Adapting Jewish Literature: Yentl and A Tale of Love and Darkness (video)

"Without hubris you will never be an artist..." -my teacher, Ruby Namdar

Last week I had the honor of joining Ruby Namdar, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Eitan Kensky for a delightful and thought provoking discussion of Yentl and A Tale of Love and Darkness. The video of that event is now available to watch.

Many thanks to Stanford University and Moment Magazine for inviting me and making it happen.

The Lives and Legacies of Jewish Women Who Resisted the Nazis (video)

I'm pleased to say that video is now available for the live webinar I moderated on the role of Jewish women and resistance. 

Wagner College professor Lori Weintrob led the program, called "Heroines of the Holocaust," based on her research and teaching at the Wagner College Holocaust Center. We were also lucky to have a survivor named Rachel Roth and her family as special guests during the program. 

It was a really special program and I hope you'll watch it.

Jewlia Eisenberg and the Music of the Spheres

(read more about the new-old Yiddish rituals of mourning in my latest column) 

A few days ago we got the terrible news that Jewlia Eisenberg was avek in der eybikayt, she had passed into the next world. It's always a tragedy when someone is cut down in their prime. It hurts even more to lose an artist like Jewlia. More than just talented, she was a force of nature; a holy vessel of song; a generous, optimistic, expansive soul. I felt so lucky every time I got to be with her. My heart and my thoughts are with her partner, AnMarie, and the rest of her family....

I had first seen Jewlia and Charming Hostess at Tonic, some time in the early 2000s. I was immediately smitten with her, her music, and the incredible musicians she worked with. I had never heard anything like this. I didn't even have the words to describe what they were doing. How often can you say that?

On one of Jewlia's visits to New York she visited me at the law firm where I worked. This was probably sometime around 2014 or 2015. We had lunch in the fancy firm cafeteria, sitting by the wraparound windows, where you could eat your panini and enjoy the view of Fox News HQ. I remember Jewlia telling me about her work as a ritual facilitator and officiant in the Bay Area, a world away from midtown. Though I rolled my eyes at the thought of getting too into god, by the end of our lunch, I was making plans to fly to Oakland just to be able to pray with her and her khevre.  

Even after we had become friends, I remained a dedicated Jewlia superfan. I was sitting front row, of course, at this 2013 show at Barbes, where I took this picture.

Jewlia at Barbes in 2013 

Jewlia was one of the very first artists I profiled as a journalist. I wrote about her in my Rootless Cosmopolitan column in Jewish Currents in 2006. (Apparently not available online)

I'm still trying to get my mind around losing her. I knew she was sick and had been for a very long time. And yet. In a year which has seen such unbearable loss, losing Jewlia feels especially unbearable.

How painfully apt then, that my last column ended up being delayed, coming out the day after we learned the news about Jewlia's passing. The topic was the one year anniversary of the pandemic, and Yiddish rituals of grief and mourning. For this column, I learned about the skilled mourning women of Ashkenaz, the klogmuters, who wailed and ripped their clothes and performed grief for the community. I interviewed my friends who are researching and reclaiming the practice of feldmestn, the ritual measurement of a graveyard with string and use that string to make neshome likht (soul candles). 

Like the badkhns, the klogmuters' wailing work consisted of variations on established themes and set patterns. With her work as a ritual facilitator, and her interest in women's poetry, I think Jewlia would have been fascinated by the functional poetry of the klogmuters. All we can do now, though, is wail in her memory, the best we can.

This Song is Your Song

Today we had our event celebrating the new Yiddish translation of Woody Guthrie's classic ode to America, This Land is Your Land. I joined Forward Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren and Forverts writer Jordan Kutzik, along with musician-archivist Lorin Sklamberg, translator and Yiddish expert Michael Wex, and the singer of Dos Land iz Dayn Land, Daniel Kahn. We had a really fun conversation about the why and how of translating from English into Yiddish. If you couldn't make it live, you can watch the video now.

