the highly cultured scion of a wealthy odessa jewish family, spivakofsky had an academic education and was already a well-traveled young man who, by jacob adler's account "acted with talent and taste in russian amateur theatricals" and "recited the poetry of pushkin with something close to genius" (adler, 1999, 60) when he was sent in 1877 to bucharest, romania as a foreign correspondent for an odessa newspaper, to cover the russo-turkish war. he crossed paths with abraham goldfaden, who only a year earlier had founded the first professional yiddish-language theater troupe, and abandoned journalism to become a romantic leading man.