Theater | New Yiddish Rep

gunkel

David Mandelbaum — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 23:45:37 +0000

One of my favorite characters. Gunkel, from Hanoch Levin's Labor Of Life.

The Big Bupkis

David Mandelbaum — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 01:22:29 +0000

Photo Source: George Xenos

Review: Backstage

Shane Bertram Baker's one-man show, written with director Allen Lewis Rickman, may claim to be a guide for gentiles, but it really instructs his primarily Jewish audience on how a Missouri goy came to be fluent in Yiddish performance and language. Supposedly he's about to accept the Young Yiddish Vaudevillian of the Year award (the YYY). It's a bit like Monty Python, if the Pythons reminisced not about music hall but Yiddish, and it makes for a silly, satisfying 75 minutes.

Accompanied by musical director Steve Sterner on piano and drummer Matt Temkin, the balding, exuberant performer in a red velvet smoking jacket tells tall tales about his entry into Yiddish vaudeville. It began when he was taken to see the re-release of the film of "Animal Crackers" in 1974: Neither his father nor his priest could explain Groucho's "Did someone call me schnorrer?" remark. (Basically, a schnorrer is a freeloader). For Baker, the language and the laughter become linked.

Baker incorporates vaudeville set pieces throughout. He demonstrates a "haircut act," one so bad that it's intended to clear the theater (the name comes from the idea that the performer would only see the backs of the patrons' heads as they exit), with silly rope tricks and creaky puns. He hypnotizes a rubber chicken. He often remarks of a vaudevillian, "He's dead now," so that it's a running gag, like Temkin's beat-late rim-shots.

When Baker does the recitations—or "word-artist" work—he's truly powerful. These are in Yiddish, with English supertitles projected. A poem about a bullfight, in which he acts the strong bull, displays pathos and rage. A joke with a dummy leading up to a dirty punch line is delicious. I loved Yossele, the "trained" dog who won't even answer to his name.

New Yiddish Rep, just two years old, aims to invigorate Yiddish theater through the excitement of its work, not nostalgia, according to the mission statement in the program. Baker's fantastic nostalgia is decidedly 21st century.

Death Of A Salesman

David Mandelbaum — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:27:52 +0000

Drama Desk nominations for:

Best Revival

Best Actor

THE FORWARD

Yiddish Breathes New Life Into 'Death of a Salesman'

Ezra GlinterOctober 16, 2015

Is “Death of a Salesman” a Jewish play? Is Willy Loman, its main character, Jewish? The question has been asked almost since “Salesman” was first produced, in 1949. Loman’s precarious life was the fate of many Jews in the 20th century, and playwright Arthur Miller — whose centenary is being celebrated this month — was the son and grandson of Jewish immigrants. He even based the play on his own uncle, a boastful salesman who struggled to make a living. Yet there is no sign in the script that the Lomans are Jews. If Willy once had Jewish roots, they are long gone.

Now a new production of “Death of a Salesman” asks a further question. If Willy Loman was Jewish, did he speak Yiddish? The obvious answer, considering that the play was written and performed in English, is no. But it’s not that simple. Shortly after the premiere of “Salesman” on Broadway, a translation was made by the actor Joseph Buloff, who performed it with his wife, Luba Kadison, first in Argentina and then, with Miller’s blessing, at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn. Now that version, titled “Toyt fun a seylsman,” is being produced by the New Yiddish Rep under the direction of Moshe Yassur, starring Avi Hoffman as Willy. Perhaps, if you grant that Willy Loman really is a Jewish character, he would have been a Yiddish speaking one as well.

Like the New Yiddish Rep’s 2013 production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the use of Yiddish raises new questions about the play, and offers new interpretative possibilities. Superficially there are many similarities between the two productions. Both are landmark pieces of 20th-century theater, and both have murky, albeit potentially Jewish contexts. Although Beckett’s play takes place in an existential void, the author’s participation in the French Resistance, and his writing of the play in the aftermath of the Second World War, gives its post-apocalyptic atmosphere a post-war resonance. Making its characters speak Yiddish only intensified that effect — Vladimir and Estragon are survivors of some sort, and in Shane Baker’s Yiddish translation they were certainly Jewish ones.

So too, although the characters in “Death of a Salesman” are thoroughly deracinated, critics have long identified them as Jews. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler called Willy Loman “crypto-Jewish” and in 2005, on the occasion of a revival of the play in London, David Mamet wrote that Loman is “unmistakably a Jew” and that the play “is a Jewish play.” As theater critic George Ross wrote in Commentary upon seeing the 1951 Yiddish production, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the original, and the Broadway production was merely Arthur Miller’s translation into English.” Yiddish, one imagines, would turn Willy Loman and his family from crypto-Jews into real Jews.

Yet strangely — almost absurdly — that isn’t the case. However one wants to parse Willy Loman’s imagined background, in the original version he is detached from any sort of ethnic community. As Miller himself put it in an essay published in honor of the play’s 50th anniversary, in 1999, if the Lomans are Jewish they are “light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.” To my mind, the Lomans could just as well be second or third generation descendants of Irish or Italian immigrants, or no immigrants at all. The important thing isn’t what identity they might once have had — it’s that by the time we get to know them, any remnant of it has vanished.

The Yiddish production, it turns out, does almost nothing to alleviate this absence. Indeed, unlike “Godot,” the use of Yiddish here doesn’t add much to the play. This isn’t to say that it isn’t an excellent production — it is. Although the cast is uniformly outstanding, attention must be paid to Hoffman as Willy, Suzanne Toren as his long-suffering wife Linda, and Daniel Kahn as his son Biff, with whom he has a stormy and tortured relationship. Although there have been many celebrated productions of “Salesman” over the decades, with actors from Dustin Hoffman to Philip Seymour Hoffman filling the lead role, it is hard to imagine more dynamic or moving performances.

Other aspects of the staging are equally impressive. Unlike the original two-tiered set, this production is stripped down so that the only furniture is a table and chairs. Yet thanks to innovative blocking, the minimal arrangement serves just as well as a more elaborate one might have. And while the lack of props might make a sometimes confusing play even more so — throughout the play Willy drifts in and out of fantasy, speaking to characters who appear on stage but whom only he can see — its status as a classic work of 20th-century American drama makes this a minor concern. But this production, excellent as it is, would have been just as good in English.

Or maybe not. The New Yiddish Rep, as with its production of “Godot,” has done more with “Toyt fun a seylsman” than just create a cultural curiosity. It has, even at this late date, expanded the boundaries of Yiddish itself. But rather than infusing “Salesman” with Jewishness, as Yiddish did for “Godot,” here the play takes the Jewishness out of Yiddish.

