A 91-year-old Jewish comedian walked into a pub — and out with my heart
Antisemitism is on the upswing. D’yan Forest isn’t daunted.
D’yan Forest performs ‘A Broad Abroad’ on Aug. 3, 2016 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images
D’yan Forest leads a double life. By day, the 91-year-old singer and comedian is Diana Schulman, an aficionado of golf, swimming and cappuccinos. By night, like Clark Kent morphing into Superman, she transforms into D’yan Forest, a fedora-tipping, ukulele-strumming spotlight-stealer with as much material locked in her memory as a Homeric bard. She holds the Guinness World Record for “Oldest Working Female Comedian,” though her gleeful laugh and booming showbiz belt makes it easy to forget her age.
The first time I saw D’yan was on her 91st birthday, when she performed her comedy special, A Gefilte Fish Out of Water, at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater near Astor Place. With the help of a photo slideshow and cabaret-style musical interludes including “It’s Too Tough to Be a Jew Again” and “If I Were a Christian (Ya Ba Dibba Dibba Dum),” Forest led us on a tour of her life from her earliest days (“I didn’t even know what Jewish was, or that I had it!”) to her nonagenarian ones (“I haven’t been able to do 69 since I was 69!”).
Clad in a sequined blue fedora and a zip-up “Happy Chanukah” sweater, she recounted her childhood in suburban Newton, Mass., during the 1940s. The symptoms of being Jewish at such a time and place, in her telling, bore a striking resemblance to the symptoms of IBS, a chronic and incurable condition that interferes with pleasurable everyday activities like joining WASP-y country clubs or buying a Christmas tree. She transported us to Middlebury College in the ’50s, where “it was like the Mayflower had just landed with a cargo of blondes!”
There, she joined the church choir, and discovered in her audition that she could sing.
“I had never heard my voice like that,” Forest told the audience. “It was high, clear, loud — you know, just like an orgasm!”
After college, Forest married a young lawyer of her parents’ choosing, who, she claims, was anatomically confused: “I once asked him if he knew what a clitoris was. He said, ‘Oh, sure! It’s that purple flower that climbs the fence!’ I said, ‘That’s a clematis!’” Forest filed for divorce, and flew off to Paris, where she sampled the finer elements of life, such as cappuccinos, cabaret singing and free love.
When Forest returned to the States in 1964, she had metamorphosed. Paris had transformed her into a woman with a fashionable cropped coiffure who sang about “l’amour” in cabarets until two in the morning. To complete the transfiguration, she submitted to the requisite goy-ification of Jewish performers at the time, downsizing her nose and glamorizing her name. She and her manager “changed Diana to D’yan, and that sounded fancy with the apostrophe,” she says. “And since Diana is the goddess of the woods, ‘Schulman’ became ‘Forest.’” And so D’yan Forest, French cabaret chanteuse, came to be.
For the next few decades, Forest pinballed around the Northeast, singing at the Waldorf, the French Embassy in New York, the World Trade Center, and a constellation of country clubs.
Today, her musical numbers combine the vocal flair of D’yan with the sassy Semitism of Diana.
“Never again didn’t last long/Antisemitism breaking up my song… The past is coming true again/And it’s too tough to be a Jew again/Cause old-fashioned hate is new again!” she sings in “It’s Too Tough to Be a Jew Again” — sung to the tune of “Everything Old is New Again,” in case you’d like to try it at home.
In “If I Were a Christian (Ya Ba Dibba Dibba Dum),” young Diana dreams of being a “bittle bittle bittle Christian girl” who is free to join Christians-only tennis clubs. As Lenin wrote, “It is necessary to dream.”
Like a signature perfume, Forest emanates a piquant blend of the grave and the giddy.
“I was always very serious,” she told me when I visited her in her West Village apartment, a cozy den with a plush blue carpet as thick as moss, several days after the cabaret. “My mother called me a ‘little old lady’ since I was eight years old.”
Her swerve from cabaret to comedy had a serious origin, too. Forest saw 9/11 happen from her roof. After that, she thought, people didn’t seem to need a French singer the way they had before; they needed to laugh.
“I played golf with the woman who owned Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York. So I said, ‘How do you get into comedy?’” Forest said. “And so within three minutes, I had a producer call me and put me in the care of a coach.’”
A 67-year-old Jewish lady breaking into stand-up? Some of Forest’s friends had their doubts:“‘They’re going to heckle you!’ ‘You’re too old!’ ‘The nights are gonna be late.’ ‘You can’t do this!’”
“What I’ve learned in life is that you don’t pay attention to people giving you advice that isn’t really what you want to do,” Forest said. “Try it anyhow, because what do they know about it?”
Forest believes that, at heart, she’s a teacher. “One of the reasons I did the show — I wanted to educate the young people,” she said. “They don’t know the history of somebody like me. I was born in ’34, and lived through World War II, and I had all the family killed in Latvia. They don’t know the history.”
There had been a good smattering of young people at the cabaret night. In the front row, I’d spotted two young bros staring up at Forest in blank-faced bewilderment, as if they’d fallen asleep during a Lakers game and had no memory of being airlifted here. Still, they’d clapped heartily at the end.
In Forest’s living room, where she sat on the velveteen couch and I sat on the carpet, I saw time accumulating everywhere: paintings of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower in memory of trips to Paris gone by; banjos and ukuleles mounted on the walls; two colorful golf balls hibernating forgotten under a dresser. There was a piano tucked along the far wall, and I thought of D’yan when she was my age and called Diana, singing her audition song for the choir at Middlebury 70 years ago: “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” a 1616 poem by Ben Jonson, later set to music by an unknown composer.
When she’d begun singing it again, onstage at Joe’s Pub, I had gasped — I had never met another living mortal who knew that song. I had assumed it languished in fetid corners of YouTube known only to people like me who enjoy obscure, unpopular music.
So I asked Forest if she’d like to sing with me. And so we took a breath and began, two Jewish ladies singing an old goyish song, one lady young in years and elderly in spirit, the other elderly in years and young in spirit. “But might I of Jove’s nectar sip, I would not change for thine… ”
“You’re the only one in the world who knows it besides me,” she said when we finished. I told her that I felt the same way.
