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Welcome to the Sam Kasten Legacy Project (דאָס סעם קעסטין לעבן–און–אָנדענק פּראָיעקט), developed and maintained by Stephanie J. Spielman.

Sam Kasten¹ (1869-1953), one of my paternal great-great grandfathers², was a beloved comedian/actor/song-and-dance man in the American Yiddish theater in the early 1900s.

On this site, you’ll find…

• A biography, pictures, and songs on the About Sam page
• A companion e-book with a translation of his memoirs
• Articles written by and about him, both translated and in the original Yiddish

Want to connect? Reach me at stephanie.spielman <at> gmail <dot> com!

(A note to the Yiddishists: My occasional Yiddish transliteration does not follow the YIVO standard. Rather, I follow the orthographic tradition of the early American Yiddish press and do whatever feels right in my neshuma at the time. This can of course vary from sentence-to-sentence, as indeed it did in the Yiddish press!)

Footnotes

1. written in Yiddish as “Kestin”: סעם קעסטין

2. more specifically, my paternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather