ACTING IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD | November 28th 2007

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Enid Stubin catches a screening of "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" in a New York cinema, and, no stranger to the genre herself, relishes the film's efforts to capture a dying art form without tumbling into nostalgia ...

The history of the Yiddish theatre in America is rich and contentious, stuffed with rivalry and ideological conflict, stocked with colossal figures who called the shots on and off the stage. "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" with its echo of an Isaac Bashevis Singer title, is a new documentary directed by Dan Katzir, about a well-reviewed but struggling production of Peretz Hirshbein's "Griner Felder" ("Green Fields") that is preparing to close in the waning days of December 2000. The shoestring show has run out of money. The box office is in drerd. The film evokes the potential for a little Hanukkah miracle, and frames the narrative with eight nights of candles: Will the producers get the Lambs' Theatre and backing for an extended, almost-Broadway run?

I caught "Yiddish Theater" on its opening night at New York's Pioneer Theatre, a wonderfully dingy temple to obscure cinema attached to a pizza parlour in the East Village. The handful of fellow audience members included the producer. Someone kept dropping Charlie Rose's name.

The film opens on a winter cityscape, to the sound of a tinny "Jingle Bells". Its focus is a production of "Griner Felder" by Zypora Spaisman and her Yiddish Public Theatre. Spaisman, who died in 2002, had spent 42 years as grande dame at the Folksbiene, a lonely survivor of the scores of Yiddish theatre troupes operating in America in the 1930s. By old Folksbiene standards, "Griner Felder" would have been a crowd-pleaser—a bucolic melodrama set in 19th-century Poland with two sets of lovers, interfering parents and a ferocious charm.

Spaisman made her name playing imperious matriarchs. In the Folksbiene's 1997 production of "Yankl der Schmid" she was magisterial, shrewd and irresistible as the Machetainesteh (a high-ranking in-law, more or less), the tyrannical fulcrum of a quarrelsome family. In Katzir's film, she's relegated to a predictably feisty little old lady, stepping gingerly down subway stairs and holding court at the theatre. In her kitchen she deftly dismantles a boiled chicken, announcing peremptorily, "There's this, and meat, and you'll drink soup." Her guest and minder is David Romeo, the film's courtly producer, who is clearly enchanted. We are too.

Katzir is off-camera in his interviews with Spaisman. If his questions seem patronising and even insolent, perhaps it is because he doesn't trust us to appreciate the gritty allure of this stubborn professional. The director's temptation to domesticate her into a cosy stereotype might be a tactical error: Spaisman is just like your bubbe—if your bubbe happened to be Mrs Patrick Campbell. Unnecessary subtitles gloss Spaisman's idiosyncratic but perfectly understandable English ("It was very coldness from the audience," she says of an unsatisfying performance).

The film also trots out a spate of experts to provide context for the demise of Yiddish theatre. "This is gold, Seymour, this is gold!" crows Zalman Mlotek, a Folksbiene director, to Seymour Rechtzeit, a veteran actor and producer. They are at the Hebrew Actors Union, walking among shelves packed with yellowed manuscripts and dog-eared scores. "So it's gold", Rechtzeit shrugs. In the re-evaluation of artefacts, the effluvium of a vibrant tradition either appreciates in value or becomes flammable trash.

For all the film's sentimentality, there are scenes of remarkable pathos. In one, Nahma Sandrow, a scholar, translator and author of "Vagabond Stars"—published in 1977 and for my money still the best work on the Yiddish theatre—is questioned about the systematic eradication of Yiddish after the second world war. "Why was there such resistance to this language?" the director asks her, referring to Israel's policy of assimilating settlers from a shattered Eastern Europe. Casting about for an answer, Sandrow looks pained. Ultimately she says, quietly, "Because it was the language of the dead."

On the final night of "Griner Felder", Spaisman is observed in her spartan dressing room, putting her performance wig into a plastic bag and tucking the parcel into a tote. Her gesture, dense with dignity and loss, speaks not only to the fate of her company, but also to the prodigious effort of actors who work night after night at their craft, outside the realm of recognition and reward. They struggle to summon forth what Ben Jonson called "a little winter love in a dark corner."

At once reverential and condescending, Katzir's documentary suggests the hazards of reclaiming a dying art form without tumbling into nostalgia. Still, "Yiddish Theater" has many pleasures, as when the irrepressible Felix Fibich shows off his agility in rehearsal. And while the soundtrack includes the now-generic stylings of the Andrews and Barry sisters—what documentary on anything Jewish could ever be without "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and "Romania, Romania"?—it was a joy to hear Martha Schlamme's exquisite, affecting folk songs.

When had I last seen Spaisman? "Mirele Efros"? "Yankl der Schmid"? "Stempenyu"? My diary tells me: November 1st 1997: "Folksbiene, 8:15." The theatre was the auditorium of a midtown East Side synagogue, and my companion was my father's cousin Monia, a plenty fierce matriarch herself. We were there, of course, for the reassuring sight of those enduring old lefties, Monia's cronies from the Yiddish Cultural Society ("I forgot more Mamaloshen than she ever knew . . . but she looks good"); the racketingly rude audience ("Shah!" "Better you shah . . . some nerve . . . he tells me shah . . ."); and the mix of rattling chocolate bar wrappers, peeling oranges, and voluble commentary on the rising action. The play didn't matter, the cast didn't signify: what was important coalesced in the sound of the language, the embers of a moribund art form, the Yiddishkeit. So you went.

(Enid Stubin is assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, and writes a New York diary for The Reader magazine.)