Yiddish Theater in WEHO NEWS: (West Hollywood News)

http://wehonews.com/z/wehonews/archive/page.php?articleID=2070

Film Review - Yiddish Theatre: A Love Story

February 14, 2008 – Film Review by Roy Oldenkamp, West Hollywood

West Hollywood, California (February 14, 2008) - Sometimes in life, we have to do what we think is right to fulfill a destiny.

Often in life, few others assist in this goal, watching quietly as a life becomes absorbed by a cause.

Such is the story of Zypora Spaisman in the enthralling new film, Yiddish Theatre: A Love Story.

This award-winning documentary chronicles the travails and triumphs of this fine actress, by necessity the company founder/director of the Yiddish Public Theater company in New York.

The film unwinds as a love song to the indomitable Ms. Spaisman, 84 year old survivor of Hitler’s pogroms and not ready to be taken down in her efforts to preserve Yiddish theater by something as inconsequential as sheer money.

Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir lets his story unfold rhythmically and ensnares us scene by scene, getting us to root for the grand dame’s success in preserving a dying art form in an obscure language.

As cultures assimilate, the languages of indigenous peoples and isolated communities fall to the wayside, from the Indian reservations in the west and northwest to the Jewish dialects from streets of Brooklyn.

Yet Zypora Spaisman will persevere and keep this Yiddish art form alive, in New York, off Broadway and in the middle of one of the worst winters on record.

In the course of a Hanukah observance, the story reaches its peak and we watch the travails unfold daily and resolve themselves as smashing reviews come in and snowbound audiences stay home.

Throughout the film, one has the sad feeling that this is the final throe of both Ms. Spaisman and Yiddish theater.
It is charming and hopeful to see a handful of younger generation actors become involved in the art form and really pick up the mantle and fall whole heartedly into their work, inhabiting roles originated in the early twentieth century and making them their own.

Watching producer David Romeo become completely absorbed by his efforts to save the show is both heartfelt and poetic. Ms. Spaisman has the assistance of a vital few: she is not alone.

She has made her mark and kept a dream alive. With gratitude, we thank both Zypora Spaisman and Dan Katzir for allowing us to glimpse the sincerity and beauty of Yiddish theater.

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story. Check your local theatres for times and locations.

The Beverly Hills Courier
The Cutler Review
February 8 2008

by Jerry Cutler
3 Bagels out of 4

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story doesn't hold out much hope for the future of Yiddish Theater.
The Award winning documentary directed by Dan Katzir and produced by Ravit Markus and Yael Katzir was, for my, a delightful trip down memory lane.
It tells the story of Zypora Spaisman, a sprightly and charismatic 84 year old actress and Holocause survivor, whose fortitue and dedication to the Yiddish art form had kept the Folksbiene theater alive for many years. There is great insight into the psyche of the elderly actors who are unwavering in their love for the theater. The story begins on the now multi-cultural lower East side of New York, as the show Green Fields, is performed to less than capacity customers.
Undaunted, two elderly producers and the hearty Ms. Spaisman, try to raise enough money to take them from the hard to get to theater to a Broadway venue and the possibility of more patrons.
You can guess the outcome of the venture, but the anticipation, the never say die attitude and Katzir's photography of the stark winter streets of New York, is a treat. When I wasa a young child, I remember my parents taking me to the second Avenue Yiddish Theatre to see a play starring Molly Picon. Her antics, even though I didn't understand the dialogue, stay with me till this day. My father was a Yiddish scholar and had his own program on New York's leading Jewish station, WEVD.
He spoke mainly English in the ouse with my New York born, mother. Today I can't hold an in depth Yiddish conversation.
I mourn the passing of Yiddish Theater and feel that I, and others like me, are in someway responsible for its demise. I apologize to Ms. Spaisman who I met during the run of a play at the the original Folksbiene Theater in the jewish Forward building on the lower East Side.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the Yiddish Theater: A Love Story which transported me back to a less complicated and carefree time of my life. It is currently at the Laemmle's Monica.
So, go see it already and enjoy.
3 bagels out of 4

http://www.thebeverlyhillscourier.com/editions/files/Courier-02-08.pdf

Encino Sun Article

Categories: FEATURES
Date: Jan 24, 2008
Title: Yiddish Theater highlights struggle to preserve a dying art
BY S.A. DEDDO
The title of the 2006 documentary Yiddish Theater: A Love Story is, to a certain extent, misleading. Yiddish theater, a movement of plays written for and by Jewish artists in the Yiddish language, is not the star of this story. The “Love Story” part is the main focus.

