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Lummus
Park
Miami, Florida
photo credit: Andy Sweet |
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WHERE NEON GOES TO DIE, is the first
documentary film to chronicle the sixty year Yiddish cultural legacy on
Miami Beach. The film is produced and directed by filmmaker David
Weintraub, capturing this vibrant "shtetl by the bay" with love and
attention to detail.
You won't find South Florida's Yiddishland on a map. No history of Miami
Beach, official or otherwise includes this cultural epoch. Yet at its
height, it included tens of thousands of local residents and over 100,000
snowbirds. For decades, Miami Beach hosted six Yiddish theaters, eight
radio stations broadcasting Yiddish programming, fifteen chapters of the
Workmen's Circle (a national Yiddish cultural institution) proliferated on
the beach and Yiddish choral and musical groups performed on Ocean Drive
all year. Then one day it disappeared in a burst of disco lights as the
Art Deco revolution and the Miami Vice-ification of South Beach resulted
in mass evictions of the city's elderly and working class, many of whom
were active
participants in the "shtetl by the bay." |
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Miami has always been
touted as a symbol of America's diversity given the mélange of
people from across the globe that co-exist here. Yet, what few
realize is that entire cultural communities existed for many years
where thousands relished in their history, language and culture. Overtown
was a leading culturally rich place that was decimated when I-95
plowed through it in the 1960's tearing out its heart and
soul. History repeated itself in the late 1970's and early 1980's
when tens of thousands of working class Jews, many of them Holocaust
survivors, were "relocated" so that t-shirt shops, fancy hotels and
nightclubs could retake the beach.
At its peak, one could swim with the sunrise swimmers off the pier
in the morning, shmooze with ones landsmen (fellows from the old
country) at one of nearly a dozen cafeterias for breakfast, join
hundreds of people at Lummus Park for Friendship Circle performances
of Yiddish music in the afternoon, participate in lectures on
culture and politics with organizations like Workmen's Circle, YIVO,
the Miami Jewish Cultural Center or one of dozens of vinkls
(literary circles), and then dance the night away at the Miami Beach
Auditorium. |
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Musicians
at Lummus Park
Miami, Florida
photo credit:
Andy Sweet
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| Weintraub uses rare footage, images and interviews with living members of
the Miami Yiddish stage and screen to reclaim Miami's "shtetl by the bay"
helping viewers understand the power and vibrancy that once existed when
residents of Miami Beach lived a communal life suffused with ethnic
culture. For more information about the film and the Center for Yiddish
Culture, get the latest screening schedule or to purchase the film log on
to: www.yiddishculture.org. |
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