PASADENA NEWS:

PCC Presents "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story"

The producer of the film, Ravit Markus, will also be present during the Wednesday viewing
From STAFF REPORTS
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | 9:5 am

Pasadena City College's Social Sciences Division and the College Diversity Office present "Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" on Wednesday at 7 p.m. The gentle homage to Jewish theater will take place in room C333, said a spokesperson in a news statement.

This independent film poignantly reflects the life of holocaust survivor Zypora Spaisman and her role in bringing Yiddish theater to America, said Pasadena City College spokesperson Juan F. Gutierrez.

The moving images express the early roles of American society in theater, the development of unions, and a powerful consideration of elderly members of our society and how we treat them, as compared to other cultures, Gutierrez said.

Honoring Women's History Month, Spaisman is highlighted throughout the film as "the woman who has kept Yiddish theater alive in the U.S." he said.

"This film makes you cry and it makes you laugh," said Lauren Arenson associate professor of Social Sciences. "It's one of the best films I've seen in years."

The producer of the film, Ravit Markus, will also be present during the viewing. He will be available for a question-and-answer session following the film.

"Yiddish Theater: A Love Story" is free and open to the public. Parking is available in any PCC student lot for $2.

For more information: (626) 585-7736.

http://www.pasadenanow.com/_News/publish/article_2278.html

Sweet 16 (Film) party

12 weeks in Los Angeles and still running.

This week Yiddish Theater: A Love Story got a long article in the Pacific Palisades Palisadian Post:

http://www.palisadespost.com/content/index.cfm?Story_ID=3691

Cinematic Love for "Yiddish Theater"

March 05, 2008

Michael Aushenker , Staff Writer

'I never saw a play in Yiddish and, to be honest, I never thought I would,' says Dan Katzir, expressing a sentiment not uncommon among many young Jewish people. Yet unlike the situation of most Jews, that changed for the Israeli-American filmmaker after he met Zypora Spaisman, a vivacious octogenarian. His resulting film, 'Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,' is an English language documentary about one little old lady's fight to keep her Yiddish theater open against all odds and, by extension, keep a moribund culture alive. 'Yiddish Theater' plays this weekend in Santa Monica.

'I was vacationing in New York and I met Zypora by chance,' Katzir tells the Palisadian Post. 'She was the grand dame of Yiddish theater. She did everything to keep her show going''from acting to sweeping the floors.'

The 80-minute 'Yiddish Theater' follows Spaisman through a hectic week during which she must raise enough funds to keep her production of Peretz Hirschbein's classic Yiddish-language play 'Green Fields' going, or see the theater that she started, the Yiddish Public Theater, come to a close'in tandem with her acting career.

Filmed during Chanukah 2000, which that year culminated on New Year's Day, the Jewish Festival of Lights adds meaning and structure to Katzir's real-life drama. Ostensibly, the filmmaker uses the eight days of Chanukah as a device to provide suspense''each lit candle calibrating a day''as viewers sit at seat's edge to see if Spaisman's cast will prevail. They encounter extreme highs (The New York Times gives the production a glowing review) and lows (a severe snowfall slams New York). Obstacles materialize in between, from potential investors flaking, to the attendance-draining Christmas holidays. The movie culminates on New Year's Eve 2001, nine months before the events of September 11, adding an unintended layer of poignancy to the viewing; 'Yiddish Theater' gives a glimpse of a more innocent, bygone Manhattan in more ways than one.

'Everything what I do is Yiddish,' Spaisman says in the film. 'I live Yiddish, I eat Yiddish, I breathe Yiddish.'

In the 10th century, Yiddish became the official language of Central and Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazi Jews). A hybrid of medieval German and Hebrew, the Yiddish language, written in a Hebraic alphabet, also borrowed some English. Today, even non-Jews pepper their vocabulary with this expressive dialect; words such as schmooze, kibbitz, schlep, putz, and chutzpah have entered our lexicon, thanks largely to our country's long tradition of Jewish entertainers.

