The Vilna Troupe was an experimental Yiddish theater company between 1915 and 1936. The 290 artists associated with the Vilna Troupe formed an interconnected network that stretched across five continents. This visualization shows how these Yiddish theater artists were connected to each other and to other artists whom they encountered.
--Debra Caplan
Baruch College
City University of New York
Use the filters on the left to view different subsets of the data. Scroll down for more information about each individual.
One way to start is by exploring one kind of relationship at a time: family, friendships, influences, professional connections, etc. Add and subtract filters to examine subsets of the data. To what extent was the Troupe a family affair? How did the Vilna Troupe’s professional network work for women? Which branches were most influential? How was the Vilna Troupe connected to significant figures in theater, film, literature, and visual art? Visualizing the Vilna Troupe encourages you to experiment with the filters to answer these questions and more.
This dataset considers any individual who ever worked with the Vilna Troupe to be a member, regardless of their role in the company. Some artists were involved for a single production, others for decades. Because members cycled in and out of Vilna Troupe branches frequently, and because many continued to leverage their Vilna Troupe affiliation to market their work after leaving the company, I consider all of these artists equal part of the same phenomenon, regardless of the length of their tenure.
Each non-Vilna Troupe artist was assigned a numerical rating that signifies their historical impact. “High impact” individuals are those who made significant contributions to their fields, and whose contributions are well documented in history. All "high impact" individuals have met the notability criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia, and most have merited entries in other encyclopedias and reference works. “Low impact” individuals are lesser known or may have made smaller contributions to their fields.
Connection lines from one Vilna Troupe member to another represent professional connections outside of the troupe. For example, Hanoch Mayer is listed as performing with Yankev Mestel. This means that Mayer and Mestel worked together on at least one non-Vilna Troupe production. The connections between Vilna Troupe members thus document how the relationships formed within this one company influenced Yiddish theater between the wars.
Family connections include kinship, marriages, and romantic relationships. Study connections document teachers and their students. Professional connections reflect people who worked together on theater and/or film productions. The friendship category includes close friendships that documented in actors' letters and memoirs. Finally, the “Inspired” category shows how Vilna Troupe members influenced each other and other artists.
More information about specific individual connections and links to more information about individuals can be found by scrolling down on the left.
Click on any individual, and you will see more information on the left side of your screen, including a list of every connection. Under the heading “Other Connections,” you will find information about how people in this network were connected to others outside of it. The other connections are people who were not personally connected to the Vilna Troupe, but had significant personal or professional relationships with other artists who were. In other words, these are second-degree connections. Selected institutional affiliations are also included under “other connections.” A coming visualization, in development, will document these institutional relationships further.
A 1918 quarrel over a love triangle and a surprise elopement led to the creation of the first of many Vilna Troupe branches. Each branch used the same Vilna Troupe name, logo, and repertoire while performing simultaneously in multiple locales. I have identified ten distinct branches of the company, listed in order of their emergence:
Use the filters to see the influence of each branch.
Click here for maps documenting the pathways of these branches.
Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York.
Special thanks to research assistant Rebecca Galpern; archivists Michelle Chesner (Columbia), Dr. Charles Berlin (Harvard), Amanda Seigel (NYPL), and Gunner Berg (YIVO); and Vilna Troupe descendants Sharon Asro, Alexander Zaloum, Barbara Buloff, Dr. Dan Ben-Amos, Madeleine Friedman, Carmela Rubin, Craig Rapel, Dr. Ziva Ben-Porat, Irene Fishler, and Michael S. Levy.
Data was primarily compiled from Vilna Troupe programs and theatrical ephemera found in the archival collections of individual troupe members at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Harvard Library Judaica Division, the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library, the Columbia University Jewish Studies Collection, and the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. Data was also collected from Zalmen Zylbercweig’s 7-volume Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Lexicon of the Yiddish Theater), the Internet Movie Database, the Internet Broadway Database, and from interviews I conducted with Vilna Troupe descendants.
Click here to download the full dataset for this project as of January 2016.
Researchers looking for specific document references about a particular connection may contact me. Please include the names of the people you are researching and a list of the relationships that you would like to reference.
More information about the Vilna Troupe