The
Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 12.016 [Sequential No. 207]
Date: 27 August 2008
1)
This issue of The Mendele Review
2) "The Jerusalem Conference: A Century Of Yiddish
1908-2008"
3) In memory of Abe Brumberg (1926-2008)
4) Paul Robeson, Itsik Fefer and Yiddish
5) "Zikhroynes fun a farshnitener teater heym"
[Part Three – Yiddish Text] (Avrom
Karpinovitsh)
6) "Memories of
a Lost Theater Home" (Part Three – English translation)
7) Yiddish Film Made in Israel; Hebrew Translation of
a Bashevis Novel; Yung Yidish Calendar
8) Lyrics and Score of "Oy dortn, dortn" and
"Shvartse karshelekh"
9) "Oy dortn, dortn" and "Shvartse
karshelekh" sung by Abe Brumberg
1)--------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: ed.
Subject: This issue of The Mendele Review
This issue of The
Mendele Review honors the memory of Abe Brumberg who died early this year.
One obituary from each side of the
2)---------------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: Professor Yechiel Szeintuch
Subject: "The
The Dov Sadan
Project for Yiddish Studies was founded in 2002 to assist graduate students of
Yiddish in planning and carrying out long-term projects in all branches of
Yiddish culture. The most recent endeavor of the Project is organization of an
international academic conference at the
The projected
topics of the conference are: 1. Modern Yiddish literature; 2.
International Yiddish press;
3. Yiddish theater; 4. Yiddish cultural history and creativity
during the Holocaust; 5. The postwar revival of Yiddish language and
literature; 6. Yiddish education in the Diaspora and in
Israel; 7. Research on Yiddish in academic institutions
such as the Hebrew University, the YIVO Institute, and others; 8. The
significance of Yiddish and its culture for Jewish Studies.
The core
members of the Dov Sadan Project are
3)--------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: ed.
Subject: In memory of Abe Brumberg (1926-2008)
To mark
the recent death of Abe Brumberg,
accomplished scholar of the Soviet period, editor, writer and Yiddish-lover –
he wore other hats as well -- we direct our readers to the interview he gave
for the Polish-Jewish Midrasz and reprinted in The Mendele Review vol. 7.13.
We also point to two rightly appreciative obituaries, one in the Guardian (Feb. 2008) and another in the Forward (March 2008).
Brumberg's
position on matters Jewish is forthrightly presented in his Jewish Social
Studies essay "Anniversaries
in Conflict: On the Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund"
. The recently published Yerusholaimer
Almanakh 28 (2008) features a fine short essay (translated into Yiddish by
the author himself), "Epizodn fun mayn sotsialistisher oysshulung"
('Episodes of My Socialist Upbringing'),
an extract from his autobiography (Journeys
Through Vanishing Worlds,
4)------------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: ed.
Subject: Paul Robeson, Itsik Fefer and
Yiddish
Continuing the
tragic story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee featured in the last issue of
The Mendele Review (see TMR vol 12.15), we reproduce a brief note
from Wikipedia that tells us about a little known incident in the life of the
great singer and actor Paul Robeson and his relationship to the complex Yiddish
poet and public figure Itsik Fefer. On the famous partisan song mentioned here
see The Mendele
Review vol 12.5 .
Paul Robeson
"The
American concert singer and actor Paul
Robeson met Feffer on July 8,
[The
above Paul Robeson note is reprinted here from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itzik_Feffer.]
5)----------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: Avrom Karpinovitsh [Abraham
Karpinowitz]
Subject: "Zikhroynes fun a farshnitener teater heym" [Part Three -- Yiddish Text]
[ Part Three
begins with third paragraph.]
(Left click on image to enlarge)
6)---------------------------------------
Date: 27 September 2008
From: Shimen Yofe [Shimon Joffe]
Subject: "Memories of a Lost
Theater Home" (Part Three – English
translation)
*
My father now
reached a critical point. He already had his own theater, the Palace Theater,
and was well known in the theater world. Zelverish, the director of the Polish
theater in Vilna, admired him for building up a theater with such modest means,
and without government assistance. My mother, too, was content, because --
thank God -- the business was doing well. But my father was not satisfied. He
was obsessed with the dream of building a theater where the gallery wouldn’t
have fewer seats than the hall, so that ordinary folk could afford the cost of
a ticket to see a performance. For what is a Jewish theater without the common
folk? The Palace Theater had no gallery and my father missed it.
Actors
wondered how father was able to write a box-office report on the back of a pack of cigarettes,
covering it with figures like tiny gnats and then showing the calculations to
my mother. Rubbing his hands with glee, he said to her: “Rachel, it’s gold. One evening‘s income from
the gallery will cover a week's expenses."
Mother pushed away the improvised reckonings and groaned: "Oh
Moyshe, you’re looking for trouble.”
My father
surveyed Tsinizeli's former circus on Ludvisarske Gass, and decided that that
was the right place to put up a theater. He chose the circus for an important
reason -- it already had a gallery. This could be a gallery for the folk. He
intended to turn the circus arena into a seating area.
My father
consulted Rudin the carpenter on what needed to be done and how to go about
doing it. Rudin had spent all his life in the theater. He knew where to set
backdrops between acts, and how to hammer in huge nails (heard throughout the
theater). His voice sounded angry, straight out of his belly: "I’m not
about to crawl around on the circus rafters. I don’t want to spend my last
years with broken legs. For this sort of work, find yourself some
gentiles..."
My father did
just that. He went to Nowy Swiat, a suburb where the Starovyern lived. They
were the so called 'Old-Believers' who had broken from the Russian Orthodox
Church). They were carpenters, builders in wood, famous throughout the area for
constructing wooden buildings. The
carpenters, bearded Russians, sat in the circus and worked with axes sharp as
razors shaping beams for the theater. My father, as was his habit, stroked his
beard, wandered about among the fresh wood, and tried to teach the carpenters
their trade....
That’s how my
father built the folk theater.
Great shows
were put on there. A live horse even appeared on the stage. It was most unusual to spend money
on such effects in the Yiddish theater; but Rudolf Zaslavski playing Tevye the
Dairyman insisted that he come onto the stage with horse and cart, exactly as
Sholem-Aleichem wrote. My father justified him, and in memory of his beloved
author went to the lumber market and bought a horse and cart.
Moris
Lyampe put on The Longing of the
Heart. Women were so taken with this drama that they came early in the day
to buy cheap tickets. The gallery filled, and my father strode about the
theater like a victor on a battle field.
On Saturday evenings, the gallery was filled
with spectators. Once, a woman fainted during a scene in The Longing of the
Heart in which two children sang a sad song with the refrain “I’ll remember
you, I’ll long for you.” Women left the
theater with red, swollen eyes, cursing the seducer with deadly curses, and
deriving a moral lesson for themselves. Men looked aside and secretly wiped
away a tear. That’s how my father gave the people to whom he was devoted a
theater. The theater tickets of this audience did not lie in lacquered purses,
but in baskets with some greens, a piece of cheap meat and a miserable little fish for the Sabbath.
One day, my
father returned from the theater and instead of
fussing over his collection of
lighters (he had a weakness for all sorts of lighters), he sat down on
the edge of the sofa and started to rub his right eyebrow. He had a habit of
stroking his right eyebrow with a finger when in deep thought. It was an old
habit, probably from his yeshiva days. Usually, my father sat like this in the
evenings, after the performances. But this time it was midday. My mother came out of the kitchen with a
plate of sliced herring and saw my father rubbing his eyebrow, and felt a pain
in her heart. Father's posture denoted something was not right. . He was
undoubtedly thinking of some new innovation for the theater. His few earned
pennies weree burning a hole in his pocket.
