Yiddish theater and radicals found a home at Douglas Park Auditorium

If the walls of the Douglas Park Auditorium could talk, they might well speak Yiddish. A three-story structure, its facade sporting bas-relief lions and angels, it stands at the intersection of Kedzie and Ogden avenues. When it opened around 1911, Eastern European immigrants were transforming North Lawndale into a Jewish neighborhood.

Their ears were attuned to the overtly sweet and unabashedly sentimental cadences of the Douglas Park Auditorium’s Yiddish theatrical troupe. Maynard Wishner...