For most Yiddish enthusiasts, the language is inextricably bound up with the Jewish parts of our lives. This makes sense; Jewish life has a more intense quality to it in Yiddish than it does in English. But for most of us, this is only one aspect of our selves. The culture we live in is predominantly not Jewish, our friends include many non-Jews, and our jobs (the present case excluded) often have little to do with Judaism. No matter how much we embrace Yiddish, it is only a part of the whole.

Yet Yiddish aspired to be more than that. For the centuries in which it was the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish was the language of the street, the market and the home. Later, Yiddishists envisioned expanding its reach further, keeping pace with the modern world. It would be the language of the law firm and the doctor’s office, the restaurant and cafe, the concert hall and the theater, even the football field and boxing ring. It would be a language you could go to university in, and study anything at all.

That never happened, quite. Perhaps the closest it came was in the Soviet Union, where Communist policy separated Yiddish as a national language from its roots in Judaism — a tragic and misguided vision that ended in tears. And these days, no one is likely to revive that dream. But this production of “Death of a Salesman” gives us a glimpse of what such a Yiddish existence might have been like in America. Unlike most Yiddish cultural events, this play comes with almost none of the usual trappings. There are no mentions of the shtetl or references to the Holocaust; no folk songs or klezmer music, and certainly no religion. Consider how far Judaism remains from this play: when death strikes, no one says Kaddish. Even as Yiddish speakers, these characters are more assimilated than many of the most assimilated Jews today.

Which isn’t to say that the Yiddish-speaking world “Seylsman” depicts is entirely hypothetical. Like Miller’s original, it takes place in a recognizable time and place. In its depression-era period, there were Yiddish-speaking, Willy Loman-ish travelling salesman, who went up and down the East Coast selling to Jewish and non-Jewish clientele alike. The production further accentuates the historical moment with its use of English. From the title on down, the script makes liberal use of English words and even slips completely into English from time to time — a historically accurate representation of American Yiddish vernacular. Similarly, English draws ethnic lines between characters; in one of the most striking departures from Miller’s text, we hear Willy teaching his non-Jewish mistress how to thank him in Yiddish for stockings. The Lomans aren’t particularly Jewish, but Yiddish does make them a people apart.

Yet even if the world of “Seylsman” could have existed in some sliver of time, the play is clearly not meant to represent a realistic circumstance. True, the two Loman sons, Happy and Biff, throw a few more English phrases into their conversation than their parents do. But this degree of Yiddish-speaking continuity, where a second or third generation would speak among themselves primarily in Yiddish, was practically unheard of outside of committed Yiddishist families, which the Lomans certainly are not. Even the introduction of ethnicity in an otherwise de-ethnicized play doesn’t contradict its overall “everyman” tenor. The Lomans may belong to their own language group, but otherwise nothing distinguishes them from the rest of society.

“Toyt fun a seylsman” thus presents a kind of alternate history, where one could be an alienated, assimilated Jew, and still speak Yiddish. It’s a strange and unrealistic prospect, and witnessing it on stage is a weird experience. But it is also a refreshing one. This is Yiddish that just is, with no justifications, explanations or apologies. It’s a fascinating thought experiment — and also great theater.

Ezra Glinter is the deputy culture editor of

NEW YORK TIMES

Review: ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Yiddish

By Laura Collins-Hughes

Nov. 2, 2015

Credit...Ronald L. Glassman

New Yiddish Rep: Death of a Salesman

There are moments in New Yiddish Rep’s “Death of a Salesman” when language comes memorably to the fore: the “achtung” Linda Loman utters when she tells her sons that attention must be paid; the phrase “riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” which acquires a striking musicality when said in Yiddish.

For a non-Yiddish speaker, this somewhat streamlined adaptation — written by Joseph Buloff in 1949, the year “Salesman” had its Broadway premiere — is a roundabout way of getting at Arthur Miller’s play. Yet language in Moshe Yassur’s production is no barrier, thanks to the fineness of the performances and the clarity of Daniel Kahn’s English supertitles.

These are Lomans fit to bruise some hearts: the exhausted Willy (Avi Hoffman), whose determined delusions have ceased to fool even himself; the doggedly buoyant Linda (Suzanne Toren), his fiercely, fretfully protective wife; Biff (Mr. Kahn), their golden child turned ne’er-do-well, who long ago lost faith in his father; and Happy (Lev Herskovitz), the placating younger son, who inherited more of Willy’s weak character than he may know.

Even in his late-life humiliation, Willy yearns to be a big shot. But Mr. Hoffman is small, which adds poignancy to his salesman’s bluster. There is fondness between Willy and Ms. Toren’s splendid Linda, and a warm, brotherly ease between Happy and Biff, who, in Mr. Kahn’s portrayal, may qualify as the most wrenching member of this sad clan.

Shane Baker, as the Lomans’ more prosperous neighbor Charley; Ben Rosenblatt, as Charley’s diligent son, Bernard; and Adam Shapiro, as Willy’s coldblooded boss, Howard, also turn in strong performances.

So it’s frustrating that design, of all things, gets in the way of this production, presented in association with the Castillo Theater. Opting for a minimal set (by Mark Marcante) and few props, Mr. Yassur stages much of the play with straightforward simplicity, allowing the acting to speak for itself.

But when Willy’s mind grows muddled, and when he flashes back to the past, up come the creepy lights (by Gertjan Houben) — usually violet, sometimes garish green — and the eerie music (by Ellen Mandel).

These jarring distractions arguably have roots in Mr. Miller’s own stage directions, but here they read as misguided midcentury modernism, confusing the action rather than clarifying it. Ultimately, they become a fatal flaw.

Yosl Rakover Speaks To God

David Mandelbaum — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:12:00 +0000

KIRKUS REVIEW

A remarkable testament to faith in the face of suffering. Zvi Kolitz is a Lithuanian Jew who left Europe in 1940 for Jerusalem, where he built a life as a daring Zionist freedom fighter. Just over a year after WWII ended, he wrote a gut-wrenching short story, —Yosl Rakover Talks to God,— the last confessions of a fictional Jewish man who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story ran in Di Yiddishe Tsaytung, a Jewish paper in Buenos Aires, on September 25, 1946. Later, Kolitz moved to New York, penned a few obscure books, contributed columns to The Jewish Week and Der Algemeine Journal, and lectured at Yeshiva University. His short story, however, got separated from its author. It began to circulate, sans Kolitz’s byline, as a true testimony unearthed in the Holocaust’s aftermath. In 1954, Di Goldene Keyt, a Yiddish quarterly in Tel Aviv, ran —Yosl Rakover— as —an authentic document.— The next year, it was broadcast on a Berlin radio station, and was run in the Parisian Zionist journal La Terre RetrouvÇe. Thomas Mann praised the text for offering a rare glimpse into the human condition. This volume reunites author and story, laying to rest any rumors that the document was written by someone who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story could stand alone: Rakover, who boldly privileges Torah over God, declares that despite everything God has done to —make me cease to believe in You . . . I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You.— This new edition also includes an essay by Paul Badde about Kolitz, a piece by Levinas about —Yosl Rakover,— and Leon Weiseltier’s somewhat anticlimactic reply to Levinas. The short story remains a fiction, but, as Levinas reminds us, that does not undermine its truth: Indeed, it is true as —only fiction can be.—

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~akantor/readings/kolitz_yossel_rakover_speaks_to_god.pdf

It Came to Life, This Legend of Death

The heartrending Holocaust story of one Yosl Rakover - a figment of the imagination of author Zvi Kolitz, who died last month - was published and broadcast in the guise of a factual account for decades

"In one of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved in a little bottle and concealed among heaps of charred stone and human bones, the following testament was found, written in the last hours of the ghetto by a Jew named Yosl Rakover."

Thus begins the story of the last testament of Yosl Rakover of Tarnopol, a Gerer Hasid who lost his wife and six children in the Holocaust, participated in the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, and jotted down his last words before dousing himself with a bottle of gasoline and lighting a match.

In the testament, Rakover settles accounts with God: "And so, my God, before I die, freed from all fear, beyond terror, in a state of absolute inner peace and trust, I will allow myself to call You to account one last time in my life ... You should not pull the rope too tight, because it might, heaven forbid, yet snap. The temptation into which You have led us is so grievous, so unbearably grievous, that You should, You must, forgive those of Your people who in their misery and anger have turned away from You."

In his document, which is 25 pages long, Rakover describes the pride he feels for his Judaism ("I am proud to be a Jew - not despite the world's relation to us, but precisely because of it. I would be ashamed to belong to the peoples who have born and raised the criminals responsible for the deeds that have been perpetrated against us"); refers to the joy he experienced when involved in acts of revenge, albeit minimal, against Germans during the revolt ("Until now, I had never really understood the passage in the Talmud that says, `Vengeance is holy, for it is mentioned between two names of God, as it is written: A God of vengeance is the Lord!'"); expresses his opposition to those who would rationalize the judgment and explain it through the commission of various sins ("To say that we have earned the blows we have received is to slander ourselves. It is a defamation of the name `Jew,' a desecration of the name `God.' It is one and the same. God is blasphemed when we blaspheme ourselves").

However, the main part of the testament focuses on his stubborn insistence on the very belief in God, a belief that remains intact despite all the catastrophes: "I believe in the God of Israel, even when He has done everything to make me cease to believe in Him. I believe in His laws even when I cannot justify His deeds. My relationship to Him is no longer that of a servant to his master, but of a student to his rabbi. I bow my head before His greatness, but I will not kiss the rod with which He chastises me. I love Him. But I love His Torah more. Even if I were disappointed in Him, I would still cherish His Torah. God commands religion, but His Torah commands a way of life - and the more we die for this way of life, the more immortal it is!"

Emotional outcry

The testament of Yosl Rakover, which was the cause of an emotional outcry among many readers around the world, is not an authentic document. It was written by the journalist, filmmaker and theatrical producer Zvi Kolitz, as a story for the Yom Kippur 1946 edition of the Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires, "Yiddishe Zeitung." Kolitz, who was born in Lithuania and fled to Italy and then Palestine even before World War II, never himself experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. At the time of the writing, he was in Argentina, serving as an emissary for the Revisionist party.

As a gifted speaker, Kolitz was asked to write something for the newspaper. Not long before this, milk cans concealing a ghetto diary and important documents compiled by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum had been discovered in Warsaw, giving Kolitz his inspiration. One night in his hotel room, he wrote the short story that he called "Yosl Rakover Talks to God." Kolitz, a man of many talents, died on September 29 in New York.

The German journalist Paul Badde conducted an extensive inquiry into Kolitz and the various incarnations of his story, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1993, to mark the jubilee year of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. In the article, Badde, a religious Catholic, related how he himself came to the story. A friend brought him the work, saying: "Here is someone whose faith still has meaning." Badde went on to become a devoted admirer and close friend of Kolitz.

This week, in a conversation held from Rome, where he is a correspondent for Die Welt (after having served as the newspaper's correspondent in Jerusalem), Badde said that not a week went by that he did not speak with Kolitz, and added that they had even spent several vacations together.

The story ran in the Yiddish newspaper in 1946 as a fictitious document, with credit given to its author. But a few years later, in 1953, someone from Buenos Aires sent the story to the Tel Aviv-based Yiddish newspaper, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), without mentioning the fact that it was a work of fiction, and without the first lines that tell the story of how it was found (which obviously could not have been written by Yosl Rakover himself). The story was published as an authentic document that had been found in the ruins of the ghetto. The editor of the quarterly, the Yiddish poet (and survivor of the Vilna Ghetto), Abraham Sutzkever, would later say: "The thing so shocked us, seemed so authentic, that we didn't even think of doing any tests or verifying it in any way."

This week, Sutzkever told Ha'aretz: "I received this text; it made a big impression on me, and I printed it without thinking too much. It had a strong impact, since people assumed, as I did, that it was an authentic text."

So began the legend of the life and times of Yosl Rakover. Its publication in an important Yiddish journal, by a prominent survivor and poet, must have added to the credibility of this independent version. In actual fact, Kolitz responded after hearing about the publication, and made a point of mentioning his own "ownership" of the story, but the legend was already stronger, at least in some instances, than him. For instance, even Sutzkever's journal, to which Kolitz sent a letter of clarification, did not even bother to print the correction.

In periodicals, prayer books

In January 1955, the story was broadcast on Radio Free Berlin, again as a "document that had been discovered," and two months later, was again published in Paris in the same guise. Kolitz responded again, at which point the story was rebroadcast in Berlin, this time with the real author's identity stated.

Conversely, in Paris the text described as authentic was analyzed by Holocaust scholar Michael Borovitz, who proved that it could not have been written by a Yosl Rakover. (One of the arguments raised by Holocaust critics against the authenticity of the text is that no people of the age of 43, as Rakover is described, took part in the revolt. Furthermore, all of the people who did take part belonged to organized groups and did not act on their own, as Rakover says he did.) All this led Borovitz to declare the text a "forgery."

The writer Chaim Be'er reiterated this claim in the Ha'aretz book supplement nine years ago, charging Kolitz with responsibility for the fake story. Kolitz's nephew, businessman David Kolitz, apprised Be'er of his error, explaining that his uncle had always taken pains to stress that it was a work of fiction. He even brought the two men together for a meeting. Be'er then ran another column in which he set the record straight.

