(1872-1959)
Born in Poland, David Pinski began his playwriting life in Warsaw before immigrating to the United States in 1899, where he wrote most of his 38 plays for Yiddish theatre companies. He demonstrated impressive versatility in style for works including the realistic tragedy Isaac Sheftl (1896) and two symbolic treatments of Jewish history, The Tsvi Family (1904) and The Eternal Jew (1906). His Yankl the Smith (1906), a drama about love and jealousy, was made into a 1938 motion picture, The Singing Blacksmith. Pins-ki's greatest success, The Treasure (1910), was first directed by Max Reinhardt in German, then in Yiddish, after which it was produced in English in 1920 by the Theatre Guild with a cast including Celia Adler, Dudley Digges, and Henry Travers. A comedy about the role poverty plays in human greed, The Treasure is Pinski's most enduring work. The Provincetown Players staged Pinski's The Final Balance in 1928 at their New York theatre, but it ran for only 28 performances.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.