New York Times bestselling author Michael Wex visits 1938 Yiddish cabaret classics in show.
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Chutzpah! Festival 2024: The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (di letste nakht baym yitesh)
When: Nov. 9, 10, 7 p.m.
Where: Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre, 950 W. 41st Ave., Vancouver
On a cold spring night in Warsaw in 1938, a group of performers gather at the Yiddish language Cabaret Yitesh. Having just been informed by the government censors that their club is being closed and with nothing left to lose, the company decides to devote the final show exclusively to material that has already been forbidden.
After all, why not go out with a bang at the Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (di letste nakht baym yitesh)?
It is estimated that 85 per cent of the six million or more Jews killed by the Nazis were Yiddish speakers.
One of the world’s leading Yiddishists, Wex is the author of Born to Kvetch. This New York Times bestseller is the most successful book written about Yiddish. Growing up in Lethbridge, AB., Wex’s family spoke Yiddish at home. Having been exposed to what amounted to a lingua franca for Jewish communities throughout much of Europe didn’t immediately lead to a lifetime of interest in the language.
“Like everyone who grew up with it, I thought it was the squarest thing on god’s green Earth, garbage for old people,” he said. “But then I was exposed to this whole secular Yiddish culture that I didn’t know through a comment by non-Jewish Beat poet grandfather Kenneth Rexroth, who described it as ‘the most cosmopolitan culture of its time.’ The first productions on American soil of works by Ibsen and Strindberg were in Yiddish, and I new none of this.”
So Wex began to research and discover the culture that went from “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf in a period of only about 50 years, only to come to a very abrupt end after 1939.”
“Whether it would have continued unabated without the Holocaust is open for debate, as the language was very much in decline in the North American Jewish community already and census figures find Polish Jews listing Polish as their mother tongue by then,” he said. “That would have been almost unthinkable even a decade earlier. But so much Yiddish is ingrained in English today, including words like schmuck, putz, schmooze, shtick and even glitch.”
A lot of these words made their way into common lexicon due to the disproportionate number of Jews who went into frowned-upon fields like showbiz, film and other performing arts. The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (di letste nakht baym yitesh) features routines that Wex researched which were vaudeville staples that also had Yiddish origins. It may have taken longer for a top 10 gag or tune to travel from Warsaw to Wisconsin, but a global hit list existed and Yiddish had a place in it.
“Stuff moved around to the point that, if you were working in Hollywood at a certain time, you knew some Yiddish whether you were Jewish or not,” he said. “Putting the play together, I tried to keep away from a lot of the historic recordings as I feel the material is overexposed and not always so good. One of the sketches is a real one from a real cabaret, and I thought I would use more of that, but so much of the material is really dated to the point nobody is going to have any idea what we’re talking about.”
Even considerable research into some of the classic material that survived the Second World War hits a dead end today. Wex says that some songs have lines that are so connected to specific local events of the time that they were written in, it’s anyone’s guess which politician or society figure is being mentioned. So he went for the closest facsimiles of what might have filled a cabaret show at the time.
“One of the songs in the show has a joke line in it which everyone from Yiddish experts to Polish historians have drawn a blank on,” he said. “But elsewhere, one of my research methods was to look at old ads to find out what movies were showing, what products were hot, etc., and that opened up a lot. It’s reasonable to assume that audiences knew the latest Hollywood hits and starlets, that American jazz was being heard — so I could put that in the show”
A case in point was discovering that a Polish language version of composer Milton Auger and lyricist Jack Yellen’s hit Ain’t She Sweet was the top hit around the time he set the play. So Wex did a Yiddish translation. Other material came from cast member Patrick Farrell.
Wex, Farrell, Shane Baker, Daniel Kahn, Regina Hopfgarner and Sasha Lurje will perform the Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (di letste nakht baym yitesh) in Yiddish with English subtitles.
5 shows to see at Chutzpah! Festival 2024
The annual Chutzpah Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts runs from Nov. 1-10 at various venues. The event never fails to present a varied program of genre-jumping performances from a Jewish perspective with plenty of cross-cultural community collaboration included. Since launching in 2001, Chutzpah! has been a great place to see exciting, engaging and emotional works.
Kommuna Lux
When: Nov. 2, 7 p.m.
Where: The Pearl, 881 Granville St., Vancouver
Itamar Erez Trio
When: Nov. 5, 7 p.m.
Where: Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, 950 W. 41st Ave.
A Canada/Israel/India summit with guitarist and pianist Itamar Erez, bassist Jeff Gammon and drummer Kevin Romain joined by special guests Yonnie Dror on Middle Eastern wind instruments and volcalists Kalya Ramu and Shruti Ramani,
Gimpel the Fool Returns to Poland
When: Nov. 4, 7 p.m.
Where: Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, 950 W. 41st Ave.
Israels Nephesh Theatre presents a stage adaptation of Nobel Prize-laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish tale of Gimpel the Fool. This screening of the film by Nephesh director Howard Rypp is co-presented with the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival and traces the show’s tour through Polish towns as it follows Singer’s escape from the Holocaust
Mark Rubin: Jew of Oklahoma
When: Nov. 6, 7 p.m.
Where: Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre, 950 W. 41st Ave.
If you thought only Okies from Muskogee came from Oklahoma, think again. Multi-instrumentalist Mark Rubin presents his story and song solo show exploring Southern Americana from a Jewish, socially-conscious viewpoint drawing upon four decades of performance.
Fortress and About Time
When: Nov. 8, 9, 7 p.m.
Where: Scotiabank Dance Centre, 1181 Davie St.
A dance double bill in honour of Lisa Nemetz, after whom the Chutzpah! Festival is named. Both world premieres, Fortress is a collaborative piece from Chutzpah! resident Canadian artists Rebecca Margolick and Livona Ellis. About Time is from Ne.Sans Opera & Dance artistic director Idan Cohen’s dive into composer Philip Glass’ solo piano etudes.