Word: shtetl
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...second movement, "Diaspora Dances," is more conventional but no less eclectic. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet are given numerical values, which serve as the music's metrical underpinning. The exotic sounds of ancient Palestine mingle with the plaintive songs of the shtetl and the joyous urgency of jazz, encompassing in quick sketches Jewish music through the ages. Only Bernstein would try something like this, and only he could get away with it. Emotionally undisciplined, Jubilee Games is no masterpiece, but it is fresh and powerful, and one of Bernstein's most honest pieces in years...
...shtetl atmospherics are thick in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood, home to a majority of the several thousand Russian immigrants, most of them Jewish, who arrive each year. Near the boardwalk, babushkas at a swing set push grandchildren, while over at the M&I International food store, women who spent last summer in Odessa this summer buy kapchonka (dried fish), Yugoslavian black-currant syrup and Borjouri seltzer water direct from Soviet Georgia. El Mundo III in Jackson Heights is one of the city's 6,500 bodegas, tiny mama-y-papa Hispanic grocery stores that sell fresh coconuts and plantains...
Yentl. Gotta sing! Gotta dance! Gotta study that Talmud! Filling every function but set decorator on this lavish musical, Barbra Streisand transforms a tale of the shtetl into a moving metaphor for her own determination and talent...
...splendor that is Streisand. For her male co-star she hired Mandy Patinkin, who has wrapped his crystalline Broadway tenor voice around Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then gave him no songs to sing; all eleven are Streisand solos. And she has inflated the production values until the humblest shtetl looks grand enough to house the Scarsdale Hadassah. Chutzpah, folks...
...past, Singer fuses two styles: the fabulist confined to his shtetl and the modernist who regards the universe as a stark and enigmatic combat zone. If Joseph Shapiro is disagreeable, he is never less than credible; once again the author displays a talent for mimicry that has previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward...