Nostalgia for the Yiddish Theater
Caplan, Marvin
Nostalgia for the Yiddish Theater The Golden Age of Second Avenue Arthur Cantor Films. 198a 70 mmut* *Ktoc YKJOtti i*snwitvl»vtfptfr^ 400. Nnrcrt. NY 10023 Reviewed by Marvin Caplan What gives...
...And a montage of Aaron Lebedeff singing his renowned patter song "Roumama" does suggest what a wonderful "turn* it was But a snippet of Menasha Skulnik in one ot his old routines hardly tells us why he was considered one of the great clowns of his time...
...that period from the end of the last century until the 1930s when Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side—at one time 23 of them—brought glamour, excitement and consolation to a struggling immigrant population With Herschel Bernardi as narrator, the video attempts to convey the excitement of that time, the presentations that transformed thousands into pathotn, fierce supporters of certain actors and companies...
...Nostalgia helps too, as we watch the comic raptures of the congregants as they listen to a poorly recorded Moyshe Oysher daven in a shtetl shul {with organ accompaniment yet...
...Scenes from old movies, mostly filmed versions of famous plays, manage to give us some sense, today, of what moved our parents and grandparents Despite the broadness of their style, Bertha Gersten in Mirele Efros, Maurice Schwartz as Tevye, and Celia Adler in Where is My Child...
...The brief vignettes presented have mixed success...
...The film then settles on its central theme...
...a following so loyal that 100,000 turned out lor GokJfadens funeral...
...And as time goes on, its value as a record of a rich and important part of our heritage increases Marwm Caplan rs a Yxtteh Translator and t member 01 rtw Dosrd of r«Kiy ot G'Mbr wasftngton...
...Ifs the only documentary we have on Yiddish theater...
...as her old films can convince us still, an utterly adorable ingenue...
...And Isaac Bashevis Singer is presented, saying of the Yiddish theater what he has often said of Yiddish: that it is "sick' not "dead" and that "between being sick and dying is a long long way," It is true that there is still a season for Yiddish theater in New York...
...New YonVs then mayor, hailed the Yiddish theater, with generous exaggeration, as "one of the great stages of all civilization...
...NY 10023 Reviewed by Marvin Caplan What gives The Golden Age of Second Avenue a special poignancy is the realization that the world it celebrates can never come again This 70-minute chronicle of the Yiddish theater in New York begins with a swift sketch of origins: the musical priests of the Temple: the Furtm spielers of the Middle Ages the badchonim (the singe...
...came through as actors of real presence and authority...
...Where did it all go...
...asks Bernardi, an ingratiating guide and a graduate, himself, of the Yiddish stage (there were charming shots of him as a teenager, playing the young Moyshe Oysher in The Singing Blacksmith He suggests some of the reasons for the decline of Yiddish theater and they are fairly welt-known: a quota system that strangled immigration in the 1920s, the rejection of Yiddish by an upwardly mobile generation, and the destruction of the root source of artists and audiences in the Holocaust Brave words are spoken and evidence advanced to suggest that the Yiddish theater still lives We see twenty-thousand turn out for a Yiddish happening in Central Park (at which John Lindsay...
...Much of the gold is intrinsic in the film itself...
...And only nostalgia helps us enjoy a middle-aged Molly Picon singing "Yankeie," her smash hit of 1918 when she was...
...and finally the first real actors brought together in 1876 in the wine cellars of Jassy, Rumania by the self-styled 'Father of the Yiddish Theater.' Abraham GokJfaden...
...The Workmen's Circle i Folksbiene) restages the classics and there are occasional new plays and musicals There are even young men and women of talent who can still take the stage in Yiddish But the era cannot be revived Now available in a video cassette, The Golden Age of Second Avenue was first released in 1968...
...jesters at Jewish weddings...
...Since then, some of the notables who appear in it alive have passed away Ben Bonus who was master of ceremonies at the Central Park event Sholem Secunda, composer of "Bei Mir Bist du Sheyn* and narrator Herschel Bernardi...
Vol. 13 • November 1988 • No. 8