The funniest part, for me at least, came when I noted that in the Yiddish translation, Daniel had inserted a reference to the groyse ozeres, the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are, of course, one of America's natural wonders and a perfect fit for a song like This Land is Your Land. But it also struck me as a very personal reference to Daniel's homeland of Detroit. Though I, a parochial New Yorker, confessed I had never actually seen any of the Great Lakes. At which point, Michael Wex chose to chastise me in front of the crowd, reminding me that I had been to Toronto (in fact, countless times) and had enjoyed walking along one of the Greatest of lakes.  Oops. To make up for my unintentional insult to the great nation to the north of us, I'll encourage everyone to listen to the folksinging group The Travellers doing their Canadian version of This Land is Your Land.

Of course, it's well worth your time to watch Daniel perform the song (again).

And finally, for the last couple months I've been OBSESSED with this extremely funky version of This Land is Your Land by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Sharon sings the verse that's often omitted, in which the singer comes across a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign (and walks right past it). If you've never heard this version, PLEASE drop everything and listen right now.

 

How Do You Get to Second Avenue?

[I'm very pleased to tell you about a new, in-depth Digital Yiddish Theatre Project piece on my play, Shtumer Shabes. Read it here.]

-------------------------------------------------------

You know that moment? When a Broadway show finally opens? The drama critics rush to the phone booths to dictate their reviews to their various newspaper copy desks. 

Before the cast can even finish their champagne toasts at Sardi’s (I imagine), the late edition newspaper is being delivered, along with the critics’ verdicts, and, by extension, the show’s future. It's one of my favorite movie magic moments. It’s all so brutal, but dramatically efficient. 

Life isn’t always so dramatically efficient. Or, maybe, not in the ways we ache for. 

At the end of November, 2020, I presented excerpts from my new play, Shtumer Shabes, at the Vancouver Chutzpah! Festival. This was as close as I was getting to my big opening moment amid the bleakness of 2020. Afterwards, though we didn’t all retire to Sardi’s together (halevai!) I got some truly wonderful messages from the folks who watched, especially the many Yiddishist world friends who had “attended.” 

One of the great surprises was getting warmly positive feedback from the non-Yiddishists, too. Their enthusiasm made me feel like just maybe, I could write accurate, compelling drama about a highly niche subculture and still make make something watchable for all audiences.  

And yet, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat unsatisfied. In November, there had been no opportunity for me to spy on the audience and see who laughed and who didn’t, no post-show shmoozing in the lobby, no face-to-face rehash. The delicious intimacy of theater was lost in the move to the virtual space. And I had poured so much into the text: carefully researched history, character details, in-jokes and lowbrow gags, and maybe even the memory of an old lover repurposed for my own dramatic use. The feedback I did get was lovely, but at a melancholy distance. 
 
So I was all the more thrilled when a few weeks ago, Yiddish literature scholar Sonia Gollance told me that she would be writing about Shtumer Shabes for the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (DYTP). Sonia’s piece, Shtetl Gothic on the Virtual Stage, is out now and I’m not ashamed to say it made my damn month. It's an in-depth look at the reading we did, touching on the text, the performances, and the technical challenges of this new kind of performance. 
 
Going from critic to playwright is a harrowing prospect, if you think about it too much, which I try not to. Such a path holds way too many opportunities to be tripped (if not worse) on one’s own prior arrogance. So it was all the more gratifying to read, for example, that my “play is full of the kind of ‘thick’ Jewish cultural literacy that she regularly champions in her other work.” Whew.

Further, Sonia writes:

It is also rare to see a production that so accurately captures the highs and lows of graduate student research–the joys of discovery, the comradery of an enthusiastic but highly specialized community, the uncertainty, the dependence on an advisor’s approval. Yet other aspects of Shtumer shabes feel more universal…It is precisely because Kafrissen has so carefully conveyed these more specific worlds that she can powerfully and convincingly meld the universal and the particular…

Who knows what the immediate future holds for live theater, but I'm very cautiously optimistic that we will soon be making small steps toward live performance and being together again in theaters of all shapes and sizes. I'm hoping my play can be part of that in some way. And if you want to bring it for workshopping at your theater or cultural space, of course, be in touch right away.