Sonya Adler

Sonya ("Sophia") Adler (died 1886), born Sonya Oberlander, early stage name Sonya Michelson, was one of the first women to perform in Yiddish theater in Imperial Russia. She later was the first wife of actor Jacob Adler, with whom she relocated to London in 1883 after Yiddish theater was banned in Russia.

A Jew from Odessa, Ukraine, she was from a genteel family, descended from Jews from the Courland (now Latvia). Jacob Adler, in his memoir, remarks that at the time he met her, she was a student at the University of Odessa, who, like him, spoke Yiddish and Russian, but also spoke much better German than he, and also excellent French. He adds that "like all the best young people of the day" she was a nihilist, a "serious young student and revolutionary", and that her (and her family's) passion for theater, and their vision of what Yiddish theater could become, kept him in the profession through the difficult early years of his career as an actor.

Her debut as a professional actress (Odessa, 1878) was in the title role of Abraham Goldfaden's darkly comic operetta Breindele Cossack, in the troupe of Israel Rosenberg, the first Yiddish theater troupe in Imperial Russia; at first she played opposite Jacob Spivakovsky, but she pulled strings so that Jacob Adler, to whom she was already close at the time, would get the role. The next few years of theatrical touring had their ups and downs; initially, so did her relationship with Adler, but they married in Poltava in 1880. For greater detail on this troupe and its travels, see Israel Rosenberg.

...
Wikipedia