Yiddish Theater highlights struggle to preserve a dying art

BY S.A. DEDDO

The title of the 2006 documentary Yiddish Theater: A Love Story is, to a certain extent, misleading.

Yiddish theater, a movement of plays written for and by Jewish artists in the Yiddish language, is not the star of this story. The “Love Story” part is the main focus – a passionate affair between the Yiddish stage and a seemingly frail little woman from the old country. Her name is Zypora Spaisman, and though you may not have heard of her, many have been moved by her inspiring life.

Dan Katzir, an Israeli documentary filmmaker, met Spaisman in December, 2000 while on holiday in New York City. He spent his weeklong vacation documenting Spaisman’s struggle to keep her critically acclaimed but financially faltering Yiddish Public Theater alive.

Katzir appears in voice only in Yiddish Theater: A Love Story, serving as both narrator and interviewer. So when he arrived in person at a special question and answer session January 18 following a screening of the film at the Laemmle Encino Town Center 5, audience members found the acclaimed Jewish filmmaker a young, handsome man – who didn’t even speak Yiddish himself.

“People have told me that I have an old soul,” he told attendees. “And I tried to tell Zypora’s story with a younger person’s eyes.”

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story documents the life of Spaisman, a feisty widow in her eighties and Holocaust survivor living alone in New York City. She’s trying to raise enough money to guarantee the survival of the theater she founded – the Yiddish Public Theater, one of the last of its kind.

Katzir is as passionate about getting his documentary out to the masses as Spaisman was about getting audiences into her theater. They both struggled with the same problem – Yiddish is a dying language.

But Katzir’s film has two advantages. First, it is told in English (with a few subtitles), and second, it is easily accessible to audiences across Los Angeles. Katzir’s main battle has been getting the word out about his film, and the audience focused on that during the Q&A, one of many he and producer Ravit Markus have been holding across L.A.

“Why don’t you get this film shown at Skirball [Cultural Center]?” asked one audience member.

“To them, I’m just another vendor trying to sell a product,” Katzir replied. “But if you called them and asked to see this film shown there, they would be more likely to respond.”

For a film that has gotten glowing reviews in newspapers across the U.S., including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Yiddish Theater: A Love Story seems destined for widespread recognition and “favorite” status among audiences Jewish and non-Jewish, young and old.

For more information on Yiddish Theater: A Love Story, visit the film’s website at www.yiddishtheater.net or www.myspace.com/yiddishtheateralovestory.

LA WEEKLY
http://www.laweekly.com/stage/theater/when-theater-is-sanctuary-and-not-temple/18180/?page=2

WHEN THEATER IS SANCTUARY AND NOT TEMPLE
Dancing butterflies
BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Monday, January 21, 2008 - 12:00 pm
At a panel discussion among celebrated playwrights who had worked or were working at the Geffen Playhouse — which hosted the event for its subscribers — artistic director Randall Arney waxed a little too poetic about theater's primal essences and beauty before posing the opening question to any of the eight scribes parked on the stage: "So what draws you back to the theater?" Arney asked. Almost all of them have written for film or TV, where they make so much more money than on the stage.The strike," Neil LaBute quickly replied. (LaBute is the author of Your Friends and Neighbors, The Shape of Things and The Wicker Man.)

LaBute functioned throughout as resident cop, arresting anybody caught with even a few grams of self-importance or inflated entitlement, despite the stash he carries in his own hip pocket.

Jane Anderson, for example(Looking for Normal, The Baby Dance), is one of America's most widely produced playwrights, with a new work staged almost every year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She tried to suggest how painful it was for her to write, as though the Geffen's subscribers had paid 25 bucks to hear a wildly successful playwright complain about a labor that nobody asked her to undertake in the first place.

"Who likes to write?" Anderson asked, rhetorically.

"I do," LaBute piped in.

"Every time you write, the bar is higher," Anderson retorted, hoping we would share her pain.

