Ida Kaminska Speaks Nostalgically of Another Great Yiddish Actress–her Mother

Ida Kaminska, the former “first lady” of the Yiddish theater in Poland, spoke nostalgically here of another great Yiddish actress, the late Esther Rachel Kaminska, who was her mother. Mme Kaminska, with her husband and children, left Poland last year in the wake of the Warsaw regime’s official anti-Semitic campaign. She had been director of the Yiddish State Theater in Warsaw, a Government-sponsored enterprise. She appeared here at the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club to mark the 34th anniversary of her mother’s death. She recalled that the late Esther Kaminska, born in a small village near Grodno, became an overnight star without benefit of dramatic training and was hailed in the pre-World War II era as the queen of Europe’s flourishing Yiddish theater. Mme. Kaminska was presented with a book on the career of Esther Kaminska by Zalmen Zylberzweig, a historian of the Yiddish theater in America and Europe.