Soviet Yiddish Writers Remembered on 60th Anniversary of Their Murder “Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union began with a flourish of trumpets and ended with a mute, strangled voice,” said Thomas Bird, a Queens College professor of European language and literature, at a memorial. held on August 12 , it was for the Soviet Yiddish…
Allan Lewis Rickman likes to say that the best audiences for “The Essence: A Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum” are gentile college students — a demographic that seemed (shockingly!) underrepresented at the show’s opening NYC Fringe Festival performance at the Robert Moss Theater on August 14. More than a few people in this crowd murmured recognition…
Since 2005, the New Worlds Theatre Project has been presenting classic Yiddish drama in English translation. This season they’re presenting a new English translation of H. Leivick’s 1921 play “Shmates,” here called “Welcome to America,” a naturalistic drama about the corrosive effects of American capitalism on a traditional Jewish immigrant family. In the notes to…
It is no small feat to recreate the world and emotions of a bygone era. But in his astonishing show celebrating his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were superstars of the Yiddish theater, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has done it. And it is a joy. PBS’s “Great Performances” is broadcasting “The Thomashefskys: Music and…
When you Google Elmore James the first hits that pop up refer to a blues singer from the 1940s. That is not the same Elmore James who stars in the National Yiddish Theatre — Folksbiene production of “Soul to Soul.” But Yiddish-singing James, 57, thinks the Southern bluesman would see similarities between what the two…
Is there room for a klezmer musical on Broadway? I think so. The band for “Shlemiel the First,” led by the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theatre’s Zalmen Mlotek, is so good that during the exit music a sizeable portion of the audience drifted down toward the pit instead of up to the exits. Costumed as an…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. To perform Yiddish theater today, you need a lot of money, or a lot of ambition. The New Yiddish Rep theater company, led by David Mandelbaum, has the latter. Mandelbaum is an actor and director who also plays most of the other roles a theater company…
From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor By Alexander Granach, with a new introduction by Herbert S. Lewis Transaction Publishers, 304 pages, $29.95 Actor Alexander Granach performed in Yiddish as a member of Berlin’s Jacob Gordin Theatrical Society early in the past century. He went from his shtetl in Galicia…
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