Only 50 days until July 4th, when Fiddler on the Roof premieres (in Yiddish) off-Broadway. And now, we know who will be in it.

If you’ve heard of anyone in the cast, it’s Jackie Hoffman, the Emmy-nominated comedian (for Feud) whose Broadway credits have included scene-stealing in everything from Hairspray to Xanadu to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She is also extremely, very, super Jewish. She has performed musical parodies of pretty much every Jewish holiday you can think of— including Shavuot. Hoffman will be playing Yenta the matchmaker, because of course she will.

Your Tevya is Steven Skybell, who has been on Broadway several times, including in the last revival of Fiddler (he was a replacement Lazar Wolf). He grew up Jewish in Lubbock Texas, which would make shtetl-dwellers’ heads spin.

Jill Abramovitz will play Golda, and, yes, her Broadway credits too include the last run of Fiddler (she replaced Grandma Tzeitel, and understudied both Golda and Yenta). She’s also a songwriter, including contributing lyrics for Broadway intermarriage musical It Shoulda Been You.

Neither of the leads are big names, so it’s exciting to see what could be the big breaks of actors who have been in the business for some time.

The supporting cast is:

Kirk Geritano as Avram, Samantha Hahn as Bielke, Cameron Johnson as Fyedka, Daniel Kahn as Perchik, Ben Liebert as Motel, Stephanie Lynne Mason as Hodel, Rosie Jo Neddy as Chava, Raquel Nobile as Shprintze, Bruce Sabath as Lazar Wolf, Jodi Snyder as Fruma-Sarah, Lauren Jeanne Thomas as The Fiddler, Bobby Underwood as the Constable, Michael Yashinsky as Mordcha, Rachel Zatcoff as Tzeitel.

Also in the production is: Jennifer Babiak, Joanne Borts, Josh Dunn, Michael Einav, Evan Mayer, Nick Raynor, Kayleen Seidl, Adam Shapiro, and James Monroe Stevko.

Of course, the director is the legendary Joel Grey. Some of the cast members have experiences performing in Yiddish, but for some, it’ll be like a mamaloshen boot camp.

See you in July!

Photo by Joan Marcus

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The National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene gives the people what they want. “Folk” is in the name, after all. And obviously, the people want Fiddler on the Roof performed in the mamaloshen. Naturally. If you don’t, there is something wrong with you.

The time will be July. The place will be the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Most other details are still forthcoming, but the musical’s lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, and the great director Jerry Zaks are both signed on as production advisors. Beyond that, we only have this vague, and honestly sort of confusing statement by the Folksbiene’s executive Christopher Massimine to go by. He says the production “will be presented in the context of a historical retrospective hypothetically introducing the idea that Sholem Aleichem has been present at the conception of the adaptation of his work for the musical stage.”

What? So, does that mean a framing device where Sholem Aleichem appears as a character? Is this going to be for Fiddler what Indecent was for God of Vengeance? Do we breathe new life into Tevye and his family by making the actors break the fourth wall or something?

“The idea we are putting forth would be an accurate re-creation of how this musical might look in its native Yiddish tongue,” Massimine continued.

What does re-creation mean? Is the translation new? Is the choreography different, like in the most recent Broadway revival?

WHAT IS GOING ON?

In any case, this production is far from the first performance of Fiddler in Yiddish (to say nothing of other Yiddish adaptations of Aleichem’s work). Back in the 1960s, only a couple of years after the Broadway production premiered, original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins helmed a Yiddish-language version of the show— in Israel (there’s even a cast album, and it’s great).

So we have a ways to wait before seeing Yiddish Fiddler onstage, but ideally more information will come soon. In the meantime, stay strong, and listen to every single cast recording of the show there is (and there are at least a dozen,) over and over to pick your favorite.

UPDATE, AS OF MARCH 16: JOEL GREY IS DIRECTING THIS PRODUCTION. GET. HYPE.

Photo of  the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof by Joan Marcus

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By all counts, the music video for “Als Ding hot a Soff, nur baym Wursht senen zway,” Joe Fleisch’s Yiddish cover of the ’80s German New Wave hit “Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei” (“Everything Has an End, Only the Sausage Has Two”) is bizarre. Shot in black and white in an evocative nod to the aesthetics of James Bond, the video―a collaboration with producer Ori Toledano and director Guy J. Bolandi―alternates between shots of Fleisch singing eerily and shots of naked, androgynous women (in a secluded forest!) who have the song’s lyrics projected or painted on their bodies.

For the casual viewer who stumbles upon Fleisch’s erotic odyssey, some context would be helpful. Joe Fleisch is actually the pseudonym of 54-year-old German author and entrepreneur Jossi Reich, whose other musical endeavor, the Tel Aviv-based band the Jewish Monkeys, is likewise unorthodox. While the band’s name might call to mind the cheerful pop vibe of the Monkees, Reich’s group performs a “distinctive mishmash of rock, klezmer, funk, and Balkan music, sung in English, Spanish, Esperanto and Yiddish,” in the words of Tablet contributor Dana Kessler. From a raunchy ode to Romania to a multicultural mashup (“The Banana Boat Song” meets “Hava Nagila,” with some politics thrown in for good measure), nothing, it seems, is musically off limits.

“It’s a personality split. It’s a complete other thing,” Reich told Jewcy, delineating his musical personae. “Jewish Monkeys is a punk rock band and very satirical and very funny and is kind of an orchestra with eight people.”

For Bolandi, who has directed projects for major TV networks like Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, “Als Ding hot a Soff” was more personal than his commercial work. “The entire concept of the video was about translation,”  said Bolandi, 35, referring not only to linguistic translation, but translating high-tech concepts―computerized designs typify the New Wave ethos―into lo-fi iterations. “In a way, this is a reference to technology, actually painting on the bodies.”

Reich’s interest in the song stems from his obsession with German New Wave music growing up, such as the theatrical stylings of Nina Hagen and the political incorrectness of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (German-American Friendship). “The music was absolutely German, very monotonous,” he said.

In “Als Ding hot a Soff,” Toledano, whom Bolandi introduced to Reich, provides the sonic heart of the project: klezmer clarient and computerized music samples. Coming from a musical household (he’s the son of Israeli singer and Eurovision contestant Avi Toledano), his prowess is no surprise. Plus, as the founder of Snowstar, a production company, it’s his job to tell stories by marrying visual media and music.

“I do Americana, Blues. I don’t have one genre,” said Toledano, 32. “I could work on a wide range of different genres and be something else every day and work with as many people as possible on different productions.”

Even if everything does have an end (or two, for sausages), let’s hope this creative partnership’s is far in the distance.

Experience the delightful weirdness that is the music video below:

Image via YouTube.

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This past Sunday in a rented storefront in Crown Heights, Vaybertaytsh, a podcast which producer Sandy Fox bills as “the first—as far as we know— Yiddish speaking, feminist radio program” celebrated the release of its second season.

Before it was a podcast, “Vaybertaytsh” – literally “translations for women” in Yiddish—was a term once used for commentaries on Torah written by Hebrew-literate Ashkenazi men for their Yiddish-speaking women wives (and other women) who were unlikely to learn the “Loshnkoydesh” (“holy tongue”) themselves. “Vaybertaytsh” also came at times to refer to the language of Yiddish itself, one of many names the “jargon” (another slang term for Yiddish) went by.

This podcast is a project of reclamation of the word.  Women themselves become the teachers, “flipping the concept of ‘vaybertaytsh’ on its head,” says Fox, “explaining and commenting on our own terms.” Interviews in the first season included a midwife serving the Hasidic community, a female cantor  for the renewal movement in Germany, and several international attendees of the Women’s March last January.

These interviews and conversations take place entirely in Yiddish, and the podcast draws guests mainly from the international community of Yiddishists, a group which speaks Yiddish in order to preserve the language. The Yiddishist movement began at the turn of the 20th century as activists and scholars sought to “legitimize” what was at the time seen as a “low” tongue, spoken by unsophisticated people—and women. “Those scholars were primarily men whose mission was to de-feminize Yiddish, to distance the language from its association with women as a ‘mameloshn,’ [or ‘mom’s tongue’],” Fox told me.

