gone. But I do have complaints, though I do not know to whom, that my dear Jewish child is growing up to be a coarse, un-Jewish, insolent boor, and I expect that some day I will be cursed for that very thing that I brought into the world... Here in America ... it has thrown all shame aside and not only is it not learning anything, it has forgotten whatever good it used to know.”" “In February 1902, Jewish builder and philanthropist Harry Finschel bought a piece of land of about 10,000 square feet, at the south corner of Grand and Chrystie Streets with the intention to erect on the site a theatre for Yiddish performances.” At the time of the opening of the Grand Theatre in New York (1903), New York's first purpose-built Yiddish theater, the New York Times noted: "That the Yiddish population is composed of confirmed theatregoers has been evident for a long time, and for many years at least three theatres, which had served their day of usefulness for the English dramas, have been pressed into service, providing amusement for the people of the Ghetto." In fact, this was a tremendous understatement of what was going on in Yiddish theatre at the time. Around the same time, Lincoln Steffens wrote that the theatre being played at the time in Yiddish outshone what was being played in English. Yiddish New York theatregoers were familiar with the plays of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and even Shaw long before these works played on Broadway, and the high calibre of Yiddish language acting became clear as Yiddish actors began to cross over to Broadway, first with Jacob Adler's tour de force performance as Shylock in a 1903 production of The Merchant of Venice, but also with performers such as Bertha Kalich, who moved back and forth between the city's leading Yiddish-language and English-language stages. Nina Warnke wrote: "In his memoirs, A. Mukdoni summed up the ambivalent feelings Russian Jewish intellectuals had about the influx of American plays and players onto their soil on the eve of the war: 'The American repertoire—be it the good or bad one—and the American actors—be they the good or bad ones—made us realize that the Yiddish theatre is really in America and that here in Poland and Russia the Yiddish theatre lives off the fallen crumbs that it collects under the rich American table.' "Mukdoyni was certainly