Dark Corridor Filled with Nothing

Dark Corridor Filled with Nothing.... At the end of which is less than nothing-- a big pile of Yiddish books.

I've been waiting ages to use Dark Corridor Filled with Nothing as a pronouncement on the future of Yiddish. Happily, an intrepid Haaretz journalist has given me the opportunity with this new piece about Mendy Cahan and Yung Yiddish. It's called 'The haimisher mensch in the central bus station.'

First off, the disclaimer. I love Mendy. I love Yung Yiddish. I love bus station Yiddish. I prefer it over airport Yiddish, dentist waiting room Yiddish and train station Yiddish. What I can't stand is stupid, hacky, pointless articles about the Yiddish community. In my opinion, they hurt more than they help by recycling the same asinine, and flawed, cliches about Yiddish. You know, those putrid tidbits of common wisdom I call the Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis.

So. The rules say that any article written about Mendy and his enterprise must follow a certain pattern. I've written about this in much greater detail, here.

Past the vendors hawking cheap knapsacks, phone cards, plastic toys and greasy falafels, up the ramp beyond the STD clinic and the school for remedial driving, and around the corner from a Filipina-Israeli matchmaking agency and a kindergarten for African migrant workers’ children, is a dark corridor filled with nothing.

It's like a horror movie and THE YIDDISH IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE BUS STATION!!!!

The bus station is an apt symbol for the journalist's perception of Yiddish: tainted by association with its neighbors and clientele.  And her reaction upon entering the Yung Yiddish space goes further: "...one stumbles, as if down Alice’s rabbit hole, into a wonderland."

Whoa. There's some serious Othering going on here. Are we really so alienated from our own recent past? Am I the only one disturbed by this?

Anyway, the requisite elements of a such an article are here. Mendy's work is minimized by his identification as a Yiddish 'enthusiast.' The journalist is astonished by the very existence of such a space (which has been in operation for decades);  astonished that Yiddish literature is more than 'Tevye the Milkman' in a thousand iterations.

Then there's the dour imagery to remind us that Yiddish is a linguistic ghoul, skulking about liminal spaces like the Tel Aviv bus station. The office is at the end of aforementioned dark corridor filled with nothing. And this gem:

Some might call it a Yiddish graveyard, but far better, suggests Cahan, would be to call it a library. A cultural center, even, where these books live on.

 As the kids say, LOL!


Then there's the requisite sprinkling of Yiddish words the author knows (or thinks she knows.) "Cahan turns to the back of the office and opens up a bisselleh door." A bisselleh door. Who knows, he only opens the bottom part, maybe? But anyway, who cares? IT'S A DEAD LANGUAGE NO ONE KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE. Who could even say what's correct or incorrect. Certainly not the subject of the story.



Or wait a minute....???
Nah... 
No one cares.

PS- Non-Jewish Arabs in Israel are learning Yiddish. 

More Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis

In this episode, Yiddish is brought in to make a sad analogy; Nova Scotia Gaelic is said to be having its "Yiddish moment." 

What is a Yiddish moment? Once flourishing minority language squashed in its place of birth, chugs along for a while in the New World, now on life support along with its few elderly speakers.

Tosh and poppycock. Ahistorical poppycock. 

The author sees Nova Scotia Gaelic at a crossroads as a minority language in Canada. It can go one way and be like Romansh, one of the four national languages of Switzerland, or it can go the way of Yiddish, and be the language of... well, no one, really, according to this article. In Switzerland you can get your phone bill in Romansh and the Romansh speaking population is aggressive about maintaining it as a civic language. Yiddish, on the other hand, has already passed over into the 'post-vernacular' of nostalgia and sentiment and is the civic language of no place and no government. If Nova Scotians aren't more aggressive, the author warns, Gaelic will go the way of Yiddish, rakhmone litslon.

There's a lot to unpack here. Though I don't know much (ok, anything) about the politics around Romansh and linguistic hegemony in Switzerland, I'm sure it's a lot more complex than what's sketched out here. In any case, I'll just focus one what concerns me, the use and abuse of Yiddish as a signifier, and one piece of the Atlantean meme:

Both [Yiddish and Gaelic] have some fluent speakers left, but with Yiddish as with Gaelic, most are elderly. Younger people who consider either language part of their identity rarely (not never, but rarely) know enough to hold down a conversation. It’s more typical for them to know snatches: songs, little sayings, a few words and phrases. Nobody who spends any time getting to know either Gaelic or Yiddish can avoid seeing that reality.

