LA TIMES INTERVIEW JAN 01 2008

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/newsletter/la-et-yiddish1jan01,1,1279998.story?ctrack=3&cset=true

Filmmakers do Yiddish theater a mitzvah

'A Love Story' documents a vanishing culture.
By Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 1, 2008
Dan Katzir was a thirtysomething Israeli filmmaker on vacation in New York City when he was accosted by 84-year-old Zypora Spaisman on the subway. The bird-weight octogenarian had been a star and director of New York City's Folksbiene, the oldest-running Yiddish theater in America, but when she met Katzir, she was in the midst of her last show, a production of 1916's "Green Fields," for the Yiddish Public Theater, which she founded in 2000.

The play was slated to close in eight days -- on New Year's Eve -- and Spaisman, desperate to prevent that from happening, was not above soliciting help from attractive young strangers on the R train.

She invited him to see her perform. "I told her I have no plan on seeing a show in Yiddish, but she said, 'Come, just see it,' " recalls Katzir, seven years later. "I just so fell in love with it."

Doing his bit to help, Katzir got out his video camera to document Spaisman's quest in "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story." The film opened in limited release at the end of November and, thanks to strong reviews, has been gaining a steadily larger following among the art-house set ever since.

"As one of the characters in the movie says, 'We live in a "Seinfeld" society,' where everything is fast and quick and edgy but not very emotional," Katzir says. "Meeting her and the [other actors], they're funny, but they're not cynical. This is an ode for this lost and disappearing culture, which still has something to teach all of us about the beauty of emotions."

It's easy to see why Katzir became entranced with Spaisman, who lost 150 family members in the Holocaust but resolutely says in the film, "Hitler couldn't stop me. Stalin couldn't stop me."

Age will certainly not prevent her from doing what she loves best: acting. "Retirement is a death sentence," she says in the film. "People have to live."

The documentary is filled with others caught up in her forceful will, including various other elderly stars of the Yiddish theater like Shifra Lerer (who played Woody Allen's character's mother in "Deconstructing Harry") as well as a young Israeli ingenue who learns her lines phonetically and a tattooed former Hassid from Williamsburg who wound up in his first play because he could speak Yiddish.

There's also the middle-class couple who plowed $70,000 of their savings into the production, and Spaisman's tireless producer, David Romeo, who trudges literally through mounds of snow, all across New York City, trying to raise the $50,000 or so it would take to allow them to move their well-reviewed production to another theater. It's to little avail, as Katzir documents the minute-by-minute expiration of a dream.

His own story has had a happier ending.

On a recent morning, the former paratrooper is sitting at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with his producer, the energetic Ravit Markus, not far from the Laemmle Monica, where their film has been playing for several weeks. Although Katzir has made 10 documentaries, including "Out for Love . . . Be Back Shortly," which was a sensation in his home country and appeared on HBO here, getting "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" seen has proved almost as daunting as trying to save Spaisman's production.

"It took eight days of filming, 40 days of editing and seven years of waiting," Katzir says. They were rebuffed in particular by countless Jewish organizations and film festivals, like the New York Jewish Film Festival, who told them that no one was interested in Yiddish theater.

"Yiddish was a valid culture for 1,100 years, and after World War II, so many Jews began hating this culture with a vengeance," Katzir says. "Maybe some Jews began identifying with Nazi propaganda and began seeing Yiddish culture the way the Nazis saw it, with this kind of contempt. That's sad, because Yiddish is a culture that brought out some of the greatest minds humanity ever had. Freud was a Yiddish speaker. Einstein came to see Yiddish plays. Sholem Aleichem. People forget all the great minds and great culture. They just see it as a culture that had 6 million members murdered, and people are maybe ashamed of it."

Katzir says that his own grandmother, as a child, was part of an organization that roamed the streets of Tel Aviv getting people to speak Hebrew instead of Yiddish. "Even today, a lot of the things that people identify as American Jewish humor, it actually comes from the Yiddish stage."

"They have this laughter through tears thing," says Markus. "Sad things are said in a humorous way, and humorous things are said in a sad way. It's part of the fact that for a lot of years, those Jews were living in a foreign country and they had to be subversive to say things, so it's all very understated. This is a culture of understated humor."

"Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" did wind up in a number of film festivals, and eventually the pair decided to forgo distributors and release the documentary themselves. Markus sent the film to Greg Laemmle, president of the Laemmle art-house chain in Los Angeles, who agreed to play it in his theaters if they could find a New York exhibitor.

A couple of days later, a programmer from New York contacted the pair through their MySpace page asking to see the film, and within days, the documentary was set to premiere at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater.

Sadly, Spaisman never got to witness the documentary's success -- she suffered a fatal stroke when the theater closed -- but she remains an inspiration to others, including Katzir.

"She was not in it for the money," he says. "She was into doing something she really loved and trying to do that as best she could. She didn't care if she had a full house. The point was being on stage. It was what gave her the reason to wake up in the morning."

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com

About.com

http://documentaries.about.com/od/revie2/fr/yiddishtheater.htm


Film Review: The Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
For Love of Theater
About.com Rating fourhalf out of Five

By Jennifer Merin, About.com
More About:

* yiddish theater
* actors in yiddish
* zypora spaisman
* shifra lerer

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While vacationing in New York, Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir met Zypora Spaisman, the 84-year-old diva of the Yiddish Theater, and became fascinated by the feisty actress, who enlisted him to document her story. Seven years later, the finished film hits the screen.
An Actress On A Mission
It's Hanukah, 2000, when Dan Katzir meets Zypora Spaisman, and the actress is on a mission to save New York's Yiddish Theater, the Folksbeine, from extinction. Zypora, at age 84, is performing in the Yiddish play, Green Fields. The production is housed in the Mazer Theater on the Lower East Side, on East Broadway in the heart of what was once New York's biggest Jewish community. But the company has run out of funds, and the production will be shut out of its theater if investors can't be found.

In the film, we see scenes from Green Fields, and they're utterly delightful. But the show is a hard sell: Green Fields was written in 1916 in a language that few people now speak or understand, and it's simple love story set in a rural Eastern European Jewish community with which modern Americans have little in common. To make matters worse, at the time, New York happens to be experiencing an exceptionally cold and snowy winter which makes it difficult to get around the city. Even people who've aready bought tickets to the play aren't showing up for performances.

However, after a 42-year career in Yiddish Theater, Zypora is not about to give up. "I survived Hitler--that German who wanted to kill me--and Stalin, I can do this," she says. And she holds out in hope.
The Eight Day Hanukah Countdown
We watch Zypora and her colleagues light Hanukah candles each evening before they perform, and wonder whether the show will survive into the new year. Green Fields gets a rave review in the New York Times and is named one of the year's top ten Off Broadway shows by the New York Post, and company Manager David Romeo begins to negotiation to move the production into the Lambs Theater, in the heart of the Broadway theater district. But, then, a traffic-stopping snow storm prevents potential backers from coming to see the show. Will the show go on?

Actually, Zypora's goal is greater than saving the show. She's trying to save an age-old art form and literary tradition from extinction. Why? "I like speaking Yiddish," she says. "It's mine language."

She also likes acting. And, within the context of America's focus on youth and trendiness, the Yiddish Theater is Zypora's artistic home, the place where she and other aging performers, are still relevant, still respected. This aspect of Zypora's mission is particularly moving.

In telling the story, Katzir enlists living legends of Yiddish theater--Shifra Lerer, Felix Fibich, Seymour Rechzeit and others--in rare interviews and takes us to endangered landmarks of New York's Jewish cultural history.

The Yiddish Theater: A Love Story is as charming, humorous, convincing, tenacious and relevant as its wonderful leading lady.

LA CITY BEAT
Review by Andy Klein
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6598&IssueNum=235

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story. The Folksbiene Theater was founded on New York’s Lower East Side in 1915, as one of many Yiddish troupes entertaining the legions of Jewish immigrants recently arrived from Europe. Fortysome years later, after surviving the Holocaust and Stalinist Russia, Zypora Spaisman came to America and reinvented herself as an actress in Yiddish theater. Another fortysome years later, toward the end of 2000, Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir was visiting New York and met the 84-year-old actress Spaisman, just as Folksbiene Theater – now the city’s last Yiddish theater – was facing eviction. Charmed by the old woman’s enthusiasm, he set about to chronicle the desperate eight days during which Spaisman and her coworkers attempt to find a way to keep the theater alive. Katzir talks to some of the very few survivors of the form’s heyday, most of whom still display an offhanded wit. The result is uneven but ultimately charming – and sad – look at the disappearance of a centuries-old cultural tradition whose impact on our own culture has been inestimable. (AK)

NY SUN

New York City's Own Borscht Belt
Movies | Review of: Yiddish Theater: A Love Story

By DARRELL HARTMAN
November 21, 2007

The survival of professional Yiddish theater in America has often been attributed to one remarkable woman, the late Zypora Spaisman. After surviving the Holocaust, the Polish-born actress joined New York's legendary Folksbiene Theater, now the country's only professional Yiddish stage outfit, in 1956. She devoted her career to it, even selling tickets and sweeping floors when she wasn't onstage. Then, following a dispute over programming in 1998, she left and formed her own troupe.

Spaisman's cultural preservation project, called the Yiddish Public Theater, soon fell on tough times, which is when the Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir first met her. As her company floundered, the unflinching 84-year-old actress began to worry that her career was doomed, not to mention the future of her once-vibrant mother tongue. Intrigued, Mr. Katzir immediately started filming. Most of "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story," which takes place over the course of a week and opens today, was shot on a camcorder because he was on vacation in New York at the time.

Occassionally, the haste with which Mr. Katzir obtained his footage is all too apparent, but his elegy is tinged with humor, and a countdown narrative adds drama. Despite great reviews, the group's production of "Green Fields," a 1916 play by Peretz Hirschbein, has failed to interest theatergoers or would-be donors enough to keep the company afloat. It's the end of 2000, which raises the question of whether Yiddish will survive into the next century. And talk about dramatic timing: Mr. Katzir explains in voice-over that if funding for the company is not found soon, the production's lights will go dark "on the last candle of Chanukah."

Mr. Katzir, who admits he knew nothing of Yiddish theater before attending this production of "Green Fields," touches on many things in this watchable and somewhat quaint bit of low-budget cinema, but he doesn't delve too deep into any of them. The uncertain fate of Spaisman's little company — which rests primarily on the eleventh-hour fund-raising efforts of the play's producer, David Romeo — doesn't play out as suspensefully as it might have. And while the indomitable, heavily accented Spaisman makes for a colorful character sketch, she is not all that forthcoming to her new friend and his camera. (Recalling her flight from Poland during the Holocaust, she says, "What's his name, the German, wanted to kill me.")

In one scene, Spaisman discusses the death of her husband with emotion, but this disclosure comes a bit out of the blue. Other aspects of the story might have been explored more fruitfully, such as the film's sole voice of youth: a dedicated young Israeli actress named Roni Neuman, who learns her lines phonetically but isn't surprised that a nearly 100-year-old play about Jewish farmers in Ukraine isn't packing the house. And the snippets of expert commentary on the decline of Yiddish — once the official language of Ashkenazi Jews and a much more prominent contributor to the symphony of multilingual New York — in secular Jewish culture leaves the viewer craving more insights.

One author and Yiddish-theater scholar, Nahma Sandrow, explains how Yiddish came to represent "the culture of the victim" after the Holocaust, while Hebrew became "the language of strength and health and self-respect." Mr. Katzir assumes most of his viewers agree, in principle at least, that Yiddish is worth saving. But he might have spent more time showing just why. (Michael Wex's recent description of Yiddish, in his excellent book "Born to Kvetch," as "a language that likes to argue with everybody about everything" would make a fine starting point.) And although "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" spends considerable time tracking Spaisman's group's struggle to upgrade from their Lower East Side performance space to Broadway, and thereby find a wider audience for "Green Fields," the play itself remains something of a mystery.

Still, Mr. Katzir's 80-minute portrait of an endangered stage culture features its share of moving moments. Those curious about Yiddish theater have particularly good reason to see it, despite the fact that it was filmed seven years ago. In fact, it may never have seen the light of day were it not for what many are calling a Yiddish revival. Ironically, that same renewal of interest threatens to make the film's mournful tone seem outdated. So take the kvetching with a grain of zalts.