In the United States, excerpts of the "testament" were inserted in several prayer books, Orthodox and Reform alike. Kolitz told Badde that he had heard that in one Conservative synagogue in New York, the text was presented on Yom Kippur by an actor who described the testament as an authentic document. Several worshipers approached the congregation's rabbi, and told him that they knew it was a work of fiction and that they even knew the author. "He replied that he knew, but that the text was more emotional this way."

One scholar in Chicago devoted an entire book to the story, in which he argued with complete confidence that the original work was actually written in English, and that the Yiddish version was merely a subsequent translation, in which the translator added some excerpts of his own.

The legend was so compelling that in 1968, when the text was published in a New York periodical, although it was made clear that this was a work of fiction, a note was added, explaining that although it was not an authentic document, "there was in actual fact a Yosl Rakover in Warsaw who perished in the flames," and whose fate became known to the author, and inspired him to write. Of course, this allegation had nothing to do with reality.

Excerpts of the story appeared in a textbook on issues of religion that was published in Germany a few years ago. It appeared as a genuine document, to which was appended a suggestion for an exercise: "Classify the type of faith that is expressed in this text. Compare it with the charges directed by Ivan Karamazov to God [in the book "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoevsky - Y.S.]. Is Yosl Rakover a modern enemy?"

From Kook to kibbutz

In Israel, the story (again, in its "authentic" version) was mainly adopted by religious Zionists, who saw it as an expression of contending with questions of faith engendered by the Holocaust. Following its publication in Sutzkever's journal, the story was translated and appeared (in excerpted form) in a Bnei Akiva youth movement journal as early as 1955. It received particularly broad publicity after being included in the book, "I Believe: Testimonies of the Lives and Deaths of People of Faith During the Holocaust," published by Mossad Harav Kook in 1965. In the early years of Gush Emunim, it was again considered a popular document among members of the movement. But it was also reprinted in 1971 in Shdemot, a quarterly published by the kibbutz movement - as a genuine document.

Two years ago, the story appeared in a new, full-length translation into Hebrew that was published by the Ministry of Defense Press, this time with Zvi Kolitz clearly marked as the author. This edition included the extensive inquiry by Paul Badde, and several other articles that had been written over the years by the French-Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas, the American-Jewish essayist Leon Wieseltier, and the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Norman Lamm.

Both in its authentic and its fictitious versions, Yosl Rakover's story left a deep impression on philosophers and men of letters throughout the second half of the 20th century. Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, who read it in the form of an authentic account toward the end of his life, described it in a letter as "an emotionally wrenching text, religiously and personally." The author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was once asked about his thoughts on the meaning of the Holocaust, said that he felt "exactly like Yosl Rakover." The philosopher Levinas, who discovered the text in its "story" incarnation, in which it was attributed to "an anonymous author," was not at all bothered by the fact that it was a work of fiction. He described it as "a real text as only a story can be."

In reaction to Yosl Rakover and his irrepressible belief in God, the Jewish philosopher George Steiner said that Jews are "infected with God," in the same way that others are consumed by yearnings or lovesick. The German poet Wolf Bierman wrote: "Ever since I learned that this final prayer was not written in letters of blood at the hour of death, but in ink, by a living, breathing writer, I am in greater admiration of this ingenious text, which in my opinion is one of the finest works of literature in the world."

The author's own story

The biography of Kolitz himself is colorful and fascinating, even discounting the Yosl Rakover affair. He was born in a Lithuanian city of 6,000 Jews, the son of the local rabbi. When he was 14, his revered father died of diabetes and Kolitz left, heading for the Land of Israel. David Kolitz says that when his uncle was in Lithuania, he moved in Betar movement circles. Indeed, en route to Palestine, Kolitz spent a few years in Italy, where he studied history at the University of Florence as well as seamanship at a school for naval officers set up by Betar. Following his years in Italy, he wrote a book praising Mussolini, who he described as a "complete and strong personality, with absolute consistency and a singularly unique force of will ... standing well above all of the other leaders of Europe." Badde explains this saying that "in those days, Mussolini was a strong friend of the Jewish National Movement. `The old Rome,' he used to say, `destroyed Judea, and the new Rome will build it.'"

Kolitz arrived in Palestine at the beginning of World War II, and became active in the Revisionist party. He secretly joined the ranks of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (the pre-state underground militia) and its struggle against British rule. Kolitz's older brother, Eliezer, was killed in July 1941 while serving in the British air force. (Another of the eight siblings is Yitzhak Kolitz, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem.)

Zvi Kolitz became well known in the ranks of the Revisionist movement, primarily as a gifted speaker and fundraiser. Once the war was over, he went to the United States where, according to several members of his family, he was also involved in fundraising for the weapons ship "Altalena," and to Argentina, where he wrote the story of Yosl Rakover.

In the 1950s, he gained a reputation as a screenwriter and the producer of the first full-length Israeli film, "Hill 24 Doesn't Answer." He subsequently explained to Badde that it was the success of the film that had kept them ever since then in the United States. His second wife, Matilda, claimed it was a matter of her inability to learn Hebrew, although there are rumors about tension between him and Menachem Begin, and his disappointment over having not been placed in the higher echelons of the Herut movement. (He was close to Begin's rivals in the Revisionist movement, Hillel Kook and Shmuel Merlin.)

In New York, Kolitz became a theatrical producer of, among other things, the play, "The Deputy," based on the book by Rolf Hochhuth, about the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. He left the world of show business after the failure of the English-language version he produced on Broadway of Habimah's Hebrew musical "King Solomon and Shalmai, the Sandalmaker." His nephew, David, who often visited him in New York, relates that for many years, his uncle's home, which fronted on Central Park, was considered one of the more prestigious cultural salons in Manhattan.

In the last 15 years of his life, Kolitz was once again engaged in the Jewish world. He lectured at Yeshiva University, the stronghold of modern Orthodoxy in New York, on issues of Jewish philosophy, and wrote a column on Jewish affairs in the Jewish Week. In his personal life, he also took a greater interest in observing the mitzvot (commandments). He began putting on tefillin (phylacteries) every morning and kept a kosher kitchen. His sister, Rachel Margaliot, said earlier this month that "throughout all the incarnations of his life, Zvi was always a great believer, which is what enabled him to write `Yosl Rakover.'"

On the day he died, Rabbi Baruch Rakover, a distant relative of his, also passed away in Haifa. David Kolitz says it was this cousin's family name that inspired the name of Yosl Rakover.

Yair Sheleg

International Yiddish Theatre Festival: Yosl Rakover Speaks to God

PAT DONNELLY, MONTREAL GAZETTE

Updated: June 26, 2009

Yosel Rakover Speaks to G-d, which already been presented last week at the festival, was brought back by popular demand.

It’s a disturbing piece about the last Jewish man left in the Warsaw ghetto as the area was being torched by the Nazis. Yosl knows the end is near and has lost his will to live. “The sun probably has no idea how little I regret that I shall never see it again,” he says.

