Word: yiddishisms
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...Yiddish Theatre, Like many other Jews who have reached artistic eminence, Muni developed his art in close contact with his own race. He was born Muni Weisenfreund in a part of Austria which is now Poland in the little town of Lemberg, which he left at the age of one month and has never seen since. His parents were traveling actors who journeyed from one European capital to another, performing in the ghettos. The nomadic life of the Weisenfreunds took them to London, where Muni went to his first school, and later, when Muni was six, to the goal...
...boys of Shakespeare's theatre played women, so the boys of the Yiddish theatre have for centuries played old men. Muni made his stage debut at the age of eleven in Cleveland, as an old man in a sketch called Two Corpses at Breakfast. He took to the stage as naturally as a grocer's son takes to the counter. But his parents had other ambitions for him. To the Jews of that generation any kind of musician was higher in the social scale than an actor. Paul was to be a violinist. He took his lessons dutifully...
...Chicago and "the bunch'' as they grew up there. "The bunch," high-school age in 1921, were second-generation Russian Jews. Few of their immigrant fathers were well off; most of them were buttonhole makers, shoemakers, pawnbrokers, barbers, cigar-makers. Most of the mothers still spoke Yiddish...
...Happen Here opened last week at 21 theatres in 18 cities. One of Los Angeles' two performances and one of New York City's three were in Yiddish. In Seattle the play was presented by a Negro cast. Two versions in Italian were scheduled for Newark and San Francisco. Despite Mr. Lewis' original edict that not a line of his script must be changed, Denver was permitted to transfer the Vermont locale to Colorado and in Detroit the action was laid in a factory district. In Tampa, the play was given in Spanish with the action...
...Louise de la Ramee (Ouida), performed on the U. S. stage by Blanche Bates, in the silent cinema by Theda Bara (1916) and Priscilla Dean (1922). The current version, costly, handsome and overlong, offers a concession to modernity: Gregory Ratoff, as a Legionnaire, says with a thick Yiddish accent: "We're all supposed to be trying to forget something, but there's so much noise around here I can't remember what it is I'm supposed to forget." More at home in Under Two Flags are Ronald Colman, who wore a kepi and baggy pants...