And that’s
what it was. While at the table, my father spoke out, "You know what,
Rachel? I was talking to people. There are complaints about the
theater." My mother didn’t ask what
complaints, she just looked at him with the grey eyes he so loved. “The complaints are that the intellectual
public goes to the Polish theater, and we have to wean them away. “ My mother
sliced the Spanish onions, my father's favorite appetizer, and grumbled:
“Intellectuals, bah, much income we get from them.”
My father left
for
Maza took all
the honours. He was at the entrance to greet all the high-born personages who
came to the gala premiere. Maza also gave interviews to journalists at the
banquets. But my father too had his moments of joy. In intervals between the
acts, the ‘cream’ of Vilna paraded in the foyer of the Folk Theater and -- with
Jewish enthusiasm -- lauded the performance in Polish.
They put on
Shakespeare’s Shylock (i.e. The Merchant of Venice).
Vayslits acted Shylock, and Yankev Mansdorf
acted Bassanio. Mansdorf walked limberly about the stage in short plush
trousers, hose covering his young muscular legs and a velvet jacket thrown over his powerful
shoulders. The costumer Zakovitsh put a belt around his hips and hung a rapier
from it. Mansdorf smiled widely with full lips and a mouthful of white teeth.
The audience enjoyed the fresh new tone which the ‘Vilner Troupe’ brought to
the Yiddish theater.
************
What became of
it all?
The Germans
converted the theater into a depot for tanks. They tore down the gallery.
Before retreating from the city in 1944, they tore down the theater and leveled
it to the ground. Not a beam was left in the building that my father had built
with such love. He went to his death in Ponar together with his audience, the
loyal Vilna theater-goers.
My father
walked the last road alone, without mother, the love of his young years. She
was murdered earlier by the Germans together with my sister Dvora, a talented
stage actress. Dvora's husband, the actor Leyb Vayner, also went with them. My
father's dream of the theater, actors, performances, decorations, stage effects
-- the colourful world in which he had lived -- was destroyed.
The ashes of
that dream live on in my memories of a destroyed home.
7)-------------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: ed.
Subject: Yiddish Film Made in
a. A
full-length film, Bet-Avi ('My Father's House') wholly in Yiddish,
directed by Dani Rozenberg, and starring Iti Titan and Miki Leon has been
produced in
b. Natan Cohen
in his review of Bilha Rubinstein's Hebrew translation of Yitskhok Bashevis's
[Isaac Bashevis Zinger's] Der kuntsnmakher fun Lublin ('The Magician of
Lublin') [see Khatsi treysar parashot ahavim ('A Half-Dozen Love Affairs')
[Ha-Aretz 22.8.2008] summarizes the novel's
plot, congratulates the translator for working from the Yiddish in contrast to
most Bashevis translators who translate from the English and -- principally --
pinpoints a goodly number of embarrassing mistranslations. In the latter area
our critic is a veritable sharpshooter, mercilessly finding egregious errors.
For instance, the translator reads afere 'affair' as opera
'opera' and speaks of Praga, the unwholesome
c. Yung yidish
calendar: YUNG
YiDiSH Events in August & September
Program in Yiddish and Hebrew: http://www.yiddish.co.il/html/events.htm
info: (03) 6874433
8)--------------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: Eleanor Mlotek
Subject: Lyrics and Score of "Oy dortn, dortn" and "Shvartse
karshelekh"
(click on image to enlarge)
9)------------------------------------
Date: 27 August 2008
From: Robert Goldenberg
Subject: "Oy dortn, dortn" and "Shvartse karshelekh" sung
by Abe Brumberg (From his album "Lovers, Dreamers and Thieves")
The album "Lovers, Dreamers and
Thieves, Yiddish Folk Songs from Eastern Europe", released, in 1977, by
Troubadour Music Inc.,
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of The Mendele Review
Issue 12.016
Editor, Leonard
Prager
Editorial Associate, Robert Goldenberg
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