Primrose Road

This came up on the Yugntruf email list the other day:

"The Essence" was created and is performed by Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner, three of the younger veterans of Yiddish theater. "We tell the entire history of the Yiddish theater, kinda-sorta, in eighty minutes," said Rickman. "We tell stories in English and act and sing in Yiddish -- with supertitles -- and the audience laughs and cries and whatevers. And it's 99 44/100% nostalgia-free." "It's not just for alter kakers," explained Shmulenson.

Q: How do you resurrect a dying language with a rich cultural history? A: Death metal. The Jewish Daily Forward reports on Gevolt, a Russian-Israeli band that rearranges and performs traditional Yiddish songs like Tum Balalaika as death metal. The Forward praises the band's work and also brings up some of the contradictions they embody:

The band’s music is not a pasquinade, but rather a nuanced embrace of both serious Yiddish lyrics and serious metal traditions. Gevolt’s rendition of the traditional “Tum Balalaika,” casts clean, articulate vocals against a chilling background of liquid metal that closely resembles the German Neue Deutsche Harte (New German hardness) movement.

There's a documentary titled Yiddish Theater: A Love Story coming to New York and LA this November. Dan Katzir, the documentary's director, posted news of the screenings to the Yugntruf mailing list last week, noting that the film tries to get across a "message about the importance of keeping Yiddish theater alive to a larger community."

"Enter the funny, larger-than-life world of Yiddish Theater today through this documentary film about the amazing woman who has kept the oldest running Yiddish Theater in America alive. Zypora Spaisman is a Holocaust survivor who conquers all hearts in her passion for art, life and Yiddish. This heartwarming story of one unique woman's struggle portrays the fight of both an old art form to stay relevant and an old actress to find meaning and a stage in a society that worships youth. Shot in real time in one of the coldest winters in NEW YORK over the eight days of Hanukkah, Zypora's theater has one week to raise funding to keep their show going. Many miracles occur during this week. But will they be enough to save this critically acclaimed Yiddish show?"