Having been a "hole-and-corner lawyer" (without a diploma) and swindler in Odessa,[1] Rosenberg was one of many merchants and middlemen who moved to Bucharest, Romania, at the start of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877.
After several more productions in Odessa, including Breindele Cossack starring Jacob Adler and Sonya Oberlander (then performing under the name Sonya Michelson), their run was cut short by the news that Goldfaden, whose plays they were using without permission, was coming to Odessa with his troupe, and had booked the Remesleni Club from under them.
[2] In Kherson, a granary was adapted into a theater by a wealthy retired soldier, Lipitz Beygun, who imported high-quality scenery from Spain.
Here they acquired a new prompter, Avrom Zetzer—whom Adler describes as a "learned" man who had previously fulfilled the same function for Goldfaden in Romania— and virtuoso Zorach Vinyavich became leader of their orchestra.
They played a month in Chişinău, where people slept in the courtyard to be the first to get tickets, and a 16-year-old David Kessler was almost accepted to join the company as an extra, but was prevented from doing so by his father.
The town lacked a theater, but at Abaza's behest a storehouse was turned into a performance space, furnished in part from the count's own dacha.
The troupe continued on to Zlatapolya, Novomirgorod, and Bogoslav, around which time Alexander Oberlander left to marry and settle down, and was replaced as advance man by a former employer of Adler's named Cheikel Bain.
In Pereiaslav, according to Adler, they played at a fine small theater, but the local police chief tried to treat the actresses as prostitutes.
Learning that in Odessa Osip Mikhailovich Lerner and Goldfaden were each presenting their own versions of Karl Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta, Rosenberg and company decided to do the same.
In the end, reunited, they went on to Zhytomyr with a new director, an apparently rich man named Hartenstein who expressed an interest in investing in them.
They thought they had found "a quiet corner" of the Russian Empire in which "to make a bit of a livelihood", but in fact Hartenstein was simply running through his money.