Juliusz Berger – aktor dwóch scen

The article recalls the outstanding actor Juliusz Berger (1928-1999), who was one
of the few twentieth-century artists in Poland who played simultaneously in two
different languages – Polish and Yiddish. Raised in a completely assimilated intelligentsia
home in Łuck, deported deep into Soviet Union, he returned to the country,
where he graduated from high school, law studies in Wrocław, and then joined
the theater. He started his stage career at PTD in Wrocław under the supervision of
Edmund Wierciński and Wilam Horzyca. Here Ida Kamińska, who was already
managing the Jewish Theater at that time, saw him and offered him the main role
in the play - her own adaptation of Eliza Orzeszkowa's novel Meir Ezofowicz, which
required him to master the Yiddish language, which he did not know.
I present Berger's artistic profile on the example of his two most famous
roles: Meir Ezofowicz from 1953 at the Jewish Theater and Tewi (Fiddler on the
Roof, 1984) at the Musical Theater in Gdynia. The context for them is Brecht's
Schweizerkez [Schweizerkas] in Mutter Courage und ihre kinders (1957) and Cadyk
in An-ski's The Dybbuk (1991).