NJ Jewish Standard

Yiddish theater: A love story indeed
By Miriam Rinn | Published 12/14/2007

actually saw the show that is at the heart of Dan Katzir’s documentary "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story." A production of "Grineh Felder" ("Green Fields"), an old Yiddish play by Peretz Hirshbein, at the Mazer Theater in the Educational Alliance building on East Broadway, the play was the first — and last — that Zypora Spaisman put on after she resigned from the Folksbiene, the Yiddish theater long supported by the Workmen’s Circle. A less inviting location is hard to imagine — set in the basement, the theater is intersected by huge pillars so that just about wherever you’re sitting, your view is obfuscated — and the play had a desperate, pathetic quality, as of a thing mortally wounded.

Spaisman had been the Folksbiene’s major star and director for many years, perhaps too many, and when the powers that be finally suggested that it was time for her to retire and hand over the troupe to younger people, she left and started her own company. Katzir, whose voice is heard throughout the film, agreed to make the documentary during the winter of 2000 at Spaisman’s urging, and it’s that doughty ego and determination that is the true protagonist of this ultimately poignant film.

"Yiddish Theater" is constructed around the eight nights of Chanukah during that brutally cold winter, with each candle opening another chapter in Spaisman’s frantic attempt to find investors — as well as playgoers — for her production. Katzir follows her around, eating what seems to be many meals in her apartment, asking her questions about the show, about her career, and about her marriage. He develops his portrait as much from what isn’t said as from what is. We don’t realize she has children until the very end, and her husband doesn’t come up either until the film is more than half over. Spaisman’s life is the theater, evidently, and only the theater. She vehemently rejects the idea of retirement. What should I do, wander around the apartment? She asks the question with incredulity. At no point is there even the slightest consideration that the Yiddish theater might do better if it was handed over to the next generation. For Spaisman, as for so many of the larger-than-life personalities drawn to the entertainment world, the production doesn’t exist if she’s not in it.

Katzir also visits and talks with other actors in the Yiddish theater that flourished in New York during the first third of the twentieth century, including Spaisman’s co-stars. He handles these elderly people with great tenderness, but avoids sentimentalizing them excessively. Their crankiness and vanity are on full display, as is the transformation that comes over them when they step on the stage or begin to perform. Spaisman especially seems a frail, slightly addled old woman in some of the interviews, but as soon as she puts on her makeup and walks out on the stage, her stooped back straightens and she regains some of her charisma. A lovely few minutes are dedicated to Felix Fibitch, a former dancer. As he elegantly twirls his hands and undulates his arms, we see the graceful young man he once was. "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" ends up being as much a meditation on old age as an investigation of the future of the Yiddish theater.

David Romeo, the group’s managing director and Spaisman’s general factotum, gets lots of screen time as he gently escorts the ladies to and from the theater on the snowy streets and desperately hustles for money to keep the show going. With an eerie resemblance to Steven Sondheim, Romeo is the heart of the documentary. If he knows that his search is fruitless as he makes call after call, he doesn’t let on; he keeps trying, perhaps for no other reason than to keep Spaisman going.

The Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater, under its new management, has succeeded far beyond anyone’s guess seven years ago. Its productions are much more sophisticated and clearly geared toward a younger, far more Americanized audience. Now at the JCC in Manhattan, the company is building its own theater on Second Avenue, the original home of Yiddish theater in New York, and has a vigorous board out raising money. Spaisman was indispensable in keeping the theater going for many years, but eventually it had to go on without her. Her resistance is as sad as it is understandable.

The film is showing at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third St., in Manhattan.

JEWISH DAILY FORWARD
Struggling Yiddish Theater Finds a Home — Onscreen
Film
By Eli Rosenblatt
Wed. Dec 19, 2007

It was not long ago that the streets of Tel Aviv and New York were packed with the sounds of the Yiddish language and its echo of exile, displacement and fortitude. For Dan Katzir, the Israeli director of the new documentary “Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,” the sounds of this language, and its disappearance, resonate loudly. His grandfather’s brother was Ephraim Katzir, the Kiev-born fourth president of Israel; his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who, while kibitzing in Hebrew with some of the newborn country’s most prominent statesmen, would hear them whispering in Yiddish. “There is a negative association with Yiddish in Israel. I was surprised when I came to the U.S. that Jews here would have such shame for Yiddish, too,” Katzir said
The film, which debuted in New York, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, portrays the story of the National Yiddish Theater — Folksbiene. During the New York winter of 2000, when faced with a dwindling audience and meager financial support, the theater found itself in danger of shutting down. Katzir’s documentary is about its struggle for survival and dignity, and about the future of a Yiddish theater staying alive with supertitles in English and Russian.

