Boris Thomashefsky was born in 1868 in a village in the Kiev region of Ukraine and was raised in a town where his grandfather was the city's cantor.
At the age of eleven, young Boris left home for the town of Berdichev, where he became a choir boy for the town's cantor, Nisan Belzer.
In an article from his memoirs, Thomashefsky wrote that he recalls that at a time when he sang with Cantor Belzer, the famous Yiddish actor Sigmund Mogulesko had come to the synagogue and heard him sing. Mogulesko then invited Thomashefsky to the theatre, and this indeed was the first time that Boris Thomashefsky had ever seen acting in a theatre.
After the pogroms, in 1881, Thomashefsky traveled with his family to New York City. Initially he worked in a paper factory on Chatham Square in Manhattan, and here he had the opportunity to lay the foundation for Yiddish theatre in America.
Boris Thomashefsky turned out to be one of the Yiddish theatre’s greatest stars.
The theatre critic B Gorin wrote the following about Boris Thomashefsky:
"Thomashefsky was still a young boy, still a child, when he came to America, and he, more than all the other actors adapted quickly to the so-called American extravaganza.
This extravaganza is a purely American product, and the American audiences loved it.
The entire event is based on a song, or a joke, an innovation with half-clad young women and special effects ...
And since Thomashefsky was younger than all the other actors when he came to the United States, this extravaganza made a very strong impression upon him, as it did with all the others.
In the theatres in which he appeared he always attempted to bring in the spirit of these extravaganzas.
This doesn't mean that his 'shtick' was saturated with extravaganzas.
For the Yiddish theatre, this would be too airy, too uncontrolled, and too clownish.
However, Thomashefsky, unbeknownst to himself, always strove to give in to his 'shtick,' with at least a hint of an extravaganza.
Thomashefsky, more than everyone in the other theatres, tore down the separation between the stage and the audience, and the viewer was invited in a friendly manner to take part in a sing-along in which everyone participated.
In Thomashefsky's theatre, more than any other theatre, people enjoyed themselves under the American flag.
While this nationalism began to spread among the American Jews, the blue flag of the Zionist movement appeared on the scene.
Thomashefsky, more than any of the other actors, was drawn to musical comedy with its gangbuster material from the American stage, which was half-operetta and half-extravaganza."
In a similar manner, Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Forward newspaper, wrote this about Thomasshefsky and his female audience:
"In those years of 'historic operettas' and 'biblical princes,' he was exactly in the right place. It was impossible to imagine a more handsome prince than Thomashefsky.
A biblical prince must wear short pants (so that the women who came to the theatre could see his legs, which appeared nude above the knees.) Thomashefsky had the nicest-looking pair of legs on the Yiddish stage. Thus he became the darling for the theatre-going world, especially among the women.
The girls would forgo the most important necessities and purchase tickets to a play in which they would be able to see Thomashefsky.
They would tell one another that in such and such a role, he was particularly bare and especially handsome.
They would remember every nook and cranny upon which he stood, and how he appeared, and from what vantage point it would be best to observe him."
The editor of the “Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre” wrote about him this way:
"Boris Thomashefsky indirectly became a founder of our Yiddish language. ... He formulated and nurtured the Yiddish theatre in America. He was the first to put together a troupe for New York, and the first to create troupes for the surrounding regions. He was the first to experiment with new plays and create interesting personas and characters.
He was the man who wrote limitless plays, and still later technically reworked plays written by others.
He represented the greatest aspects and importance of Yiddish Theatre -- the large companies, the full orchestras, the special sets, the first to bring a large first-class troupe of actors to America, the first to bring in an assimilated Jewish-Yiddish dramatist, Osip Dymov, and from the European Yiddish theatre, the [famed] Vilna Troupe."
Boris Thomashefsky was one of the Yiddish theatre's greatest actors.