To him it’s an insult to beasts that the Nazis are compared to them. As for Hitler, he sees him not as an animal, but rather as a child of modern man, a product of modernity, an expression of the dark side of humankind.

Life has become a calamity to Yosl and death a liberator. But he hasn’t given up on God, with whom he has an extended conversation as he prepares his final exit.

Yosl laments over his lost grandchildren, compares himself to Job, toys with his prayer shawl, nibbles on a piece of stale bread and ruminates on what it means to be a Jew.

Mandelbaum gives a passionate performance of what’s essentially an extended death scene – a man saying farewell to the world.

The text he delivers was written not as a play but as a newspaper article, in 1946 by Zvi Kolitz. For many years, it was believed to be an eyewitness account, but it is in fact, a fictionalized tale inspired by real events.

Amy Coleman directed this thought-provoking work, which was adapted by Mandelbaum from Kolitz’s story.

Awake And Sing

David Mandelbaum — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 20:16:50 +0000

Jewwis Telegraphic Agency

A classic play sounds more American when it is performed in Yiddish. Go figure.

BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL DECEMBER 5, 2017 12:19 PM

Actors appearing in "Awake and Sing!" from left to right: Ronit Asheri, Moshe Lobel, Lea Kalisch, David Mandelbaum and Eli Rosen. (Pedro Hernandez

NEW YORK (JTA) — Everything I love about the playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets is found in the opening line of his 1935 play “Awake and Sing!”: “Where’s advancement down the place?”

The line is said by Ralph, the thwarted son in a struggling Bronx Jewish family in the heart of the Depression, in that wonderful, weirdly Yiddishesque language Odets created for Broadway and Hollywood. It means something like “I can’t get a promotion at work!” — but there’s no music in a sentence like that.

It’s the music heard in Odets’ 1957 screenplay for “The Sweet Smell of Success,” in which the sleazy denizens of New York’s nightclub society sound like they’re speaking Shakespeare translated into Yiddish then back into English.

“My experience I can give you in a nutshell, and I didn’t dream it in a dream, either — dog eat dog,” says Sidney Falco, the hustling PR man played by Tony Curtis. “In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me!”

And if it takes you a minute to figure out what a character like Ralph or Sidney is saying, that was part of the point: Odets created a version of English that sounded both familiar and alien because he wanted his working-class Jewish characters to sound both familiar and alien. Odets made his name in the ’30s in the proudly left-wing Group Theatre writing kitchen-sink dramas that transformed his own poor Jewish upbringing into a universal call for justice and fair play. When plays like “Awake and Sing!” and “Golden Boy” opened on Broadway, they thrilled and scandalized audiences with their risque content and occasionally radical politics.

So what happens to “Awake and Sing!” when you lose Odets’ conceit, and instead of characters speaking English as if they are speaking Yiddish, the characters actually speak Yiddish? That’s the challenge of a new staging of the play by New Yiddish Rep at Manhattan’s 14th Street Y, where a 1938 Yiddish translation of the play by Chaver Paver is being staged through Dec. 24. Performing Odets in Yiddish might sound both redundant and self-defeating, but it works. Thanks to an excellent cast and a sudden relevance for the play Odets couldn’t have dreamed of, something is definitely gained in the translation.

Luzer Twersky, left, and Ronit Asheri in “Awake and Sing!” at Manhattan’s 14th Street Y. (Pedro Hernandez)

I don’t speak Yiddish, but know enough Hebrew and Leo Rosten that I can hear how a Yiddish sentence gets from here to there. (The New Yiddish Rep production is presented with English supertitles projected above the stage.) Characters wail, flatter, gripe, coo, criticize and crow in the mameloshn. It’s a music all its own.

You do miss cockamamie Odets lines like “In life there’s two kinds — the men that’s sure of themselves and the one who ain’t! It’s a time you quit being a selling-platter and got in the first class.” (What’s a selling-platter? Who knows — but you get the point!)

But you gain something else: a connection to the Jewish past — and the political present.

The Jewish past is coded into Yiddish — not just because it is the language that Bubbe and Zayde spoke, but because it is a river that swept up and grew swollen on the history of the Jews going back to the Israelites. When Jacob, the fiery Marxist grandfather in the play, quotes Isaiah (and gives the play its title), the Hebrew recalls how Cynthia Ozick once described a similar moment in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories: “the six scant Hebrew syllables instantly call up … the full quotation, the tremor or memory aroused by its ancestral uses.” The Bergers have always been a Jewish, if highly assimilated family; the Yiddish reminds you how Jewish they are.

As for the present: No play about immigrants can avoid sounding topical in this age of travel bans and deportations. The Bergers may speak Yiddish at home, but let you know they speak English out in the world. They’ll lapse into English when they need to, as when Ralph is on the phone with a girlfriend, or when they want to, as when the conniving boarder Moe delivers his tag line, “Don’t make me laugh!” An “insurance policy” is an insurance policy, and “Teddy Roosevelt” is Teddy Roosevelt. A younger character like the daughter Hennie toggles between Yiddish and English, and is reluctant to marry a “greenhorn” (or “griner” in Yiddish), an immigrant only three years off the boat. This is the immigrant’s anxiety: eager to fit in, and sometimes disdainful of newer immigrants who remind them of their vulnerability.

It’s impossible to watch a struggling family crowded into a small apartment, speaking a”foreign” language, and not be reminded of the different families, from other countries, who would replace them. This is a play about immigrant dreamers meeting a harsh reality. It’s about a system that needs strong backs and cheap labor — until it doesn’t. The Yiddish in this “Awake and Sing!” makes it a more particular story and, Odets would no doubt kvell, a more universal one.

Theatre Is Easy

Vakh Oyf Un Zing
(Awake and Sing!)

By Clifford Odets, Translated into Yiddish by Chaver Paver;
Directed by David Mendelbaum
Produced by New Yiddish Rep

by Gabriella Steinberg on 12.10.17

BOTTOM LINE: A heartbreaking and gorgeous Yiddish version of the classic American play that wrestles with economic disparity in Depression-era New York.

When you ask those in the Jewish and Yiddish-speaking community how the language is doing, you can expect to hear the following answers: “It’s a dying language.” Or, “we’re experiencing a revival!” I may generalize a bit, but The New Yiddish Rep is able to answer the call of saving the language among mainstream Jews and theatre-goers. The Rep is also reviving the culture’s vitality, which to many, never went away in the first place—you just need to know where to look.

As a progressive Jew living in Brooklyn, I am fortunate to hear Yiddish everywhere. It’s still spoken as a first language in many Chasidic households, and on the other side of the spectrum, there’s a resurgence among leftists in the Ashkenazi community yearning to recreate the culture that almost died out at the hands of the Nazis (and with political turmoil bringing up that particular historical memory, no wonder they are clinging to the mother tongue.) The Rep provides both solutions—it won’t let the Yiddish language die, and it will revive Yiddish culture.

