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SHOW
NOTES: ONE OF THREE
by Barry Robinson
Asbury (NJ) Park Press, May 11, 1966
“If only I had a parking lot,” Ben
Bonus mused, “then I wouldn’t have any problems at all.” He
was exaggerating, of course, but not that much. When you’re
producing Yiddish theater on New York’s Second Avenue these
days, there will always be problems. Bonus, however, has had
less than most, his biggest one being that prospective
patrons can’t find a place to park their cars, which is
something impresarios never had to worry about during the
Yiddish theater’s prime in the early days of this century.
Back then New York's Jewish population
was pretty well concentrated in a shtetl of sorts known as
the Lower East Side, of which Second Avenue was a cultural
main stream. In the years since, affluence and assimilation
have turned the neighborhood into a ghost-like relic of its
previous vitality as Jews and gentiles alike joined the
suburban migration. Once a gourmet's delight, the area now
boasts only two dairy restaurants, the famed Moscowitz and
Lupowitz (which served a flaishadich or meat menu), having
closed its doors within the past few weeks. Where once there
were twenty theatres mounting plays in Yiddish, there are
now three.
What he is selling, at this point, is
closer to Yiddish vaudeville than theater, but he plans to
go legitimate in October with an original vehicle, depicting
European shtetl life. The show, which will have music, is
expected to run through the entire week, instead of just on
weekends as his current offerings are.
The basic theme of his variety
shows is to speak Yiddish, and to have a recognizably
Jewish flavor. Although a singer will occasionally work
in English (or, as on the night we were there, in
French), all dialogue is in Yiddish. Since Yiddish is a
rather impressionistic tongue, it’s relatively
easy—assuming the knowledge of a healthy handful of
Yiddishisms—to grasp the general gist of the
conversation. The specifics are something else, and that
is where Bonus may run into trouble in the
less-than-immediate future as less and less Jews find it
necessary to know even Yiddishisms, much less the
language itself. How will a show urging one to speak
Yiddish fare then?
In typical Yiddish fashion, bonus
answers the question with—what else?—a question. “How
many people who go to the opera speak Italian? They go
because they enjoy the music and the flavor of the
performance, a flavor that would be lost if it should be
translated into English. ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is not
‘Tevye.’ You can’t translate Yiddish into English
without losing something.”
His shows are written by men whose
words flow with ease only in Yiddish. Wolf Yunin, M.
Nudelman and I. Shulman are the last of a breed of
poet-journalists, writers for the dwindling Yiddish
language papers, The Day and the Daily Forward. I.
Kishon wrote the movie, “Sallah”; Itzhak Yonasovich is a
Polish Jew living in Argentina, where Yiddish theater
still flourishes strongly, and Mordecai Gebertig is a
Jewish folk writer. When the time comes that Jewish
generations don’t comprehend Yiddish, Bonus will have a
narrator translate what’s to come at the beginning of
each scene, but his writers will continue in their
mother tongue.
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The role of Yiddish theatre
in this country is best reflected in one of its
most golden moments—when either Jacob Adler or
Maurice Schwartz played Shakespeare in Yiddish,
bringing the drama of the Bard to immigrants who
could not speak English fluently, much les
understand Shakespearean usage. The existence of
Yiddish theater was then a necessity; now, it is
at best a luxury—a good luxury—but nonetheless a
luxury.
Still, the crowds are
coming to the Village Theatre and will probably
continue to do so for some years. Not only old
people, whose faces glow with nostalgia from
hearing their mother tongue spoken, but young
people in search of someday when assimilation
has become so thorough that young Jews no longer
seek their Yiddish roots. Will the Yiddish
theater be able to survive as a cultural entity
then as opera no doubt will? Ben Bonus thinks
so, but the chances are that, when that day
comes, Yiddish theater impresarios will be faced
with problems far more difficult than finding a
place for their patrons to park.
The role of Yiddish theatre
in this country is best reflected in one of its
most golden moments—when either Jacob Adler or
Maurice Schwartz played Shakespeare in Yiddish,
bringing the drama of the Bard to immigrants who
could not speak English fluently, much les
understand Shakespearean usage. The existence of
Yiddish theater was then a necessity; now, it is
at best a luxury—a good luxury—but nonetheless a
luxury. |
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Still, the crowds are coming to the
Village Theatre and will probably continue to do so for
some years. Not only old people, whose faces glow with
nostalgia from hearing their mother tongue spoken, but
young people in search of someday when assimilation has
become so thorough that young Jews no longer seek their
Yiddish roots. Will the Yiddish theater be able to
survive as a cultural entity then as opera no doubt
will? Ben Bonus thinks so, but the chances are that,
when that day comes, Yiddish theater impresarios will be
faced with problems far more difficult than finding a
place for their patrons to park.
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