old woman he has grown to love to flee from the threatened deportation, but indirectly blames her death.

The film was praised by international critics and rated as an "exciting contemporary drama of haunting artistic unity". The acting performances of the two main actors, who received special praise from the competition jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965, were also popular with the critics . At the beginning of January 1966, the film celebrated its theatrical release in the USA, where it was equally well received and was awarded the Oscar in the category of best foreign language film . For the part of Rosa Lautmann, Ida Kamińska was nominated a year later for the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama and received a nomination for the Oscar for best actress . While Kamińska had lost out to Anouk Aimée ( A Man and a Woman ) at the Golden Globe Awards , she had to admit defeat to the American Elizabeth Taylor at the Academy Awards for Mike Nichols ' debut film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? received her second acting award.

Broadway in New York

After the great success in the cinema, the American impresario Harold Leventhal (1919–2005), who had been involved in the spread of The Store in the High Street , brought Ida Kamińska from Warsaw to New York's Broadway . From October to December 1967 she performed there with Jacob Gordin's play Mirele Efros . From November to December 1967 she was seen in a Broadway revival by Bertolt Brecht's mother Courage and her children . In both plays she played the leading role and took over the direction, with Mirele Efros Kamińska was also responsible for the script adaptation.

Emigration to Israel

In 1968 she gave up the post of artistic director at the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw and decided to leave her home country due to the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Poland. On the day the Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia, Kamińska emigrated with her family and numerous members of the ensemble to Israel via Vienna and gave up Polish citizenship.

Her last film appearance followed two years later, again under Ján Kadár's direction, in An Angel Called Levin (1970), which also marked her debut in English-language cinema. In the drama, a variation by Frank Capras, Isn't Life Beautiful? (1946), Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte were her film partners. However, Kamińska was unable to build on earlier successes with this film or with the following theater productions and lived alternately in the USA and Israel.

In 1973 she published her memoir in the United States under the title My Life, My Theater , which was not translated into Polish until 22 years later.

Ida Kamińska, who was married to the Polish actor Marian Melman (1900–1978) and from whom their son Viktor Melman came, died in 1980 in New York from heart disease. The actress, who appeared in 124 roles, wrote two plays, translated 58 others into Yiddish and directed 65 performances, was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing , New York.

In 2001, the New York YIVO Institute for Jewish Research dedicated an exhibition to her entitled "Ida Kaminska (1899–1980): Grande Dame of the Yiddish theater" . In 2005 her daughter Ruth Kamińska (* 1920), who emerged from her first marriage to Sigmund Turkow and, like her mother, had switched to acting, died.

Filmography

Awards

literature

  • Abraham Goldfaden, Ida Kamińska: Di Beyde kune-lemls: muzikalishe komedye in 2 parts (8 pictures): tsum 50-stn yortseyt fun Avraham Goldfaden. [H. mo. l.] Varsha 1958. (Yiddish edition)
  • Ida Kamińska: My life, my theater. Macmillan, New York 1973. (English edition)
  • Bertolt Brecht, Jacob Gordin: Ida Kaminska and the Jewish State Theater of Poland. Dunetz and Lovett, New York 1967. (English edition)
  • William Berkowitz: Conversation with .... Bloch Pub. Co., New York 1975. (English edition)
  • Joshua A. Fishman: Never say die! : a thousand years of Yiddish in Jewish life and letters. Mouton, The Hague et al. 1981. (English edition)
  • Sheila F. Segal: Women of valor: stories of great Jewish women who helped shape the twentieth century. Behrman, West Orange, NJ 1996, ISBN 0-87441-612-4 . (English edition)
  • Krystyna Fisher, Michael C. Steinlauf: Ida Kaminska (1899–1980): Grande Dame of the Yiddish theater. Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York 2001. (English edition)
  • Gabrielle Suzanne Kaplan: Extraordinary Jews: staging their lives: one-act plays for teens. ARE Publications, Denver, Colo. 2001, ISBN 0-86705-051-9 . (English edition)
  • Mirosława M. Bułat: Kaminski Theater. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 313-316.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ film service. 50, 1966.
  2. ↑ Detlef Friedrich: Mother Courage from Galicia. In: Berliner Zeitung . April 17, 2003, p. 11.
personal data
SURNAME Kamińska, Ida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaminska, Ida
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Jewish actress
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 1980
Place of death New York , USA