Sandy Fox, who also goes by the Yiddish name Sosye, describes Vaybertaytsh both as a continuation and a refutation of that philosophy. Just as these men sought to produce mainstream literature and journalism in Yiddish, Fox creates episodes of Vaybertaytsh available for download on any podcast app.

But unlike this earlier wave of Yiddishists, Fox does not shy from association with women or the home. The pilot opens with a tribute to the Riot Grrrl music movement , and another episode in the first season is devoted to a conversation between women who have lost their mothers on their memories of those women.

Nor does Fox insist on a rigid grammatical purity, as the first wave of many turn-of-the-century Yiddishists did. “I don’t really believe there is such a thing as ‘authentic’ Yiddish,” she says, “and it can be uncomfortable to speak perfect clinical Yiddish.” Vaybertaytsh’s opening episode contains a kind of non-apology for any grammatical “mistakes” the podcast may make: “Let’s simply feel free to speak” says Fox in the first episode (in of course, Yiddish). Creating something new is “too important to wait for a perfect Yiddish.”

As a Yiddish learner who speaks with less than perfect grammar, this stance excites me. More than once I have lost my train of thought while speaking due to interruptions correcting my grammar. While such interruptions are kindly meant and an important part of the language-learning process, they can make communication a little exhausting. “Often it’s been men serving as the gatekeepers,” Fox notes.  That gate-keeping can turn people away from actually speaking the language, something the relatively small community of Yiddishists arguably cannot afford.

At the second season’s release party, Fox welcomed non-Yiddish-fluent guests to “Yiddishland” before continuing entirely in Yiddish, while translations in English appeared onscreen behind her. “Maybe it seems weird, considering the fact that we all speak English. But such is the way of the Yiddishists,” the screen read, “Welcome to our world.”

The default language of the night was Yiddish, with a “learner’s couch” equipped with a dictionary. Party attendees schmoozed over the food, the drinks,  and the choice of women’s social justice groups to which to donate the nights proceeds (the winner was Days for Girls), all in Yiddish of varying fluency. Emboldened by the podcast’s premise, I took my time forming clunky sentences for concepts that I might have communicated much faster in English. By the time the event ended, I was only rarely asking my conversational partners to repeat themselves.

One man asked me near the evening’s end how I had first encountered Vaybertaytsh. I told him I’d heard of it online, I’d been unsure if my language comprehension would be strong enough to follow along, but I eventually checked it out and was using it to train my ear. “And here I am!” I finished exuberantly. My conversational partner nodded. “Okay. But I didn’t mean the podcast—I meant the language.”

Rachel Wetter is an educator and history nerd living in New York who also goes by Rokhl.

Images via Facebook.

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Yiddish has had an exciting creative revival in recent years, including festivals, theater, and music. Even punk music is getting its Yiddish on!

From klezmer-punk to pop-punk, here are the best punk acts with Yiddish as their mamaloshen (mother tongue). They’re punk with their attitudes and sensibilities, their musical styles, and their polemics against injustice and war.

Klunk

Klunk (short for “klezmer-punk”) combines klezmer with punk rock and metal. The Parisian band released their debut EP in March. Their songs embrace left-wing stances against oppression, poverty, unemployment, and inequality. “I consider myself a Yiddishist, and I try to promote the Yiddish language and culture by all means possible,” says lead singer and pianist Jean-Gabriel Davis.

“Daloy Polizey” (“Down with the Police”) features raspy vocals, crunchy guitar chords, and a fast tempo. The song dates back to at least 1905. According to the Jewish Music Research Centre, the song “tends toward anarchism, even anarchist terror, especially in the verse that calls to bury Tsar Nicolai along with his mother,” and “may be connected to more radical sections of the Labor Bund.”

Asher Yatzar

Not all Yiddish punk stems from klezmer! Asher Yatzar, a Yiddish pop-punk band, started playing shows in Chicago last year. For the band members, singing in Yiddish isn’t a radical statement, but rather, natural for Ashkenazi Jews. “They’re all Jewish songs,” said guitarist/singer Shmul. “My lyrics are generally more secular, but we have a song about the bund, a song about creating new paradigms for envisioning collective Jewish liberation, a song about Yiddishkayt.”

The song “Genitungen” (“Exercise”) begins, “Far i’deayl gezuntenkeit … genitungen” (“For optimal health … exercise”). In the lyrics, examples of exercise include running, learning in a bet-midrash (house of study), and praying. Asher Yatzar drummer/singer Dave explained that “for ideal health,” a Jew needs “to work your guf (body) and your brain and your nshoma (soul).”

Golem

Golem plays klezmer with a rockin’, punked-up edge. Singer/accordionist Annette Ezekiel Kogan said that Golem was out to make klezmer that “preserved the past” but was “alive,” rather than belonging in “a museum” or “a morgue.”

Golem typically opens shows with Kogan wailing “Oy!” and then greeting the crowd in Yiddish. Golem’s other singer, Aaron Diskin, translates that Kogan isn’t speaking English, German, or Hebrew, but rather—brace for the excitement—Yiddish! With a hefty drum-roll, Golem then launches into the frenzied “Odessa,” which Kogan has called their “anthem.” The old Peisachke Burstein song is about yearning for the narrator’s hometown and “beautiful city” of Odessa, Ukraine. Golem included “Odessa” on their 2004 and 2014 albums, but it sounds the most intense—and punk rock—live.

Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird

Although their “Radical Yiddish Punkfolk Cabaret” stew contains many ingredients, punk is an important element of Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird. In my book, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk, Kahn says that his music exhibited a “do-it-yourself” approach, “exuberant irreverence and aggressiveness,” “sardonic acid humor,” a “willingness to engage with some dark shit,” and a rejection of “commercial market populism: the idea of trying to make something that’s appealing to everybody.”

When the band included electric guitar, there was a more discernible punk rock vibe, such as in the intense bridge and coda of “Yosl Ber/A Patriot.” Kahn sang most verses of the Itsik Manger song in both Yiddish and English, but it’s the one he didn’t translate into English that made the song’s underlying joke work. In the liner notes Kahn explained that a Jewish soldier accused of running away from battle was a “faithful soldier”: “That’s why I ran away from the front! I hate the enemy so much, I don’t even want to look him in the eye!”

To learn more about Golem, Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, and other bands that combine Jewishness and punk, check out, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk.

Photo of Klunk by Kriss Peeks

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2016 once proves itself to be a banner year, when we learned today of the passing of Gene Wilder. He was 83, but DANG is it sad.

Gene Wilder-One of the truly great talents of our time. He blessed every film we did with his magic & he blessed me with his friendship.

— Mel Brooks (@MelBrooks) August 29, 2016

God. It’s just. The saddest thing.

Well, what we have to remember him for is a lot of laughter. We could literally just sit here all day and throw Gene Wilder moments back and forth. But this is Jewcy, so let’s pick just one that is particularly Jewish.

Remember The Frisco Kid? It’s a wholly underwatched, underrated 1979 comedy-adventure flick where Wilder plays an immigrant rabbi trying to schlep across the wild west with a bank-robbing, drop-dead-gorgeous Harrison Ford as his companion.

Once again, picking one moment from this film to share is impossible. The movie is so unapologetically Jewish, from the rabbi’s insistence to not ride a horse on Shabbos (even with a posse on his tail), to his absolute devotion to the Torah scroll he’s meant to bring to San Francisco. So here, for good measure are links to a scene where he tries to explain Jewish divinity to Native Americans, and one where Harrison Ford teaches him, well, colorful American language.

But for our featured clip, we’d like to remind you that Wilder belongs on the list of Jewish actors you may have forgotten spoke Yiddish onscreen (remember Doris Roberts in Hester Street?). Wilder’s rabbi has become lost and destitute, when spotting a group of men with beards wearing black hats, he attempts to talk to them in what he assumes is their native language. They turn out to be Amish.

The clip is only online subtitled in Hebrew and Arabic, so we’ve included an English translation (admittedly mostly from the Hebrew), below:

Wilder [in Yiddish]: “Landsmen [Yiddish word for compatriots, brothers, of my people, etc.]! Landsmen! HELLO! Landsmen! Landsmen! Hello! Landsmen— God! God! Thank God that I found you! Something terrible and awful happened to me! I was on my way to San Francisco and horrible bastards robbed me! They almost killed me!”

Amish men [In Pennsylvania Dutch]: “What did he say?” “I can’t understand any of it.”

Wilder [Yiddish]: “What’s the matter? You don’t understand Yiddish?”

Amish Men [Penn. Dutch]: “Is he speaking German?” “No, it’s not German… Do you speak English?”

Amish Man [In English]: “Dost thou speak English?”

Wilder [In English, noticing Christian Bible]: “Dost… thou… speak… OY GEVALT!”

Still from The Frisco Kid via Google+.

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Doris Roberts passed away yesterday, and most obituaries seem to be focussing on her most famous role in Everybody Loves Raymond, where she played, albeit brilliantly, a stereotype of an overbearing “ethnic” mother as an Italian-American.

Time, at least, published a piece about when she played an rad Jewish grandmother on Lizzie McGuire.

But no one seems remember her in another very Jewish role: as Mrs. Kavarsky in Hester Street.

Hester Street is an unusual, wonderful film, made in 1975, in black and white, and largely in Yiddish. It stars Carol Kane (you know, from The Princess Pride and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), as a Jewish greenhorn in the Lower East Side in 1896 trying to adjust to her secularized husband, and her new home. Roberts plays a no-nonsense neighbor who supports Kane by giving her an American makeover, which she does bilingually.

So farewell to Ms. Roberts, but we’ll always have her brilliant screen appearances, including Hester Street. You can watch the whole movie on YouTube, or skip to one of the scenes with Roberts below:

https://youtu.be/TF5Tg-PGsLc?t=48m

Image credit: YouTube

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YidLife Crisis is a new web series that grapples with some of the great quandaries of contemporary Jewish life: Should Jews continue to practice archaic traditions? How do we define Jewish culture, which bears the influence of nationalities from around the globe? Also, how much badonkadonk is too much badonkadonk?

The series consists of four raucous, five-minute episodes written and performed by Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal-born actors who play Chaimie and Laizer, respectively. Each episode follows the two thirty-somethings as they grapple with their secular Jewish identity, revel in iconic Montreal restaurants, and extol the virtues of schmaltz (an absolute must, when it comes to smoked meat). This would be sufficiently wonderful on its own, but Batalion and Elman deliver something even better: the series is performed almost entirely in Yiddish.

Batalion and Elman studied Yiddish at Bialik High School in Montreal. Years after graduating, they connected in Los Angeles and began brainstorming ideas for a project that they could work on together. They knew they wanted to create a Yiddish web series, but not because they had lofty goals of preserving a “dying language.” As comic actors, Batalion and Elman were drawn to the vitality and rhythm of Yiddish, which has played an integral role in shaping humor and comedy in North America.

“I think a large part of what we’re doing here is a form of preservation of culture, but it’s not based on some sort of pure altruism,” Batalion explains. “It’s based on the fact that we just thought Yiddish was funny. Jamie and I are big fans of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that kind of comedy is built on a Yiddish style that’s coming out in English, but it really owes royalties to the Yiddish language.”

Initially, they planned to recreate classic Seinfeld sketches in Yiddish, as a homage to the language that lends its flavor to their favorite sitcom. But they soon realized that they could do more than borrow material from an existing show. Batalion and Elman applied for and received a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation, an organization that promotes Jewish culture in Montreal. Then, with some translation help from Batalion’s father, the duo started to write their own Yiddish scripts, which explored their concerns as young, secular Jews.