I appreciate the Rep’s attention to detail when choosing their productions. Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! is a great choice for a company looking to analyze the Jewish American experience in 2017. The 1935 play tells the story of the Berger family in the Bronx, a working-class Jewish family concerned with survival and importance. Matriarch Bessie (Ronit Asheri) holds the family together like glue with her strong will and ever-present fear of the unknown, including possible eviction and losing her family to assimilation. With her subdued husband Myron (Eli Rosen), a law school dropout who relies on gambling for any semblance of a financial future, Bessie has two children, Hennie (Mira Kessler) and Ralph (Moshe Lobel).

When Hennie becomes pregnant, her mother arranges a quick marriage with Sam (Luzer Twersky), a meek man who rents a room from the family. Another boarder, Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler), who’s embraces a nouveau riche lifestyle, is full of boisterous masculinity; he pines for Hennie but has trouble expressing his feelings. Meanwhile, Ralph is in love with a girl in Manhattan, but cannot build a future with her because the little money he has goes towards supporting his own family. Appalled by his sister's shotgun union, and constantly cut down by his mother, Ralph leans into his grandfather Jacob (David Mandelbaum), a jolly, leftist idealist who loves music and scripture.

The structure of this family is much more a commentary on economic disruption than it is a recalling of a family’s personal drama. Odets cleverly includes a multitude of perspectives that resonate with audiences to this day. The brilliance of this production, and Chaver Paver’s translation (Paver had translated Awake and Sing! for the burgeoning Second Avenue Yiddish theatre community of yore) is that it allows the family's fears to resonate within a language that is second nature to many and at the same time, dying out for others. Listening to Bessie bemoan the fate of her family in a language that represents so much history (of both despair and joy) is a deeply moving experience.

New Yiddish Rep's production at the 14th Street Y is fascinating, and the acting is the winning feature. Founding member David Mandelbaum directs and plays a delightful Jacob, and co-founder Amy Coleman is a gender-bent Uncle Morty (as Aunt Mimi) who often speaks in English—a symbol of her successful assimilation into mainstream society. As Bessie, Asheri is a powerhouse of matriarchal control who teeters on the ballistic, as Odets intended. Lobel plays Ralph with a heartbreak I haven’t seen in previous productions. The use of Yiddish lends itself well to the divide between Ralph and his love Blanche (who he keeps secret from his family)—he speaks to her over the phone in English. I’ve seen actors play Ralph with pent-up frustration, but Lobel reaches for the despair of this character with great maturity.

I am impressed with how this ensemble leans into gender dynamics and flips them on their head. Mandelbaum’s direction leaves room for male vulnerability—every male character cries audibly at least once—and lets the female characters stand as beacons of strength against the men who are putty in their hands (even Hennie has a line in the text, “I never cry,” before she breaks down in front of Myron—the one exception to this dynamic). I appreciate this foray into another layer of commentary in Odets' text: a broken economy affects all genders.

The production is lovely and simple. In more elaborate productions of Awake and Sing!, the plentiful furniture can be difficult for actors to navigate in moments of great turmoil. This isn't to say Nathan Rhoden's design is subpar—he successfully executes a lavish set with great respect for the supertitles, which are easy to see when watching the action. But New Yiddish Rep’s production honors what a Bronx family of the time would experience. Gail Cooper-Hecht's costumes offer subdued color palates for the family, with brighter hues for Moe and Mimi in their quest for economic success. And Jesse Freedman’s sound design, a kaleidoscope of 1930s Yiddish classics mixed in with some nostalgia pieces (period-specific radio ads and news items) is well done. Shout out to the show’s producers—your rye bread budget must be through the roof, but that small touch is worth it!

The New Yiddish Rep expertly balances the play's nostalgia with an understanding that its themes permeate our current society. Yiddish theatre answers a unique call when it comes to Awake and Sing! In a time when speaking Yiddish evokes the perils of the past, experiencing a story like Awake and Sing! is a large task. This production shows how the hope for the future of Yiddish theatre lies in hearty pieces about economic disparity...and love, and heartache, and family.

Theater Pizzazz Review

AWAKE AND SING: DAVID MANDELBAUM’S 21ST CENTURY MIRACLE

POSTED ON DEC 7, 2017 IN THEATER REVIEWS

by Myra Chanin

The New Yiddish Rep’s current production of Awake and Sing, Clifford Odets’ 1935 American masterpiece, is a 21^st century miracle. It validates Artistic Director David Mandelbaum’s mishegas/obsession of establishing a Yiddish acting company performing modern plays, either written or translated into Yiddish, that attract diverse appreciative audiences of many ages, which describes the ticket holders at the performance I attended

The New Yiddish Rep’s firstborn, the groundbreaking Yiddish Waiting for Godot,was praised by both The New York Times and The New Yorker. It was not only a surprise hit here but also killed at the International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, suggesting that the Irish may actually be a lost tribe of Israel. It starred and was translated by the astonishing Shane Baker, a would-you-believe Yiddish-obsessed Midwestern Episcopalian who now speaks Yiddish like he was raised in Berditchev. Since then, major New Yiddish Rep productions have included Death of a Salesman which received two Drama Desk nominations, one for Best Revival and a second for leading actor Avi Hoffman whose Willie Loman spoke the language he actually spoke. Last winter’s production of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance was very compelling. It was about a Jewish brothel owner willing to pay anything for a respectable rabbinical husband for his pure daughter, who unfortunately was already in lust with one of his sex workers. If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the play became the cornerstone of Paula Vogel’s Tony-winning Indecent. Incidentally, FYI, Yiddish is once again hip. It’s being taught at our finest universities including UCLA, Columbia, Binghamton, Brandeis, even Duke and Emory. So Mazel Tov, ya’ll.

DAVID MANDELBAUM, AMY COLEMAN

Why do I think the New Yiddish Rep’s Awake and Sing is a Miracle of Miracles? Because until now, multi-character Yiddish productions were forced to cast actors with little or no familiarity with Mamalushen – the mother tongue. They learned their lines syllable by syllable and garbled the Yiddish words so badly that even someone like me, who spoke Yiddish before she spoke English, had to check the English supertitles to figure out what they actually meant. But now Yiddish speaking actors are coming out of the woodwork. Mandelbaum has gradually unearthed enough aspiring young actors who grew up in Yiddish-speaking households and can express the emotions behind the words with their voices and body movements because the subtleties of Yiddish are ingrained in their DNA.

