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Bella and Samuel Spewack. Bella (25 March 1899 – 27 April 1990) and Samuel Spewack (16 September 1899 – 14 October 1971) were a writing team. Samuel, who also directed many of their plays, was born in Bachmut, Ukraine. [1] He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City [2] and then received his degree from Columbia College.
Bella Spewack, in collaboration with her husband Sam, is known for writing some of the most memorable works of musical theater history, including Leave It to Me (1938) and Kiss Me Kate (1948). The Spewacks also wrote screenplays for several 1940s Hollywood hits, such as Weekend at the Waldorf. The couple contributed to many Jewish organizations and founded the Spewack Sports Club for the ...
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There are 75,000 items in the Spewack collection, including letters, manuscripts, scripts, screenplays, diaries, documents, motion pictures, playbills and more. When the lights came up at the Lucille Lortel Theater on a recent evening for a premier performance, the private side of Sam and Bella Spewack, the renowned husband and wife Broadway writing team, became public years after their death.
Spewack wrote of her Jewish girlhood on New York's Lower East Side around the same time. Twenty-three years old in 1922 and having just made a happy marriage, she wrote of her difficult childhood at the turn of the cen tury off Lower Manhattan's tough streets of Broome and Delancey. Spewack, however, never sought the publication of Streets.
SPEWACK, BELLA (1899?–1990), U.S. journalist, screen-writer, and playwright. Born in Transylvania, Bella Cohen emigrated with her mother to the Lower East Side of New York in 1903. After graduating from Washington Irving High School, she began writing for the socialist newspaper The Call and also worked as a press agent for various organizations.
Bella, who went on to a brilliant career write for stage and screen with her husband Sam, describes the sights, sounds, and characters of urban Jewish immigrant life after the turn of the century. Witty, street-smart, and unsentimental, Bella was a genuine American heroine who displays in this memoir “a triumph of will and spirit” (The Jewish Week).
