"Whatever success I may have..." - Anna Held

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August 4, 2016 9:54 AM

Helene Anna Held (19 March 1872 – 12 August 1918), known professionally as Anna Held, was a Polish-born French stage performer and singer.

Anna Held

"Whatever success I may have attained is due to the fact that since I was old enough to work at all, my ambition has never deserted me." - Anna Held.

Helene Anna Held (19 March 1872 – 12 August 1918), known professionally as Anna Held, was a Polish-born French stage performer and singer, most often associated with impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, her common-law husband.

Born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, she was the daughter of a German-Jewish glove maker, Shimmle (aka Maurice) Held, and his French-Jewish wife, Yvonne Pierre.

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Sources of her year of birth range from 1865 to 1873, but 1872 has been accepted in general. In 1881, antisemitic pogroms forced the family to flee to Paris, France.

When her father's glovemaking business failed, he found work as a janitor, while her mother operated a kosher restaurant.

Held began working in the garment industry, then found work as a singer in Jewish theatres in Paris and, later, after her father's death, London, where her roles included the title role in a production by Jacob Adler of Abraham Goldfaden's Shulamith; she was also in Goldfaden's ill-fated Paris troupe, whose cashier stole their money before they ever played publicly.

As a young woman in France, Held converted to Roman Catholicism. She remained so the rest of her life, and declined even to acknowledge her Jewish heritage.

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