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Autographed Cabinet card of classy bejeweled actress Bertha Kalich. She was known for her majestic bearing, great beauty, and fluency in many languages. This is a powerful and artistic image. There is much information on this actress on the web some of which I copied below:\"Bertha Kalich
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaBertha Kalich, (also spelled Kalish) (17 May 17, 1874 – 18 April 1939) was a Jewish actress, born in Lemberg, Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine). Though she was well-established as an entertainer in Eastern Europe, she is best remembered as one of the several \"larger-than-life\" figures that dominated New York stages during the \"Golden Age\" of American Yiddish Theatre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Historians estimate that, during her career, Kalich performed more than 125 different roles in seven different languages.According to historian Daniel Soyer, \"she was such a success that anti-Semitic theatergoers, who had come with the intention of pelting her with onions, threw flowers instead.\"Kalich married Leopold Spachner in 1890 at the age of 16. They had two children, a son Arthur (who died young) and a daughter Lilian.
Coming to America
A Placard for the Thalia Yiddish Theatre\'s production of Hamlet, starring \"Madam Bertha Kalish\" in the title role (January 30, 189-?)Even at that age, Kalich already had a major career in at least three countries and four languages. Her success prompted jealousies, however and in 1894 there was rumored to be an assassination plot in the works by some of her rivals. Joseph Rumshinsky, whom she had met during her the Shulamis tour, introduced her to Joseph Edelstein of the People\'s Theatre who offered to sponsor her to New York. His newly founded Thalia Theater was looking for fresh talent, and there Kalich appeared in Di Vilde Kenigin (The wild queen) and a Yiddish production of La Belle Hélène (Beautiful Helen). She also took reprised former roles of Shulamis, Juliette, and Desdemona in a number of Yiddish-language productions.In her new home, Kalich set out to emphasize her dramatic skills over her musical talents, working hard as a proponent of the Yiddish theater movement, hoping to help the theatres gain credibility in addition to notoriety. Anti-semitism in America had initially led audiences to believe that Jewish immigrants were incapable of producing anything more than low-brow, minstrel entertainment, but Thalia had made a name for itself with its revolutionary Yiddish-language translations of Shakespeare. Kalich played a number of roles in these landmark works, even beating out the other male stars for a chance to play the coveted role of Hamlet. According to Yiddish theatre scholar Joel Berkowitx, Shakespeare\'s plays served \"as both sources and symbols\" in helping Jewish immigrants \"cross the bridge from Yiddish to American culture.\"It also didn\'t hurt that fans compared Kalich to another famous female Hamlet of the era, Sarah Bernhardt, and in fact many newspapers would go on to call her the \"Jewish Berhardt\" in the years to come.\"
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