Watch Kirk Douglas sing in Yiddish
By Jordan Kutzik February 7, 2020
Read in Yiddish
When news spread that legendary American actor Kirk Douglas, né Issur Danielovitch, had passed away at the age of 103, the Folksbiene dug into its archives and posted this touching moment from their 2002 gala, when the star was presented with a lifetime achievement award.
Douglas was raised in poverty alongside his six sisters in Amsterdam, New York. In the old country his father had been a horse trader, but in Amsterdam his parents collected rags and trash to resell in a horse-drawn wagon. Douglas only spoke Yiddish until he started school.
Wanting to escape his immigrant background and Americanize, Douglas changed his name before entering the Navy during World War Two. Later in life, and especially after surviving a helicopter crash that killed two of his fellow passengers, he re-embraced his Jewish roots and wrote a book about his spiritual journey.
In 1996 he suffered a severe stroke which limited his ability to speak but he continued acting well into his ninth decade. In this clip he relates a funny anecdote about why he was unable to get a job acting in the Yiddish theater and sings a few lines of the song “Mayn Yidishe Meydele” (My Jewish Girl). Despite the choppiness in his voice, his Litvak Yiddish accent comes across clearly.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor
