Word: yiddishism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dangerous game: the temptations of Conviction, on the one hand, and utter, shapeless Alienation, on the other, are usually seductive enough to deprive piety of content and realism of form. "Spit in a whore's face and she'll tell you it's raining," goes an old Yiddish proverb. What to do about reality seems to have become a problem of choice, and a film-maker who suspects that both documentary and story are lies isn't likely to respect the concept of entertainment, either. As a result, going to the movies has become a chiefly personal experience-we want...
Isaac Bashevis Singer, 66, has now lived in the U.S. longer than he did in Poland. At both terminals he has borne witness to the Jewish catastrophes that dwarf the past and pre-empt the future: pogroms, the Holocaust, assimilation and its concomitant, the dying of the Yiddish language in which he writes. And yet within this spare grandpaterfamilias still resides the spirit of a young Hasid, whose nights were animated by ghosts leaping about the Sabbath candles, inanimate objects given life by the Evil One and the immanent...
...then, he has worked as an assistant to Pierre Boulez at Bayreuth and California's Ojai Festival, rehearsed the orchestra for the famous Heifetz-Piatigorsky concerts. If Thomas seems to enjoy the performing aspects of conducting, that is natural. His grandfather, Boris Thomashefsky, was a founder of the Yiddish theater in New York. His father is Film Maker Ted Thomas; Paul Muni was a cousin...
...ethnicized that it makes Beckett into a kind of emcee for United Nations Day. Leland Moss' Estragon seems to have been imported from a Catskills road company of Fiddler on the Roof. His gestures might have been modelled on Menasha Skulnik's, his lines threaten to slip into Yiddish, and the "nu's" and the "oy's" and the Diaspora world-weariness almost crown Beckett the prince of pushcart playwrights...
Died. Menasha Skulnik, seventyish, irrepressible Yiddish comedian and Broadway actor (The Fifth Season, The Flowering Peach, The Zulu and the Zayda) for 60 years; in Manhattan. His explanation for his popularity: "People laugh not from the jokes but from the situations I am in. I play the little guy -the schlemiel-against the world...