Fact is, those who study contemporary Yiddish agree that there are almost a million Yiddish speakers alive today. The majority of them are some flavor of ultra-Orthodox, mostly Hasidim. And, due to exploding birth rates, the population of contemporary Yiddish speakers skews heavily younger.

So, no. Sorry. Wrong. Maybe you don't like Hasidim, but you can't deny that they're Jews, there's a lot of them, and that they speak Yiddish every damn day. 

Gaelic is at a crossroads. It can continue to go the way of Yiddish, a language whose fluent speakers are mostly elderly and which is basically nonexistent as a language of government. Or it can go the way of Romansh and other small languages, and gradually but aggressively claim its right to be part of the modern world. 

In fact, if you want to go all Dubnovian, Yiddish is a language of civic life and governance. Of course, it's a totally internal, self-governing of the Hasidic kehiles, but nonetheless, go into any Hasidic community (In America, in Canada, in Belgium, in Israel) and you'll see a great deal of public life being conducted in Yiddish. 

Point being that those who had a political will, and a theological imperative, to maintain Yiddish as a vernacular have done so for themselves, without waiting for a Yiddish phone bill from the government. (Though you can buy a Metrocard in Yiddish in New York City.)

Faced with the grinding machinery of American assimilation, the majority of American Jews had no such collective will to maintain Yiddish. If the Jews of 1910, let's say, had been dealing with the same kind of linguistic discourse available to Canadians of 2012, perhaps then, things might have turned out somewhat differently. But obviously the two situations are completely different. Analogy fail. Let's hope Nova Scotia Gaelic fares a little bit better.

Yiddish Theater Updates

Couple of interesting items on the Yiddish theater calendar...

Yiddish Plays at Target Margin Theater

Target Margin Theater, under the direction of David Herskovits, has undertaken an ambitious two season exploration of Yiddish theater in English. The past couple of weeks have seen a full schedule of 'Lab' shows presented at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg. I saw Dukus last week and there's still a chance to see the remaining three shows:

November 2 & 3 at 9:30 pm  

Shulamis, or The Well and the Pussycat after Abraham Goldfaden 

Lead Artist: Gil Sperling 

Goldfaden’s classic operetta offers hum-along Schlagers such as “Rozhinkes mit mandlen,” mixed with male treachery, bride-snatching and infant mortality.




October 30 – November 3 at 7:30 pm A DOUBLE BILL: 
After Midnight by Samuel Daixel 
Lead Artist: Stephanie Weeks
The clock strikes Midnight. All is still. But is it? Something’s stirring, something’s budding, howling, falling. Something…
*playing with*
Cripples by David Pinski 

Lead Artist: Ásta Bennie Hostetter

Watch the most damaged members of society vie for the smallest piece of land: “That isn’t your place! … Since I’m standing upon it, it’s mine!”


Tickets for TMT at the Brick here




And the new season at The Folksbiene...

A revival of The Golden Land, a musical about the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States, is now playing through December 2. (In English and Yiddish)




		PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
	Sunday Oct 28-Dec 2-		2pm & 6pm
	Tuesday Nov 13 and 20		7:30pm
	Tuesday Nov 27		2:00pm
	Wednesday Oct 31-Nov 28		2pm & 7:30pm
	Thursday Nov 1-29		2pm & 7:30pm
		(no performances November 22)
	Friday Nov 23		1pm
	Saturday Nov 3, 10, and 24		8pm

At Baruch College Performing Arts Center, 28th Street and Lexington Avenue

Tickets here

Dybbuk Revival 2012: Hurricane Edition

The Yiddish Revival is sooooo 2011. From here on out it's all feigned surprise at the persistence of the Yiddishly undead all the time.

2012: Year of the Dybbuk Revival was first announced in my Forward review of Jason Haxton's Dibbuk Box. Much has happened since then in the space between worlds....

In June, Fernando Penalosa, a translator of Yiddish and Maya, among other languages, published a slim, but very exciting, volume of Dybbuk parodies with English translation and notes: Parodies of An-Sky's The Dybbuk.  These are parodies by well known writers and journalists from the time of the Vilna Troupe's original Dybbuk. A friend of mine just got a copy of this volume and instead of stealing hers I may need to go to Plan B and just buy my own. Hmmm....

On August 15 Yiddish vaudevillian Shane Baker and musician Benjy Fox-Rosen workshopped their new two-handed Dybbuk to great acclaim and greater puzzled looks.

At the end of August a new Hollywood movie opened, purporting to be based on the Dybbuk legend. The Possession was a decent enough horror movie, but had more to do with The Exorcist than actual Jewish folklore.

