Thursday, August 18, 2005

Yiddish Synchronicity

A detour from the many jaunts to the Soho Apple Store (btw the last time I was there I saw Liev Schreiber. He's very tall and thin in person and I suspect he's on the "other team". I just looked up his bio and he was raised on the LES by his single mom cab driver. He went to Brooklyn Tech, Hampshire College and Yale. He's mentioned in a column by Michael Musto-case closed!) took me to Tower Video. I picked up the Komediant in the used DVD section. It's about this famous Yiddish Theater family. "Indirectly, the Komediant is also a survey of the life of the Yiddish Theater of the 1920's, 1930's, in many countries such as Poland, the U.S. and Israel. The narrator of this documentary is Lillian Lux, who is a great actress that pushes the viewer from tears to laughter and from despair to hope. She is indeed the star of this film. The film radiates love, nostalgia, and a lot of Yiddishkiet as well! She wanted a simple life: family and children. And then a shock: Pesach, who was born on Pesach (Passover), died on Pesach 1986. He was a legendary performer, an actor of the best Yiddish melodrama. Millions of Jews remembered his great A Wedding in the Village. And in the film, Lillian Lux told us that one day a survivor told her that people were singing the songs from this Pesach's play in their last way to the gas chamber: Where are you Mama, Where are you Papa? And tears came to her beautiful Jewish eyes." Lillian passed away at 86 this past June.

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