Kobrin's 30 or so plays spanned both "golden ages" of Yiddish theater in America. When he started as a playwright at the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish theater was bringing to America challenging modern classics, such as the works of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, and Leo Tolstoy, sometimes before these had yet been presented on the English-language American stage; and his career continued into the era of the art theater movement in Yiddish, exemplified in New York by Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre. Kobrin continued, throughout his life, to contribute to Yiddish-language newspapers. He also worked extensively as a translator of modern classics from French and Russian into Yiddish. Among the authors whose work he translated were Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov. His wife, Pauline, collaborated on some of these translations.    1 This is the year given by Liptzin. Sandrow and the "Cambridge History" give 1872.