As fall races forward and we get closer to Halloween, Dybbukim are popping up all over. At the University of Maryland the Dybbuk Marathon Conference was scheduled for this weekend. According to the website:

The Dybbuk Marathon conference, "Dybbuks in the 21st Century: Why Are We Still Possessed?", the first of its kind unique combination of academic and artistic events devoted to the iconic Yiddish play, The Dybbuk, Or Between Two Worlds (1912-1914) by S. An-sky, will bring together established academic experts on dybbuks from the US and Israel, a new generation of scholars, students, artists involved in the ongoing revival of interest in dybbuks (souls of the dead possessing the living bodies) in the twenty-first century, as well as Jewish communities of the area, and general public.

And this week! A new production (with all new music) of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner's retelling of the Dybbuk. It's at Queens College, Goldstein Theater:
Special Preview Performance  Wed. October 31 at 7:00
11/1, 11/8 and 11/11 at 7:00
11/3 and 11/10 at 8:00
11/4 and 11/11 at 2:00
(Call the box office at 718-793-8080. Tickets will also be available at the door one hour prior to the performance.)

This isn't the first production of Kushner's Dybbuk. Back in 1997 he collaborated with the world-famous Klezmatics on a brand new score for the show. Those songs were then recorded for their CD, Possessed. It's a beautiful album and has one of the only Yiddish odes to marijuana that I know of. Get it!

LIPA!!!!!

There's a new video from international Hasidic pop star, brocade bekeshe and funky glasses wearer, Lipa Schmeltzer. It's called Mizrach (East) and it celebrates unity or achdus among all Jews. Well, among all kinds of male Jews. OK, maybe not all male Jews, but anyway.

The Mizrach at issue here is Israel and the division between its haredi and secular Jews. That division (and the bitterness it creates) is felt in the haredi community's (until now, legal) avoidance of national military service via the Tal law. "The law, enacted in 2002, provided a legal framework for full-time yeshiva students, mainly from the haredi community, to indefinitely defer military service."  That law recently expired and the government is now free to start calling haredi youths for military service.

As you can imagine, the military's absorption of a huge, restive demographic with highly specialized ... ahem... needs is both a logistical and cultural challenge. There's a lot of ill will from all sides mizrakh, maariv, tsofen, durem (east, west, south, north). Enter Lipa.

Lipa is a vocal supporter of haredi participation in the Israeli military and this video is an interesting, and in some quarters provocative, statement of his support. He dances with soldiers, he dances with frum yingermen. He wears funky glasses and hipster square Satmar briln. He's got multiple kippah changes. Lipa is Liberace in pelts and this is 2012 akhdus, baby! 

Check it out:

Yiddish Theater comes to South Fallsburg This Weekend!

New Yiddish Rep and the Rivoli Theatre present:

Yosl Rakover Speaks To G-d

Thursday, August 23rd 10 PM Motzei Shabbos, August 25th 11 PM Rivoli Theatre 5243 MAIN STREET SOUTH FALLSBURG, NY 845 436-5336 $10 newyiddishrep.org

Brokhshtiker/Shards

On August 12th we observed the 60th anniversary of what has come to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. August 12th, 1952, 13 Soviet Jews were executed in Moscow's Lyubyanka Prison, as part of Stalin's larger plan to decimate Soviet Jewry. Five of those executed were writers. All had been leaders and public figures associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Today, commemorations often include other prominent Soviet Jews murdered by Stalin in the same period, such as Shloyme Mikhoels. 


Modernist poet Perets Markish was among those executed in 1952. One of his most famous poems is Brokhshtiker (Shards.) From Brokhshtiker comes the image of a shpigl af a shteyn, a mirror on a stone. Shpigl af a shteyn is also familiar to students of Yiddish literature as the title of the most important anthology of Soviet Yiddish writing. 



Here's the title page of my very old copy:




And the list of authors found within:

For this year's August 12th commemoration, Australian animator Jack Feldstein created a short film set to Brokhshtiker. Feldstein uses a technique he calls 'neonizing' which is "a combination of live action video recording and public domain material..." The result, with Yiddishist Shane Baker reciting the words of the poem, is a beautiful new interpretation of Markish and his poetry.

Memorials, Music and (M)dybbuk: Coming Up

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird at Lincoln Center, Sunday at 1

Did you know the Yiddish Pogues were in New York City? I didn't, either. Sunday at 1 pm Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird will be playing at Lincoln Center in a rare (and free) NYC appearance. Highly recommended.

If you can't make it on Sunday, Kahn and the Painted Bird will be playing at the Living Room on Ludlow, Thursday the 16th at 10 pm.

