Photographers
Polito Studio,
New York, New York

Sitter
Lucy Levin, July 4, 1906 - September 4, 1939

Date
circa 1937

Type
Portrait

Medium
Gelatin silver print

Accession Number
X2012.7.112

Credit Line
Museum of the City of New York

Testimony
"As soon as I saw her, I immediately decided that she belonged in the theatre. With her figure, and with her dark, burning eyes ... I asked her how old she was, and she answered "seventeen," and we sighed with a small look and smile, that she is no more than that, although she appeared a year younger. I then mentioned that she must have inherited her musicality, for besides her father who is a singer, her mother's side had Berl the Chazn (Cantor), who was the cantor for many years in the Vilna Gabranisher Synagogue. He was a great prayer leader. I told her to sing something, so she sat at the piano and sang an aria from the opera, "Rigoletto" and accompanied herself.

... She told me that she plays piano in a moving picture theatre (then this was still in the fashion of the silent moving pictures), and that she took piano lessons, and she taught herself how to sing with an Italian singing professor. I asked her whether she wanted to be a prima donna in the Yiddish theatre. She answered that this is her only purpose. I had her sing, [and I determined] that she was musical enough that she no longer needed to study the art of singing, but that she needed to become a Yiddish actress, and she needed to begin to learn Yiddish with a rabbi. She said to me that she was able to [speak Yiddish] a little. I said to her that a little was not enough. From that day on she would speak, read and learn Yiddish, and almost every night she went to the theatre and saw everything that was being played -- a drama, an operetta, a comedy, all types of theatre. She obeyed me. She learned Yiddish, and every night she sat behind the stage, and with her dark eyes soaked in everything that she had seen and heard.

The next season Samuel Goldinburg opened a theatre in Philadelphia and engaged the young woman for his theatre. He staged in Philadelphia "Der rebin's nigun (The Rabbi's Melody)" and "Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride)." So as the young Lucy Levin knew both the aforementioned musical plays from seeing them almost every night in New York's Second Avenue Theatre, she not only played the prima donna role, but she also helped in the offerings, because she knew them well and remembered everything, and Philadelphia rang with the new prima donna Lucy Levin. A season later she was engaged for the New York Second Avenue Theatre as a prima donna ..."

Source of Testimony
Joseph Rumshinsky -- "Joseph Rumshinsky Tells About Fifty Years of Yiddish Theatre," March 23, 1953.