Dinah Shtettin

Dinah Shtettin (later Dinah Adler and Dinah Feinman; first name sometimes given as Dina, maiden name sometimes given as Stettin) was a prominent Yiddish theater actress. She was the second wife of Jacob Adler, with whom she had a daughter, Celia; they divorced, and she married Siegmund Feinman. Contrary to the custom of the time, she and Adler remained friends even after their divorce.

The daughter of Polish Jews Shtettin had a strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing in London. She began her theatrical career in the chorus of Israel Grodner's London troupe in the mid-1880s, eventually getting small parts, and joining Adler's troupe when the Grodners went to Paris. Adler, then a widower, took up with her, although he was already involved with Jenny ("Jennya") Kaiser, with whom he had taken up while his first wife, Sonya, was still alive, and by whom he had had a son. Her father approved neither of theater nor of Adler, but if his daughter was to be involved with a man, "Let it be a divorce tomorrow, but marriage it must be!" They were married in 1887 just before he left to bring his troupe to the United States; seven months later he came back to London; he returned to New York in 1889, and she followed shortly after.

Her New York debut was in the role of Fanya, the villain's daughter, in Jacob Gordin's commercially unsuccessful first play Siberia (1892), now considered a landmark in the evolution of Yiddish Theater.

References

• Adler, Jacob, A Life on the Stage: A Memoir, translated and with commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld, Knopf, New York, 1999, ISBN 067941351. 261, 302–303.