Photographers
Rappoport Studio
77 Second Avenue
New York, New York

Sitter
Aaron Lebedeff, 1873 - November 8, 1960

Date
circa 1920

Type
Portrait

Medium
Gelatin silver print

Credit Line
Museum of the City of New York

Accession Number
66.38.39

Testimony
"At the start of the 1920 season, there were murmurs in the Yiddish theatre world that the Litvak comic could be found in New York. They even said to us that he was with me in an operetta on Second Avenue. He entered into the theatre unnoticed, and then he came out. Before appearing on the Yiddish stage, he first visited every Yiddish theatre, even the English theatres. He studied when and who it lacked.

On a Wednesday night they announced: The Litvak comic Aaron Lebedeff in "Liovke Molodietz." There was a coldness, a wakefulness at the beginning of the performance. The stage, put together from old scenery, the same nine musicians in the orchestra. And until the groom emerged, the Litvak comic, the Liovke Molodietz, the performance looked just like a theatrical production in the province. But when Liovke Molodietz jumped in, he immediately brought with him in his first appearance, a great exposition, the most costly scenery, and a large orchestra. Because Liovke Molodietz is you, the people, you will be able to overcome all these obstacles. And they embraced him like an old acquaintance. It's not me -- not you -- not a new actor, a new star, it's you, a good brother, he's ours, you sing, you dance.

During the first night of his appearance, Aaron Lebedeff not only acted, but he danced and sang for the fourteen to fifteen hundred people who then attended the performance, yet I felt, sitting in the theatre, that the applause, the laughter, stormed the entire Jewish-American theatre public in America.

Leaving the theatre, I still felt the excitement of the public, that what took the big stars thirty to thirty-five years, the Litvak did in one evening.

Since then, since that evening, the greatest events have taken place before our eyes. Whole kingdoms have fallen. Modernism has already become classical. An airplane already has the same effect as a carriage at home. The greatest electrical lighting already looks like a kerosene lamp from home. Atomic power is already spoken of as an ordinary event. But Aaron Lebedeff is still on the stage as the young, fresh, eternal Liovke Molodietz. And although in his later years, kein ayin hora, he still sang his grandfather's sleep songs to his grandchildren. He is still in all the hearts of the students who sings so plain and simply to his girl ... "Oy, I like she; Oy, oy, oy, I like she." They see him go on the stage, in the streets and in the coffee house, because it never gets old, and he will remain the eternal Liovke Molodietz."

Source of Testimony
Joseph Rumshinsky -- "Joseph Rumshinsky Tells About Fifty Years of Yiddish Theatre," Forward, March 2, 1953.