11  October 24th, 1946


  1. Yiddish/Jewish culture↩︎

  2. Shabbat↩︎

  3. heretic↩︎

  4. In 1946 when Sam was writing this, Brownsville was still 100% Jewish↩︎

  5. This is not likely a great translation… Yiddish: די ציגען און די בלאָטעם↩︎

  6. These regions all have different Yiddish dialects. Litvaks are Lithuanian/northeastern, and Galicianers are from the Galicia region, which is now part of Poland and western Ukraine↩︎

  7. I’m not sure what this exactly refers to: קעהלע↩︎

  8. Boris wrote this based on a play written previously by Shimon Bekerman↩︎

  9. They are cousins, and almost certainly they are first cousins - I believe their mothers were sisters↩︎

  10. Recall, they had also acted together in Philadelphia for the summer of (probably) 1889.↩︎

  11. Probably Singer Hall↩︎

  12. Sam and Charlie indeed were close friends. Along with Sam’s son Louie, Charlie was with Sam when he passed away. There are conflicting historical records about whether Sam actually met Charlie at this time. On one hand, records show that Charlie was born in 1886, and these events are taking place in 1893-94 when Charlie was still a child living in the Lower East Side (as confirmed by Charlie’s obituary in the Forverts). On the other hand, Sholem Perlmutter described that Charlie did indeed act in Brownsville in Singer Hall at the same time as Sam did.↩︎

  13. In fact, as we know from an interview with Sam in the Forverts in 1913, his friend Frank suggested to him that if he’s going to starve to death eating a piece of bread a day, he might as well get married first.↩︎

  14. Not a leading man anymore↩︎

  15. “The Polish Boy.” The play was in fact written by Moishe Ish Horowitz Halevy (who enters the scene in Chapter 28) and is based on the eponymous book by Yitzhak Yoel Linetzky.↩︎

  16. What else would they do?↩︎