The film introduces a cast of stage actors, allies and audiences, including Zypora Spaisman, a Polish-born actress who immigrated to New York in the 1950s; Roni Neuman, an Israeli actress taking a stab at the New York theater scene, and David Romeo, a Brooklyn-born actor raised in a Hasidic, Yiddish-speaking home. Alongside them is a fur-capped producer who tirelessly tries to raise funds, as well as Shifra Lehrer and Felix Fibich — two headliners from a time, earlier last century, when Yiddish theaters from Buenos Aires to New York were filled with audiences that came to see their humor, torments and joys illuminated by actors who spoke their language.

What emerges is the director’s knack for splicing the candid moments in his subjects’ personal lives with the professional fervor with which they pursue their art. The cast’s unswerving enthusiasm for the Yiddish stage and the challenges that this sentiment faces in a city that simply doesn’t speak its language raise important questions about how the cast’s Jewish identities are transformed through the theater’s struggle for vitality. At one point in the film, as the theater labors to make money, Spaisman is confronted with the gloomy possibility of drawing more revenue for the theater by performing on the Sabbath afternoon, and the portrayal of her conundrum evokes larger issues.

“I think about half the people who come to see the film are Jewish,” Katzir remarked in an interview with the Forward. “But for Jews, it is a unique experience. People raise their hands and it’s a coming-out session for them, it’s not a question-and-answer session.”

The film was financed by an Israeli government film fund and by Jonah Goldreich, a Los Angeles real estate developer and Holocaust survivor whom Katzir describes as believing strongly in the preservation of Yiddish culture. Katzir was unable to secure the funding to obtain archival footage depicting the heyday of Yiddish theater, which he said would have added the historical context he wanted the film to describe. Many Jewish film festivals did not initially accept it. After the film’s trailer was posted online at MySpace and was noted at some festivals across the world, the documentary caught the attention of Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles, the Pioneer Theater in New York and the Lev Cinema in Tel Aviv. Now, almost a month after its American debut, it has secured a continued run in New York and Los Angeles.

The film’s extended run and the grass-roots hanging of movie posters on city walls will hopefully ensure that awareness about the Yiddish theater is raised. “People need to think what could happen to this culture, and to see that for the secular people, this is a mirror into their world and a way to learn about the past,” Katzir noted. “But today, the theater still does not have a permanent home. Even if it pays rent to the Manhattan JCC for a space there, it still needs to pay the rent.”

Eli Rosenblatt is a writer living in New York City.
Wed. Dec 19, 2007

THE LOS ANGELES JEWISH JOURNAL BLOG:

The story was their own.

At the turn of the 21st century, a veteran actress struggles to keep Yiddish theater alive in New York. She desperately searches for money and a miracle to extend the run of a show scheduled to close on the last day of Chanukah. Years later, two impassioned filmmakers work outside the studio system with little financial backing to tell her story. They decide to call it "a love story." As fate would have it, audiences are falling head over heels for this documentary; a film that, more than anything, is about the distances people will go for their art.

Dan Katzir and Ravit Markus have brought the world "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" and despite lack of advertising and a limited release, solid reviews in the L.A. Times and The Daily News are compelling crowds to movie theaters. Variety listed the doc as a top indie opener last weekend, so Laemmle Theatres has extended its run in the Valley and opened weekend showings at their Santa Monica location.

It may be rainy weekend so stay dry and see the current cinema.

Here's the schedule:

Laemmle's Monica
1332 2nd Street
Santa Monica, 90401
310-394-9741

Sat & Sun: 11:00 am

Laemmle's Fallbrook
6731 Fallbrook Ave
West Hills, CA, 91307
818 340 8710

Fri, Sat & Sun: 12:00 noon, 5:00pm
Mon-Thu : 1:00pm & 6:00pm
Wednesday: 11am, 1:00pm & 6:00pm