JANE ROSE

JANE ROSE (ca. 1880-July 14, 1927)

            She was a playwright, born in Minsk with the maiden name of Tsukerman.  She came from a poor family and arrived in New York in 1896.  She was a socialist and active leader of the first Yiddish dramatic circle in the United States.  From 1912 she was living in Cleveland.  She was paralyzed over the last eight years of her life.  Around 1910 she began writing dramatic pieces in both Yiddish and English at about the same time.  Her Yiddish one-act plays were mostly published in Fraye arbeter shtime (Free voice of labor) in New York and the English ones in The Call.  In book form: Ziben eynakters (Seven one-act plays) (New York: Maks N. Mayzel, 1918), 48 pp.; Dos gefins, a kinder shpil (The find, a children’s play) (New York, 1918), 32 pp.  Her other one-act plays appeared in: Fraye arbeter shtime (April 4, 1914; November 21, 1914; November 28, 1914; May 26, 1917; June 2, 1917; June 9, 1917; June 26, 1917); and Unzer gezund (Our health) in New York (May 1915-February 1916).  Most of her one-act plays were performed for long periods of time by American Yiddish drama circles.  Rose’s “one-act plays,” wrote Yoyel Entin, “if they did not offer a new tone in Yiddish dramatic literature, they introduced into it a breath of something broader,…a suggestion of a new playfulness.”  She died in Cleveland.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 4; Zalmen Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Handbook of the Yiddish theater), vol. 6 (Mexico City, 1969); Yoyel Entin, preface to her play, Hinter di kulisen (Behind the scenes), in Ziben eynakters.

Berl Cohen