Memorial for the Murdered Yiddish Poets, Sunday at 3

And then at 3 (on Sunday) is the annual Memorial for the Murdered Yiddish Poets. From the Congress for Jewish Culture:

On August 12th, 1952, Stalin's regime executed, among other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, five Yiddish writers whose achievements represent some of the high points of 20th century literature: Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Moyshe Kulbak. 

This Sunday, August 12th, 2012 at 3 PM, the Congress for Jewish Culture together with CYCO Yiddish Books, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Workmen's Circle will be holding a memorial

 to remember those and other Yiddish writers who suffered repression in the Soviet Union.

The event is free and open to the public, one need only register in advance at the following link: http://yivo.org/events_signups.php

It will take place at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) in Manhattan.

The program is in Yiddish and English. Professor Thomas Bird of Queens College will chair, with the participation of Boris Sandler, editor of the Forverts; Paul Glasser of the YIVO; Hy Wolfe of CYCO Yiddish Books will recite and sing poetry by the writers; Paula Teitelbaum, the folksinger, will sing two songs by Moyshe Kulbak (executed in 1937) and read poems by other writers; and the program will also feature two new short films using poems by Perets Markish as the soundtrack, one by neon animator Jack Feldstein and one by Paul Fischer.
Come, help us remember!

New Staged Reading of the Dybbuk, Wednesday, August 15th, 7 pm

The Dybbuk Revival of 2012 continues apace with a new staged reading (with music) of Sh. An-Sky's The Dybbuk. This new Dybbuk is the brainchild of Shane Baker and Benjy Fox-Rosen, two of my favorite young Yiddish artists.

You are hereby cordially invited to attend the wedding of the holy bride and groom. Stand with us under the khupe on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 at 7 PM as Leah Bas Sender is married to Menashe Zoknlialke at the behest of her father, R' Sender Brinitzer.  Potluck orem-moltsayt (seriously, bring a dish fit for a rich man's daughter's wedding).  We present to you a staged reading of selections from The Dybbuk, by Shane Bertram Baker and Benjamin Haim Fox-Rosen with S. Z. Rapoport. Music combobulated by Benjamin Haim Fox-Rosen. Free and open to the public. RSVP requested. Limited seating. Dress your Sabbath best.

at The St. James Building, 1133 Broadway, Suite 245 southwest corner of 26th Street and Broadway

And the Dybbuk's Dybbuk

Finally, a little Hasidic foygel reminded me that you can watch the original Yiddish Dybbuk on-line. Enjoy!

"Based" "on" "a" "True" "Story"

There are two ways to make a Jewish supernatural horror film. One, Jewish vampires and werewolves (American Werewolf in London, Fearless Vampire Killers). Or two, take supernatural elements from Jewish folklore and spin a story around them (the Dybbuk, the Golem). Option one presents a wider range of story elements, but presents the challenge of harmonizing supernatural cosmologies. Is a Jewish vampire repelled by a cross and holy water? Does the presence of Jews in a horror film necessarily destroy the illusions of a fantasy universe? 

Option two is more rare, I think, because most people, Jews and non-Jews, are unfamiliar with the world of the Jewish supernatural. The most developed body of Jewish supernatural lore comes from Eastern Europe and its Yiddish culture. And as with the Yiddish language, American Jews really haven't the slightest interest in Eastern European folk religion (and its spirit world). Which is too bad, because the potential for a really good, really creepy, really Jewish horror movie is there.*

Alas, there is a new 'dybbuk' movie coming out soon. And while I long to see a great Dybbuk for the 21st century, I'm fairly confident this ain't it. At the end of August, Lionsgate will release The Possession, a new film featuring a dybbuk in a box and a really creepy little girl possessed by said dybbuk. Oh, it's got Matisyahu's beard (z"l) attached to the character of Tsadok, a Kabalist exorcist. If you ask me (and, really, you should've) a brilliant move would've been to hire an actual Hasid (or recently ex-) to play the role of Tsadok. I'm thinking someone like Luzer Twersky. He's a young actor who comes from that part of the world (Hasidic Brooklyn) where they actually believe in this stuff. (Not fakelore like a dybbuk haunted winebox, but you know what I mean.) Ah well. Movies. You expect intelligent verisimilitude and you get Renee Zellweger in a shpitzl.

You can see the trailer for The Possession online. They're pushing the 'Based on a True Story' angle pretty hard. It's true that the movie bears a relationship to a real, purportedly dybbuk haunted, winebox, though that relationship is more commercial than familial. 

