Break a leg or get shot: the Jewish actors who braved Stalin's terror
The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre had to please Stalin and his henchmen or face dreadful consequences. How did it manage to thrive for so long?I first came across Solomon Mikhoels and the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre in the 1980s, as I researched a PhD in Yiddish. (I say "researched" as I didn't quite finish it and that way it sounds as if I might have done.) Yiddish, the language of east European Jewry, was…