Where have these young’uns been hiding? In Brooklyn, encased in prayer shawls. They’re the offspring of that Orthodox Community who will no longer allow to have their lives constrained by Hassidism’s intellectual restrictions. One of them, Eli Rosen, a recovering lawyer, translated and starred in the company’s previous production, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and is presently translating two short plays by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin for a future production with his fellow players in what is becoming a Yiddish repertory company.

LEA KALISCH, GERA SANDLER

Awake and Sing contains the skeleton of every 1930 Jewish household I can remember. Myron Berger (Eli Rosen) is the passive, but hard-working lawyer/father. His wife Bessie (Ronit Asheri-Sandler), is the financially insecure, rejecting mother who only wants “the best” for their children. Daughter Hennie (a role shared by Lea Kalisch and Mira Kessler) is the modern working woman ensnared in an age-old trap. Her brother Ralph (Moshe Lobel) is the lost but ambitious son, too insecure to untie that apron strings that bind him to his mother. Their maternal grandfather Jacob (David Mandelbaum) is a revolutionary who endlessly talks rather than does … until he does. The family “success,” their unmarried, rich, dress-designer Aunt Mimi (Amy Coleman) most likely worked part of her way up the ladder on her back. Sam Feinschreiber (Luzer Twersky) is the schlemiel who was happily and hastily married off to Hennie without a clue to what was what. Boarder Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler) is a petty crook wannabe bigtime gangster who loves Hennie despite his bluster. Amy Coleman (co-founder of the company and the wife of Artistic Director David Mandelbaum) is the only non-Yiddish speaker in the cast, and she cleverly gets to say almost all of her lines in English.

LUZER TWERSKY, RONIT ASHERI

Despite my clichéd descriptions, every one of these characters comes to life as a complex, striving, unique human being, flaws and all. They all long for financial security and romantic love. The actors really inhabit the souls of their characters and bring them to life in ways that make your heart stand up and cheer.

The actors are hardly Moishe-Come-Latelys. Gera Sandler is an Israeli Yiddish Theater star/ director, TV personality, featured in international films and his wife Ronit has starred in many Israeli productions as well. As for the Brooklyn contingent, Luzer Twersky has appeared in HBO’s Transparent, will be soon seen in HBO’s High Maintenance. His life is the subject of the Netflix Film, One of Us. Moshe Lobel landed a Yiddish speaking role on a 2018 HBO comedy series and is also producing the new web series entitled Untold Genius. All of the others actors have appeared previously in New Yiddish Rep productions.

David Mandelbaum’s adaptation of Chaver Payer’s translation shortened and tightened the play by properly downplaying the political aspects. Under his direction, the actors perform so naturally that the man sitting beside me felt he was in his father’s house.

Praise and appreciation are also due those who work behind the scenes. Three cheers for Nathan Rodan’s living room’s pretentious perfection, lacking only crocheted antimacassars to extend the life of the upholstered armrests. Gail Cooper-Hecht’s costumes were tacky and equally period perfect. If Diane von Furstenberg sees this play, they’ll soon be the rage again. The music that Jesse Freedman chose to play between the acts particularly delighted me. Every Sunday Morning over WEVD! Joe and Paul’s! A Manischewitz commercial! And a personal favorite of mine “Levine and His Flying Machine.” The plane in which Levine rode lost the race with Lindbergh but became the world’s first transatlantic passenger.

One last comment. Do you have to know French to enjoy a François Truffaut film or German to appreciate Werner Herzog’s work? No siree. You just have to be able to read the English titles. The same applies to Awake and Sing. Go. Enjoy a moving, nostalgic but realistic play with a plausibly happy ending and titles that are easy to see.

Photos: Pedro Hernandez

The Labor Of Life

David Mandelbaum — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 18:47:44 +0000

A post-modern classic by Hanoch Levin, a couples recurring life pattern, in a never ending cycle of existential crisis. Levin has been called the Israeli Beckett and is Israel's greatest playwright to date. And yet his work is virtually unknown in the United States. We produced thius play in both the original Hebrew and in a splendid Yiddish translation by Eli Rosen. We will be reviving it this month at our studio theater.

Check out these links if you want to know more about him and his work

https://www.academia.edu/3338142/On_Hanoch_Levin_the_most_important_Israeli_playwriter_

https://www.haaretz.com/life/.premium.MAGAZINE-bringing-israel-s-best-known-playwright-hanoch-levin-to-a-worldwide-audience-1.7936278

The New York Times Obi

Hanoch Levin, Israel's leading playwright, who spent more than three decades trying to strip the nation of self-congratulatory armor and force it to examine what he considered its hypocrisy and self-delusion, died on Wednesday of bone cancer. He was 56.

Although his first plays caused enormous controversy when they were performed in the 1960's and 70's, Mr. Levin's death was greeted here with profound dismay at the highest cultural and political levels.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak called him ''one of the greatest playwrights that Israel has ever had.''

The Education Minister, Yossi Sarid, said he ''showed us what we really looked like when we were still saying, 'Surely, that can't be us.' '' He added, ''Levin saved us because without him we wouldn't have known that the social and political ulcer was about to explode.''

Mr. Levin came to prominence in 1968 with his play, ''You, Me and the Next War,'' staged in a tiny club in south Tel Aviv. It was a fierce critique of the euphoria that swept the country after its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula and found itself the military ruler of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The Whore From Ohio

David Mandelbaum — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 19:10:46 +0000

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Waiting For Godot

David Mandelbaum — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 21:00:03 +0000

The ‘Godot’ We’ve All Been Waiting For

On a recent Friday evening, I was sitting in Manhattan’s Castillo Theatre, on West 42nd Street, waiting to see a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

As the house lights went down, and the stage lights went up, the play’s minimalist set came into view: a low mound and a bare tree that looked more like a metal sculpture than like a living thing. On the mound sat David Mandelbaum as the rundown Estragon, wearing a misshapen hat and a pair of torn trousers held to his body by a rope belt. Shane Baker, playing the slightly more decorous Vladimir, stood nearby. As Estragon wrestled with his boot, trying to pull it off his swollen foot, he moaned, “Me ken goornisht teeee-yen.”

Anyone familiar with Beckett’s masterpiece, now celebrating the 60th year since its premiere at Paris’s Théâtre de Babylone, would recognize that famous first line, “Nothing to be done.” The difference was that, like the rest of this performance, it was said in Yiddish.

There’s a lot that’s perfect about doing “Waiting for Godot” in Yiddish, even if we needed this production, directed by Moshe Yassur for New Yiddish Rep, to make us realize it. Through Baker’s translation and the cast’s performances — Mandelbaum and Baker outdo themselves as the existential odd couple of Estragon and Vladimir, as does Avi Hoffman as the blustering Pozzo and Raphael Goldwasser as his masochistic slave, Lucky — the New Yiddish Rep has created a distinctive work that possesses its own power while shedding new light on the original.

