Sonya Adler

Her debut as a professional actress (Odesa, 1878) was in the title role of Abraham Goldfaden's darkly comic operetta Breindele Cossack, in the troupe of Israel Rosenberg, the first Yiddish theater troupe in Imperial Russia; at first she played opposite Jacob Spivakovsky, but she pulled strings so that Jacob Adler, to whom she was already close at the time, would get the role.

[citation needed] The February 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II was calamitous for the Jews of Russia, for Yiddish theater, and for the Adlers.

The mourning for the tsar meant there would be no performances in the capital; in addition the political climate of Russia turned sharply against the Jews.

[2] After a few more months of continuing to perform in Łódź and Zhytomyr, Sonya returned to her parents' house in Odesa to give birth to her daughter Rivkah (Rebecca), who later died in London at the age of 3.

[3] Sonya, too, died in London, from an infection contracted while giving birth to her second child, Abram ("Abe") Adler, in 1886 at age 27.