Born in 1858 in Odessa, Russia, Sara Levitzky was of a well-to-do Jewish family. She studied singing at the Odessa Conservatory for a time and then joined a Yiddish theater troupe managed by Maurice Heine, whom she shortly married. The repressions that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 bore heavily on the Jews of Russia, and in September 1883 Yiddish plays were expressly forbidden. Early the next year the Heine troupe emigrated to the United States, where Sara soon gained a following in the Yiddish theater in New York City. In 1890 she divorced Heine and married Jacob Adler, the leading tragic actor on the American Yiddish stage. Adler, together with playwright Jacob Gordin, was undertaking to revitalize the Yiddish theater, then overburdened by outmoded stock material, with modern drama reflecting the urban milieu of Jews in America. Sara and Jacob Adler╒s productions over the next several decades, mainly at their own theater on the Bowery, were the rebirth of serious Yiddish theater. She played some 300 leading roles, including many from the popular theatrical repertoire of the day. Her greatest role, and the one that established her preeminence on the Yiddish stage, was that of Katusha Maslova in Gordin╒s dramatization of Tolstoy╒s Resurrection. A close second was her starkly realistic portrayal of the abandoned and unbalanced wife in Gordin╒s Homeless. She performed infrequently after Jacob Adler╒s death in 1926. In 1939 she recreated her role in Resurrection at a tribute to her at the New Yorker Theatre. Not the least of her contributions to the theater were her children Stella Adler, born in 1902, and Luther Adler, born in 1903. Sara Adler died in New York City on April 28, 1953.
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