Word: yiddishe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the Czech film The Shop on Main Street was released in 1966, Ida Kaminska, 68, long a distinguished member of the Yiddish theater in her native Poland, became a familiar figure on the western side of the Iron Curtain. Now Miss Kaminska has decided she likes the West as much as the West likes her. Along with four members of her family, she flew from Poland to Vienna. Next stop is Israel, where she will be a guest of the government for a few weeks. She plans to come to the U.S. later this year and remain for good...
Genghis Cohn, a Yiddish music-hall comedian, is on his last stage. The stage is Auschwitz, and his audience is a German firing squad. But he seizes the opportunity for a last punch line. He turns his naked rump to the executioners and says: "Kush mir in tokhes!," which in Yiddish means "Kiss my ass!" Herr Captain Schatz, the man who has been placidly shooting Jews down on order, is so shaken that he accords Cohn the unusual respect of examining the corpse and ordering it clothed. Seeing an opportunity to keep his act going, Cohn's ghost slips...
...been my fate," says Cohn, "to add a new dimension to the legend of the Wandering Jew: that of the immanent Jew, omnipresent, entirely assimilated, forever part of each atom of the German earth, air and conscience." Night after night, he sits on Schatz's bedpost, teaching him Yiddish and the art of Jewish cooking. But he also discovers that being part of a Nazi means that the Nazi is part of him. Both are humans; both are part of "the very semen of the species...
...lovers, particularly Thomas Babe and Joan Tolentino (Hermia and Lysander) evoked consistent and deserved laughter from the happy Opening Night audience, as did Avreml (Avreml!?) Friedman as a Yiddish Peter Quintz...
Despite his evangelical fervor, Lynd leaves a final impression of ambiguity, partly justifying the Yiddish proverb that Irving Howe recently directed at him: "He wants to dance at all the weddings." Lynd winces before the untender either-ors of history. He cannot settle flatly even on Viet Nam. "Were I in Viet Nam, I think I might be an anguished neutralist Buddhist some place," he has confessed to an interviewer...