“The grant led us to realizations that we had about how the show could be deeper than just redoing Seinfeld sketches, “Elman says. “We could actually use the content of what we’re going to talk about in the show as a way of reaching out to other communities, and as a way of explaining our narishkeit, our Jewish neuroses, to the non-Jewish world.”

And what is it, exactly, that occupies the minds of the YidLife guys? Food, for one thing. (“It’s a Jewish show,” Elman says. “What else are we going to be doing?”) Each episode is set in a beloved Montreal eatery, as Chaimie and Laizer chow down on their favorite dishes and engage in Talmudic debates on matters of great Jewish import, like the optimal method for making bagels. They chat about beautiful women, naked selfies, and the merits of a big, um, posterior (the series is rated “Chai plus,” thanks to its racier content). It’s amusing to watch the guys work words like “badonkadonk” into Yiddish dialogue, but their lighthearted banter belies an earnest contemplation of modern Jewish life, with all its inconsistencies and hypocrisies.

In the first episode, Laizer is gorging on poutine—a very treyf Canadian specialty made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy—as Kol Nidre soars in the background. In another episode, Chaimie takes Laizer to task for eating at a Greek restaurant. “After what they did?” he cries. “200 BC? Forced conversion, temple desecration? I can’t eat this crap.” He does, in the end, after Laizer reminds him that most of his favorite “Jewish” foods—latkes, bagels, challah, Danish—were borrowed from other nationalities who, to put it lightly, had fraught relationships with the Jews. In the same episode, Laizer questions the value of continuing to practice ancient Jewish rites, like circumcision. “Is your mother Jewish?” he asks Chaimie. “Then by Jewish law, so are you. So why the schmekle chop?!”

“We’re dealing with everything with humor,” Batalion says of YidLife. “But some of the topics that are broached are fairly serious. I mean, atonement, circumcision are pretty serious acts. It’s not just that the act is serious, but the implications and the discussion about identity is a pretty serious discussion. In some way, Jamie and I grapple with it every single day.”

“I want to clarify,” Elman cuts in. “I don’t grapple with Eli’s circumcision in any way, shape, or form.”

Yiddish might seem like an anachronistic choice of language for a series rooted in a very twenty-first century medium, but it works. During the filming of YidLife’s first episode, Batalion and Elman performed their dialogue twice: once in English and once in Yiddish. The French-Canadian staff of the restaurant where they were shooting watched the English take with little reaction. But they started cracking up when Batalion and Elman performed the sketch in Yiddish.

“They were laughing the whole time we were doing the Yiddish, even though they couldn’t understand a word of it,” Elman says. “And in fact one of our camera guys—he’s a French-Canadian guy—was laughing during the take. I said, ‘Why is this so funny to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, it just sounds funny. It sounds like Seinfeld.’ And we knew right away that we were doing it right.”

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish
Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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What’s an apikores to do on Yom Kippur? If you were an anarchist in London, New York, or Warsaw in the early 20th century, there’s a good chance you would have attended a Yom Kippur ball for the express purpose of eating, drinking, and thumbing your nose at tradition and the religious establishment.

The creators of the new comedy series YidLife Crisis have captured that heretical spirit, added a dash of irony and Yiddish profanity, and served it up for free online—with a side of poutine.

YidLife is the brainchild of Canadian comics Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, who play Leizer and Chaimie, respectively. The web series follows the two thirty-somethings as they contemplate the modern Jewish condition against the backdrop of Montreal’s iconic restaurants. The best part? YidLife’s dialogue is spoken almost entirely in Yiddish.

In “Breaking the Fast,” the first episode of the series, Chaimie tries to persuade Leizer to ditch the whole Yom Kippur thing and indulge in some poutine, which, for the uninitiated, consists of French fries slathered in cheese curds and meat-based gravy—essentially a very delicious, very treyf heart attack in a bowl. Leizer doesn’t need much in the way of convincing, though he makes sure to keep his cheese curds and gravy separate. As Leizer himself puts it (in Yiddish), “If I have to break the fast, fine, but I will not mix milk and meat!”

Watch  “Breaking the Fast” below, and stay tuned for an interview with Batalion and Elman!

