Ha-Levi Horowitz. In 1887, playing in Baltimore, he met 14-year-old Bessie Baumfeld-Kaufman, when she came backstage to meet the beautiful young "actress" she had seen on stage, only to discover that "she" was Boris. Bessie soon ran away from home to join the company, and eventually took over the ingenue roles, as Boris moved on to romantic male leads. They married in 1891. In 1891, with Mogulesko, Kessler, and Adler all engaged in starting the Union Theater, Moishe Finkel brought the still relatively unknown Thomashefsky back to New York to star at his National Theater, where Thomashefsky became enough of a success in Moses Halevy Horowitz's operetta David ben Jesse as to force the Union Theater temporarily to abandon its highbrow programming and compete head on. After Adler recruited Jacob Gordin as a playwright and found a way to draw the masses to serious theater with Gordin's The Yiddish King Lear, and then turned to Shakespeare's Othello, Thomashefsky decided to show that he could compete on that ground as well, and responded with the first Yiddish production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which, by all reports, he acquitted himself excellently. His production of Hamlet was more than just a direct translation; the story was also adapted to make it more accessible to a devout European Jewish audience. At the start of the play, young Hamlet has been away at Rabbinical college, and his uncle has seduced the Queen Mother away from King Hamlet, breaking the old man's heart. There are sectarian jokes regarding communication with angels. Claudius spreads a rumor that Prince Hamlet has succumbed to nihilism while away, but his scheme is discovered and the traitor is sent to Siberia in his nephew's stead. The play ends early, with Hamlet ceremonially marrying Ophelia at her funeral then dying of a broken heart. These types of edits were not uncommon in the Yiddish-language theatre scene. Some critics view it as a step away from immigrant assimilation, others as one step further towards common ground between the new residents and their American neighbors. These productions ushered in what is generally seen as the first great age of Yiddish theater, centered in New York and lasting approximately until a new wave of Jewish immigration in 1905—08 once again resulted in a vogue for broad comedy, vaudeville and light operettas, which the Thomashefskys embraced wholeheartedly, especially in performing Leon Kobrin's plays about immigrant life.