Yiddish, of course, is not just a language spoken by Jews, but also a language bound up with Jewish life and tradition. Thus, translating “Godot” (or anything else) into Yiddish means relocating it into a universe of Jewish reference and idiom. Here, for example, “His highness” becomes “Der rebbe reb Tsots,” and “critic” (flung as an insult by Estragon to Vladimir) becomes “misnaged.”

And when Vladimir remonstrates with Pozzo over the latter wanting to get rid of Lucky, the original comparison of chucking away Lucky “like a banana skin” becomes “shlogn kapores mit im” — that is, discarding him like the sacrificial chicken swung around the head before Yom Kippur.

The performance also locates the play within a Yiddish world through the speech and mannerisms of the actors. While Estragon speaks an earthy Polish Yiddish, Vladimir has a more refined Lithuanian accent, giving the characters’ interactions a “tomayto/tomahto” comedy. Estragon, trying to figure out what day of the week it is (and when Godot might or might not arrive), employs the singsong tune traditionally used to work out a knotty bit of reasoning in the Gemara.

Most spectacular is when Lucky is instructed to “think” and embarks on a rapid-fire nonsense disquisition, delivered here with a grandiose Yom Kippur melody.

What all this adds to Beckett’s play, however, is a more difficult question.

Brooks Atkinson, reviewing “Godot” for The New York Times in 1956, paraphrased Churchill describing Russia in saying that the play is “a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” Does rendering it into Yiddish make it less enigmatic? And if so, is that a good thing?

According to Mandelbaum, the troupe originally wanted to present the characters as Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It’s an understandable inclination, especially since Beckett, who was a member of the French Resistance, wrote the play in 1948 and ’49, and his work expresses the existential anguish of the time.

Fortunately, however, the Beckett estate nixed the idea. Despite the postwar resonance, the power of the play lies in the maddening interplay between specific references to the world we know and a nowhere quality that puts it in a kind of purgatory beyond time and space. Moving the action to a more concrete historical setting would have vitiated that hanging-in-thin-air torment, even if the historical moment was itself the hanging-in-thin-air torment of a displaced persons camp.

Even without any overt indication, Yiddish brings out this aspect of the play. Indeed, when Vladimir asks, “Where are all these corpses from?” and exclaims: “A charnel house! A charnel house!” or when both Vladimir and Estragon speak of the noise of dead voices, and how the dead “talk about their lives,” it’s impossible to think of anything else. If this makes the play more concrete, it is not by adding anything extra, but by revealing the inference contained in Beckett’s words themselves.

After the performance, a friend asked me, “So, does Yiddish theater have a future?” Trying to make a joke, I said something about having to “wait and see.” But the truth is, if the future of Yiddish theater means more shows like this one, that’s a tremendously good thing. While much Yiddish theater today — or, more frequently, Yiddish theater in English translation — focuses on mining the existing Yiddish canon, New Yiddish Rep has done something much more audacious. With “Waiting for Godot,” it has shown not what the Yiddish language has contributed to theater in the past, but what it is still able to contribute today. And that is well worth waiting for.

God Of Vengeance

David Mandelbaum — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 20:39:44 +0000

Review: In ‘God of Vengeance,’ a Nice Jewish Family Lives Above a Brothel

By Charles Isherwood

Dec. 29, 2016

Questions of guilt and retribution gnaw ceaselessly at the heart of Yankl (Shane Baker), the central character in Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” which is being given a timely revival by the New Yiddish Rep at LaMaMa. A pious Orthodox Jew, Yankl makes his living in what remains a highly unorthodox profession: He owns a brothel that sits below the apartment in which his family lives.

Asch’s 1907 play, esteemed and widely produced in Europe, caused a scandal when it was staged in New York, ultimately opening on Broadway in 1923 and creating such a ruckus that the entire company was hauled into court on charges of indecency. The timeliness of this production — performed in Yiddish with English supertitles — has everything to do with the arrival on Broadway this spring of Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” a powerful drama depicting the tumultuous history of the play and including some passages from it.

But “God of Vengeance” holds the stage formidably in its own right, primarily for its forthright depiction of the love between Yankl’s teenage daughter, Rifkele (Shayna Schmidt), and Manke (Melissa Weisz), one of the women who work in the brothel. The play is remarkable, too, in its nuanced depiction of Manke and her fellow prostitutes Basha (Mira Kessler) and Reyzl (Rachel Botchan). Although some may find that Basha’s genial acceptance of her lot is romanticized, she frankly boasts that she has freedoms, even living as she does, that would be denied her in the hidebound community where she grew up.

Rifkele, played with lovely sensitivity by Ms. Schmidt, yearns for freedom, too — the freedom to love Manke — but her father is busy arranging a good marriage for her, with the help of Reb Eli (a wryly funny David Mandelbaum), the matchmaker, who blithely brushes away Yankl’s almost obsessive sense of guilt over his business, assuring him that as long as he’s a good Jew, everything will be fine.

o redeem himself in the eyes of God, Yankl has paid to have a Torah scroll created, and his most fervent hope is to find Rifkele a respectable Jewish husband, as if by raising her strictly and setting her up in a traditional marriage, he could expunge the sense of his own sinfulness that festers in his soul. Mr. Baker imbues the character with a tormented single-mindedness that neatly defines his predicament.

The production is deftly directed by Eleanor Reissa, who is terrific in the role of Yankl’s wife, Sarah, herself a former worker in Yankl’s brothel. Now dutifully playing the role of subservient wife, Sarah properly wears a wig when necessary. It is Sarah who tries desperately to bring Rifkele back home when she steals away with Manke. They are enticed by Yankl’s procurer Shloyme (a wonderfully slimy Luzer Twersky) and his girlfriend Hindel (Caraid O’Brien, making something fairly fresh of the hooker with a heart of, well, tinsel if not gold), to start up a new stable.

The production is somewhat cramped on the small stage at LaMaMa — the cluttered set almost resembles a used-furniture shop — and the contemporary setting adds nothing much to the play. But the cast’s commitment brings the work’s flashes of lyricism to powerful life. Most moving is the scene in which the women exchange confidences as rain pours down, and customers are sparse. Basha, played with marvelous grace by Ms. Kessler, has no regrets for fleeing the marriage that was being forced upon her, but she is still haunted by visions of her dead mother.

Manke calls to Rifkele, who sneaks out of the house and joins her in the rain. They share a tender scene in which Manke playfully pretends to be Rifkele’s bridegroom and impulsively implores her to come away with her so they can share a life together. The purity of the affection between them is beautifully played, and Asch’s sympathetic depiction of their love is affecting in its honesty. Even writing in the early years of the last century, he makes it implicitly clear that in his view, it is not God’s vengeance that Rifkele and Manke need to fear — only man’s.