Back in 2004 the press picked up on the story of a haunted winebox that had somehow ended up on Ebay. The current owner of the box, Jason Haxton, just released his own book, describing his journey to discover the truth about the box. You can read my review of Haxton's 'Dibbuk Box' at the Forward. From what I see in the trailer, and what I've read about the movie, The Possession bears scant resemblance to the book, aside from both having dibbuks and boxes. And don't even get me started on what relation the book may have to 'reality.' In February I noted that the book had the uncanny authority of a Wonderbread bagel.




At least from the trailer, it looks like the producers were less interested in drawing on Jewish lore, and more content to recycle familiar horror movie tropes. The trailer itself is a callback to The Exorcist and its prototype 'little girl possessed by middle eastern entity' images of terror: little girl undergoing medical scanning, little girl suffering bodily possession, etc. The actress in The Possession even looks a bit like Linda Blair.

Watch the first minute and a half of the trailer and you'll know everything you need to know about the movie, aside from its lack of imagination. The requisite bearded university expert (it's beard vs. beard up in here) examines our mysterious object of evil, saying: "It says 'dybbuk'... Hebrew word for demon." 

Bahah. OK. Except no. "Dybbuk" contains the loshn koydesh root 'd-v-k' which means to cleave. The word dybbuk comes to us from the phrase ruakh medabek or 'spirit who cleaves'. We find Jewish folklore about dybbukim and possession arising in pre-Enlightenment Eastern Europe. Dybbukim were a kind of failed gilgul, or reincarnation of a soul. A dybbuk was believed to be the soul of a sinner fleeing his (always his) spiritual punishment. He would take refuge in a woman's body (always a woman) until driven out by the local mekubel or his non-union Ukrainian equivalent. The point being that dybbukim were not supernatural entities per se, they were discarnate souls just looking out for themselves. They had no larger agenda of evil. Not to put too fine point on it, but goyish and Jewish possession are totally different animals. Or animus. And The Possession seems to miss this distinction entirely.


As for demons, Yiddish does contain plenty of supernatural beings to be scared of. The most obvious 'demon' therein is a shed, a servant of Ashmodai found, for one, in IB Singer's short story 'The Last Demon' or, in Yiddish, Mayse Tishevits. (And, if you can read the Yiddish, it is infinitely better than the watered down, de-Judaised English translation. Ahem.)

But maybe these are the academic niggles of a humorless Yiddishist. After all, the real question is, will The Possession give me tingles in my scary place? Who knows, maybe Matisyahu will surprise us with his riveting screen presence and glatt Hasidish gravitas. And maybe we'll see a new twist on the quiescent evil lurking in small girls. 

Indeed, it is possible to shamelessly recycle horror tropes, sprinkle brazenly with homages to classic movies, and indulge in just the kind of fakelore which usually leaves me clutching at my pearls, and still end up with something that's fresh, fun and, most important, scary. I'm thinking of the recent Hammer studios reboot Wake Wood. I won't give too much away, but Wake Wood's protagonists are a young married couple who move into an isolated Irish village whose residents turn out to practice the kind of tweedy, Celt-ish earth magic found only in certain mid-century English horror films. Deliciously scary hi-jinks ensue.

In Jason Haxton's 'The Dibbuk Box,' a trail of mid- to large size catastrophes seem to follow the box around, pinging everyone with the bad luck to enter its orbit. The spookiest thing that happened to me was someone (presumably a publicist) arriving at my blog by googling 'dibbuk box' while I was reading it.  I'm still holding out hope that The Possession can conjure up a scare or two better than that.

Bright Lights, Yiddish Stage

The New York Yiddish scene has been kind of quiet lately. That's summer in the city for you; all the cool kids are in Berlin, Krakow or Minsk. But two great Yiddish theater events are coming up in August, so mark your calendars:

First, on August 8: You Don't Have to Speak Yiddish to Understand the Truth, an evening of vintage vaudeville benefitting the Sholem Aleichem Foundation and the Congress for Jewish Culture. Performers will include Yelena Shmulenson, Shane Baker, Allan Rickman, David Mandelbaum and many, many others. (Wednesday, August 8, 9:30 pm, at the Metropolitan Room)

And then, The Essence, a Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum, returns to the New York stage as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The Essence is a madcap overview of the history of Yiddish theater like you've never seen before. In the words of the producers, "Leave Grandma at home."


Tuesday August 14 at 7:30, Thursday August 16  at 7:15, Friday August 17 at 4, Sunday August 19 at 9, Friday August 24 at 4, Sunday August 26 at 1 


At the Robert Moss Theater at 440 Studios 
(440 Lafayette Street, below Astor Place, across the street from the Public Theater) 

Buy your tickets for The Essence here.