Related: Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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I recently sat down for an interview with Shane Baker: actor, translator, Executive Director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, bon vivant and all around most unusual Yiddishist I know. The pretext was my writing about the current production of the New Yiddish Rep’s Yiddish-language version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “Vartn af Godo” (translated by Shane, beautifully directed by Moshe Yassur). The lure was the taco truck parked outside my building at lunchtime.

Shane and I hadn’t seen each other since the middle of the summer, when he and the other members of the New Yiddish Rep (actors Rafael Goldwaser, Allen Lewis Rickman, and NYR artistic director/actor David Mandelbaum) left for Ireland with Vartn af Godo and I was heading to Klezkanada, the Jewish arts retreat near Montreal.

After playing Vartn af Godo at the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, Shane stayed on in Ireland for a kind of heritage trip (a rare reminder that he isn’t actually Jewish). He came back to North America for Toronto’s Ashkenaz festival, where he performed his riotous neo-vaudeville tribute, “The Big Bupkis!  A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville,” then returned to New York for the current run of Vartn af Godo at Barrow Street Theatre as part of Origin Theater’s 1st Irish Festival.

Shane had been touring the world to great acclaim. I had just premiered a new English-Yiddish play to a crowd of 30 at Klezkanada, in a room whose most prominent acoustic feature was a deafening ventilation hum. We had a lot to catch up on.

Our conversation ranged from deliciously vulgar to intimidatingly erudite within a few bites of taco. When I asked him whether he got in touch with his roots in Ireland, I was treated to a story far too filthy for Jewcy. With great regret, I steered him away from vaudeville and back to the avant-garde Waiting for Godot. Why translate it to Yiddish? I asked. When I had gone to see it a few nights before, it was clear how many Yiddish speakers were in the house just from where the laughs were.

“I wanted to translate Waiting for Godot, and we staged the play, all in line with the great Yiddishist dream—I think first set out ‘shvarts af vays’ [in black and white] by Ber Borochov—that the world’s greatest works must be translated into Yiddish in order to nurture the language, just as works in Yiddish must be translated into the world languages in order to show people what we have,” he said.

A task like translating Beckett brings up the deepest existential questions for new Yiddish art. For whom is this new translation? Is it for translator, audience, or both? There’s no question that there were a handful of folks in the audience (for example, some Hasidic friends of mine) who were introduced to Beckett via the Yiddish translation. But it goes without saying that the task of translating world literature to bring it to the Yiddish ‘masses’ no longer burns with the same urgency as it did for Borochov and his early-twentieth century colleagues.

On the other hand, Shane tells me that in Ireland—where one would expect even fewer Yiddish speakers—he overheard people after the show saying that they had never understood Waiting for Godot as they had in Yiddish. And this was NOT a Yiddish speaking audience.

I asked Shane if he’d found anything new in the text with this new production. “A yid lebt mit bitokhn (a Jew lives with hope),” he replied. “For me, Beckett is all about hope.” In the optimism of Godot’s Vladimir Shane sees one of the things he fell in love with about Yiddish, “the insistence of the older generation of Yiddishists; the joy and purpose in what they were doing… Vladimir has his questioning moments, but he’s the driving force that keeps them waiting. It’s a purposeful waiting, a Jewish waiting.”

I have to agree. Though on the surface it seems like nothing happens in Godot, what keeps you on the edge of your seat is the development of the relationships between these four brutalized humans. How will they choose? Between life and death? Between hope and despair? These are questions with the most vitality when done with the deepest specificity, which is why I think Godot in Yiddish holds such power for audiences, whether or not they speak Yiddish. Great art needs no further justification.

Waiting for Godot shows through September 21 at Barrow Street Theater in New York. Purchase tickets here. (Use discount code “WAIT35” for 20% off.)

Rokhl Kafrissen writes about Jewish life and culture from a distant corner of New York City. Her new play is a Yiddish-English gangster ghost romance called “A Brokhe” (A Blessing).

(Image by Ron Glassman, via New Yiddish Rep)

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