Herman Yablokoff was born in 1902 in Grodno, Polish Lithuania. He graduated from a Hebrew school and sang as a choir boy at the age of ten with Yoshe Slonimer, the city cantor. After that he would also travel about and sing with other cantors.
During World War I, Yablokoff was taken into the troupe of the theatre director Guzik, where he made his debut in a child’s role as “Isrolik” in a play written by Boris Thomashefsky’s called “Dos pintele yid.”
Later on he moved into adult roles in Lipovski's and Kompaneyets' troupes, and in 1924 he worked with the ”Kovner United Troupe” for four years and then traveled around to such countries as Latvia, Germany and Holland. Eventually Yablokoff immigrated to America and began playing on stages in Toronto, Montreal, and Los Angeles before settling in New York.
Yablokoff became one of the most pervasive personalities of the Second Avenue Theatre world during the heyday of American Yiddish theatre in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the many major musical shows he wrote, directed, and produced was “Der Payatz, or, The Clown,” which catapulted him to even wider fame under that sobriquet. He further popularized that role on his weekly Yiddish radio program of the same name. The song, “Papirosn,” or “Cigarettes,” was his most popular song.
Herman Yablokoff later went on tour to Israel, Scandinavia, Europe, Cuba, and South America, and he frequently played opposite his wife, the equally well-known Yiddish actress and singer Bella Mysell. But his most important trip was his seven-month tour of displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy following the end of the Second World War, where he gave more than one hundred performances for 180,000 homeless Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
Yablokoff was accepted into the Hebrew Actors Union in 1931 and went on to serve as its president for a number of terms after World War II. He was also president of the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance, as well as chairman of the Yiddish National Theatre in New York.
As a Yiddish songwriter, lyricist, actor, playwright, director, and producer, Herman Yablokoff did it all.
