You might be surprised to learn that Edward G Robinson's first professional acting job was in the Yiddish theatre, albeit in only one production.
An interesting incident was written about his experience in this play and is told in a biography of Robinson, entitled "Little Caesar," which was written by the author Alan L Gansberg. It goes as such:
"In 1913, at the young age of nineteen, Edward G Robinson was looking for work in the theatre. His pal, Pepe Schildkraut, was the son of Rudolph Schildkraut, one of the premier actors of the Yiddish theatre, and Pepe mentioned that his father was looking for a short-term replacement for a small role in his current play, “Number 37,” at the West End Theatre. Robinson jumped at the chance, and Schildkraut senior agreed. Since the play was in Yiddish – Robinson would have preferred English, although Yiddish was his first language – he chose the name Edward Golden for the program. He rehearsed with the great Schildkraut, more than a little awed.
Robinson – or Golden – had one scene in the second act, played entirely with Schildkraut. He was a district attorney in his fifties, but it was not unusual for younger actors to play older men in the Yiddish theatre. ….
Edward G Robinson wrote about this experience in his autobiography. He wrote this:
During my senior year, Pepe Schildkraut came to me with a very strange and complimentary request. His father, Rudolph Schildkraut, needed a replacement for an actor in the cast of “Number 37,” a play in which he was appearing at the West End Theatre. It was the part of the district attorney, occurred in the second act, and was mostly a dialogue between Schildkraut, the accursed, and the district attorney. The district attorney was supposed to be a man in his fifties, and I was barely nineteen, but that did not bother the senior Mr. Schildkraut. In the Yiddish theatre it was nothing for a child of fifteen to play a man of seventy, though I doubt the reverse ever occurred.
In any case, I was delighted and thrilled --- until I discovered that the play was in Yiddish. Now there have been rumors, through the years, that I had my start as a Yiddish actor. It is sadly not true. The truth of it is that the only role I ever played in Yiddish is that one play with Rudolph Schildkraut, and I appeared under the name of Edward Golden.
Let me make some deeply felt observations about the Yiddish theatre at this point. It was a great classic theatre, and companies would travel from Poland and Eastern Europe to South America, South Africa, and the United States, playing Chekhov, Sudermann, and Shakespeare. These were superb repertory companies, most of them, and they specialized in tragedy. What else?
Of course, from time to time, there were also comedies, usually with bitter and satiric undertones, with lovely actresses like Molly Picon and Bessie Thomashefsky. But tragic or comic, they played to enormous audiences. The Yiddish theatre is all but gone due to the restrictive Johnson Immigration Act of 1920 that cut off the flow of Yiddish-speaking immigration, and thus, at the same time, cut off the new audiences. Many of the great Yiddish actors made the wrenching and difficult transition from Yiddish to English. Among them are Jacob Ben-Ami, Maurice Moscovitch, Bertha Kalish, Muni Weisenfreund (who changed his name to Paul Muni), Molly Picon (who in her seventies can still do handsprings), and even Rudolph Schildkraut himself. I am certain he demanded from his American actors the same rigorous rehearsing he demanded from me.
I remember him as a painstaking director, but I was a quick study and pretty optimistic about my chances to cut the mustard. Unfortunately, I mingled with members of the audience on the sidewalk before the curtain rose on the first performance, and a gentleman, an actor, came up to me and said, “Congratulations. You’re playing with Schildkraut. What will happen to you if you forget your lines?”
Such a prospect had never occurred to me. But from the moment he said it, it never left my mind. While I was on stage, his words kept interfering with the text of the play. And I dried up. I fluffed. I could not recall one more line of the play. Mr. Schildkraut politely gave me the cue again, and exactly nothing happened. I was catatonic. I managed to ad lib something and looked beseechingly around for the prompter – but he was nowhere in sight.
Desperately, I burbled something to the effect that I would have to go into my office (off stage) to check on some law books relevant to the case. I left Mr. Schildkraut to the mercies of the audience and fled backstage, looked for the prompter, and found him eventually. As he gave me the line, mirabile dictu [marvelously], I also remembered the rest of the play.
And so I walked back on the stage to find that Mr. Schildkraut had been ad-libbing with bits and pieces of previous plays he had been in, and it was perfectly evident that the audience had no idea anything was wrong.
We finished our scene; Mr. Schildkraut took all his bows and actually motioned me forward to take one of my own, and then the curtain rang down.
“So what was it, young man?” asked Mr. Schildkraut.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, “I forgot my lines.”
“So what was such a problem?” asked Mr. Schildkraut. “All you had to do was ask me and I would have told you.”