"Not for me," LaBute shot back. "For me the bar gets lower."

Skepticism was in the air. Arney introduced Adrian Pasdar and Marcus Hummon, co-creators of the Geffen's critically excoriated Civil War musical Atlanta, and praised their creativity, adding that Atlanta was slated to close the following week.

"Not a day too soon," the gent next to me muttered to himself.

On the verities of theater, Pasdar remarked that "the closest thing to an empty theater is an empty church."

Donald Margulies (Dinner With Friends, The Model Apartment, Collected Stories) stepped in to bring down the rising hot-air balloon, but even he was not safe from Police Sergeant LaBute.

On teaching playwriting, Margulies said "there is no right way to do anything — sex, writing, anything. Everybody is going to find his own way."

"Actually, with sex there is a right way," LaBute interjected. "It was really helpful to learn. I've become a Casanova."

"I brought up sex," Margulies lamented. "I never should have done that."

"It's not a choice," said Joan Rivers of working in the theater. (Her autobiographical solo performance, Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress,opens at the Geffen next month.) "It's a calling. You just have to do this. Success is just, 'Fuck you, if the window is shut, I'll find the door. If the door is shut, I'll climb in under.'"

The paradox of all this religiosity about doing theater comes from the chastening reality that we live in a commercial culture, and theater has almost always been a money-losing proposition. I doubt that in ancient Greece people talked about theater as a temple. They didn't have to. It was already part of a religious service honoring Dionysus. Do you hear football players talking about the Super Bowl as a temple? No need, it's understood.

On the way out, the gent next to me ran into a female friend, and they launched into a conversation in Yiddish — a blend of German and Hebrew widely spoken throughout Eastern Europe in the early 20th century and subsequently in New York, to which those persecuted Ashkenazi Jews emigrated. The woman spoke of the need to keep the dying language alive, adding that she has childhood memories of her grandmother speaking Yiddish.

Something similar happened in December 2000, on a New York subway, when Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir struck up a conversation with 88-year-old Zypora Spaisman, who was struggling to keep her Yiddish Public Theater solvent. She'd founded the YPT in the Lower East Side after retiring at age 84 from New York's other Yiddish ensemble, the Folksbiene Theatre, where she'd been the troupe's leading lady for 42 years.

On the subway, Spaisman shamed Katzir for not knowing a word of Yiddish and encouraged him to film a documentary about the Yiddish Public.

The result is Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,Katzir's wistful and moving portrait of quixotically dedicated artisans playing to half-empty houses, struggling for solvency and relevance — which renders it not just a movie about a theater in particular, but about the theater in general.

In one scene, we see Spaisman slicing a boiled chicken in the kitchen of her tiny apartment as she answers the question of why she fled Eastern Europe: "It vas because of, [pause] vat's his name. He vanted to kill me, the German, you think he wanted to kiss me?"

That contrapuntal blend of heartbreak and humor propels the film, as it does the Yiddish tongue. Cross-fade to octogenarian Spaisman in a black coat, carefully negotiating icy streets on her way to the limelight in a dying theater that represents a dying culture. Though they would never admit it, a dying art form is what the discussion at the Geffen was really about, masked with references to temples and churches. But there's a larger point about an embattled art form, culture or tongue, which Katzir ruefully pointed out to me recently as we sat in a coffee shop outside the Sunset 5, where his film was being screened: "It can take a thousand years for a language to die." (For a YouTube trailer for the film, go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzJynjw_4dw.)

Sometimes I think the theater is not so much a temple but a sanctuary where people try to save butterflies from the storm, to hold them in the cup of their clutched hands.

The memorial for Gar Campbell last week at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice underscored the primal, human need to hold butterflies, as if they were spirits on the brink of slipping up and away.

"We just wanted to bring him back," said colleague Richard Fancy. There was no shortage of people on hand to remember the actor-playwright-director-teacher-photographer, who died of colon cancer on December 20 at age 64. The overflow crowd spilled into the adjoining studio theater, where the testimonies were broadcast. The assemblage — from aging hippies to teenage students packed cross-legged in the front of the hall — was evidence that someone like Campbell who avoids the spotlight can touch a theater community as profoundly as a leading player, if not more so. (Campbell stopped acting — and drinking — to pursue his callings as a teacher and director, what Fancy described as "service.")

A lifetime smoker, Campbell was a lanky fellow known for his headscarves and fedoras. Said longtime friend Andrew Parks, Campbell was so stylish, heads would turn when he walked into the 901 bar near USC, where they studied theater: "Women followed him like ducklings. He was a dark, bad boy, and I didn't work that side of the street."

He was known for a wry, sideways turn of his head — "as though he was adjusting to a good idea," Parks noted — when he was probably just trying to hear what was being said to him, as he'd lost hearing in one ear.

Campbell co-founded the Company Theatre on La Cienega, which was comprised of USC graduates and enjoyed a 12-year run from 1967 to 1979. It was an ensemble that possessed "a combination of talents and a creative force that has never been matched in Los Angeles," said former L.A. Times drama critic Sylvie Drake.

A stream of actors spoke of Campbell's skill at fathoming the mystery of a scene with a few succinct words.

Suddenly, the room was filled with the sweet, sardonic strains of Parks singing "Dancing Butterfly," a song Campbell had written for his play Creatures.

Parks and Campbell's partner, Marilyn Fox (who's also Pacific Resident Theatre's artistic director), read a scene from the play. One snippet of dialogue speaks volumes about all that's wrong with our theater, and all that can be right about it:

"I will spend my life writing poems for you," says Clem Caterpillar to his "dying" partner, Clara, as she slips away into a cocoon.

"One good one will do," she replies.

YIDDISH THEATER: A LOVE STORY | A film by DAN KATZIR, RAVIT MARKUS and YAEL KATZIR, directed by DAN KATZIR | Presented by NEW LOVE FILMS and LAEMMLE'S GRANDE | Visit www.newlovefilms.com for screening locations and schedule.

Israeli premiere: Yiddish Theater: a love story

Review Journal.com
(Las Vegas)


Jan. 15, 2008
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

International Exploration

Film festival selections take audiences around the world

By CAROL CLING
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Wandering the desert has been a Jewish tradition since the Exodus.

And now, in its seventh year, the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival is doing a bit of wandering too.

After six years at the Suncoast's 16-screen multiplex, the festival has moved -- to not one but two new, and smaller, venues.

Seven of the festival's nine screenings, which begin Wednesday and run through Sunday, will take place at the Summerlin Library's theater. The festival concludes Jan. 27 in the student union theater at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

There's a simple explanation, according to festival founder Joshua Abbey, who heads the Desert Space Foundation, which produces the festival. (The Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada co-sponsors this year's event.)

Cinemark, the Dallas-based chain that now owns and operates the Suncoast multiplex, "didn't wish to maintain the sponsorship" of the festival established by the previous owners, Century Theatres, Abbey says. "It's a transitional year."

The festival's move to the Summerlin Library and UNLV student union theaters means more than a hundred fewer seats for each screening; the Summerlin theater seats about 290 and the UNLV student union's theater seats 300.

By contrast, the festival's previous home at the Suncoast has more than 400 seats "and we sold that out on numerous occasions," Abbey notes. (In other words, arrive early this year.)

The festival's new venues also mean all but one of the features will be shown on DVD; to compensate, five of the nine screenings will be presented free of charge.

The change in venues also enables Abbey to realize one longtime goal: "to have the festival on both ends of the valley," he explains. "There's been a lot of desire" among Green Valley residents "not to have to schlep over to Summerlin."

But the festival reflects a geographical diversity that extends beyond its dual Las Vegas locations.

The nine featured movies take audiences around the world, from Israel to Argentina, New York to the Ukraine.

"All the films are the top tier" of movies featured "at other major Jewish film festivals," Abbey notes.

That includes two 2006 features that shared Israel's Academy Award for best picture: "Aviva My Love" and "Sweet Mud."

Two documentaries now in theatrical release also highlight the festival: "The Rape of Europa" (short-listed for this year's Academy Awards documentary competition), a documentary about the Nazi plundering of Europe's art treasures during World War II; and "Yiddish: A Love Story," which focuses on a Holocaust survivor's efforts to keep America's last Yiddish theater going.

The festival also spotlights personal labors of love by everybody from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Paul Mazursky ("Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy") to Pedro Banchik, a chemical engineer from Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose family-reunion video project ("De Bassarabia a Entre Rios") has become an international success.

Naturally, there's a Las Vegas connection. (There's always a Las Vegas connection.)

It's Banchik's cousin Carlos, a local resident -- recent vice president of Midbar Kodesh Temple in Henderson-- who attended the family reunion in Argentina marking the 100th anniversary of their family's flight from anti-Semitism in the eastern European region of Bessarabia (now located in present-day Moldova) to a new life in Argentina.

Initially, Pedro Banchik intended to make a five-minute video to mark the occasion; instead, he wound up working "20 hours a day" on what became a full-length documentary.

"I didn't have any idea how to make the film," Banchik acknowledges in a telephone interview from his Buenos Aires home. "But when I started to do it, it was like an addiction."

Less than five months later, the finished product -- "a gift to my family" -- attracted such a strong response that Banchik received e-mails and telephone calls from around the world (including one from Israel's Beth Hatefutsoth Museum of the Jewish Diaspora) requesting copies.

It's since been featured at several international film festivals; Banchik plans to attend his film's Jan. 27 screening at UNLV. Argentine officials also have declared it of "cultural interest for the nation" and will be shown "in all the provinces" this year, he says. "I have recognition not only from the Jewish community but the wider community. I'm proud of that."

Unlike Banchik, a newcomer to filmmaking, veteran writer-director Mazursky (whose credits include "An Unmarried Woman," "Harry and Tonto" and "Down and Out in Beverly Hills") makes his documentary debut with "Yippee."

In it, the self-described "secular Jew" takes a "Journey to Jewish Joy" to a small Ukrainian town where thousands of Hasidic Jews gather annually to sing, dance and pray at a renowned rabbi's grave.

Mazursky was inspired to join them after his longtime optician told him the journey had changed his life.

"It was an overwhelming experience," acknowledges Mazursky, who made the journey accompanied by his optician, a Los Angeles rabbi -- and a Moroccan rock 'n' roll musician.

Together, they joined fellow Jews from around the world -- not only Israel and the United States but Britain, France, even India and Cuba.

"You might think they're crazy," Mazursky says of the participants, "but you'll be touched."

That's the reaction "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" has triggered in viewers, notes director Dan Katzir.

"For me, it was a passion project," he explains, one prompted by a chance meeting on the New York subway with an octogenarian actress and Holocaust survivor, Zypora Spaisman, devoted to keeping America's longest-running Yiddish theater alive.

When Katzir saw Spaisman perform, "I never experienced so much emotions in one play," he recalls. And he told Spaisman, " 'I'm a broke filmmaker, but I want to help you.' "

He did so by documenting her quest with his home video camera. That was seven years ago -- and although the subject of Katzir's documentary didn't live to see its theatrical release, her passion lives on.

"You see her energy and fall in love with her energy," Katzir observes, noting that audiences are "thanking us for making them feel something."

That sort of emotion also marks the enthusiastic response to "The Rape of Europa," notes Neil Friedman, president of Menemsha Films, which is distributing the documentary about how the Nazis tried to plunder Europe's art treasures during World War II. (It was nominated for a Writers' Guild Award last week.)

It's "a real word-of-mouth success," says Friedman, noting successful runs in U.S. theaters from Salt Lake City to Chattanooga, Tenn.

"It's not about death and destruction and the Holocaust," he explains. "It's primarily a film about art."

It also exemplifies the power of documentaries, Friedman says, to illuminate subjects "you may have heard a little bit about, but once you see it, 'Wow, it's all new!' "

That's a quality "The Rape of Europa" shares with "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story," "De Bassarabia a Entre Rios" and other festival features.

After all, Abbey points out, "just because it says 'Jewish Film Festival' doesn't mean it isn't for people" -- of any faith -- "who love good cinema."

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0272.
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ASHLAND DAILY TIDINGS
http://www.dailytidings.com/2008/0105/stories/0105_bp_yiddish_film.php

January 5, 2008
Filmmakers do Yiddish theater a real mitzvah
By Rachel Abramowitz
Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD — 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 house in Santa Monica with his producer, the energetic Ravit Markus, not far from a local film house, 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."