Yiddish culture also consists of a theatrical tradition that bridged the shtetls (Jewish villages) to early 1880s American life at a time when pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe caused Jews to immigrate to the United States. By 1924, two million Jews had arrived, bringing with them a rich culture. When the Folksbiene Theatre was founded in 1915 on New York's Lower East Side, 14 other Yiddish theater companies existed. But as the U.S.-born children assimilated into the mainstream, this theater audience dwindled with Yiddish culture among the new generation.

'There's one thing that can be said about the Yiddish theater that can't be said about any other foreign-language immigrant theater,' says Palisades resident Marvin Zuckerman, a Yiddish culture authority. 'It's the longest-lasting.'

'The Yiddish theater is generally thought to be started in Romania by Avrom Goldfadn,' explains Zuckerman, dean emeritus of Los Angeles Valley College. 'Goldfadn [1840- 1948] is considered the guy who tied it all together. He wrote Yiddish operettas. The Broadway of Yiddish theater was Second Avenue''Yiddish art theater, vaudeville, musicals.'

Yiddish theater enjoyed a respectable reputation in its 1900-1950 heyday. Lincoln Steffens called it the best theater in New York. The genre, which peaked in the 1940s, coincided with Yiddish cinema (i.e., 'Yidel Mitn Fiedl' with Molly Picon) produced in New York and pre-war Poland. Hirschbein wrote 'Green Fields' in 1908 in Odessa, and a 1937 film version was shot in upstate New York.

'He happens to be buried in Los Angeles behind Paramount [at Hollywood Forever cemetery],' says Zuckerman of Hirschbein, who died in 1948. 'He was a world traveler, he wrote for travel books, and he wound up in L.A.'

'A lot of famous American actors came out of the Yiddish theater,' continues Zuckerman, husband of Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the real-life 'Gidget' recently profiled in the Post. 'Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, our very own Palisadian, Walter Matthau.' Joel Grey's father was renowned comedian Mickey Katz, who incorporated Yiddish into his act. The grandfather of conductor Michael Tilsen Thomas was the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky. One of Thomashefsky's rivals was Jacob P. Adler, whose wife, Sara, was a prominent Yiddish theater actress. If his surname sounds familiar, it could be because his daughter was Stella Adler, whose acting disciples included Marlon Brando.

The unspoken irony for the filmmakers is that Spaisman's mission is a metaphor for their movie''itself a valentine to the culture and something of an underdog. 'Yiddish Theater' has squeaked by from screening to screening since its 2006 premiere in San Francisco.

'It's sad,' Katzir notes, 'that after 1,100 years, just as Hitler lost in his attempt to destroy this Yiddish culture, it's fading away in the secular world. I'm Israeli. For Israelis, Yiddish is even more foreign than it is for Americans.'

In Israel, Yiddish culture has not been preserved among the overwhelmingly secular youth. As if to make that point, the lead in Spaisman's play, a young Israeli, ironically shows off armfuls of tattoos (a corporeal desecration forbidden in the Jewish religion) after acting in Hassidic garb.

But Eric Gordon, director of the local Yiddish culture society, The Workman's Circle/Arbeter Ring of Southern California, quibbles with Katzir's premise that Yiddish culture and theater is dying.

'The movie has a kind of quality of lamentation about it that I take issue with,' Gordon says, pointing out that the Folksbiene remains vital. mount major annual productions and stages plays in both English and Russian translations.

Gordon's own Workman's Circle chapter celebrates its centennial this year, while California's oldest Workman's branch, in San Francisco, turns 101.

What's sure about 'Yiddish Theater' is the passion for Yiddish culture exuded by both Spaisman and the filmmakers. Another Palisadian, Los Angeles Times movie critic Kenneth Turan, called the film 'charming and disarming.'

'Nothing can take away from the flavor of being caught up in the battles and dreams of a formidable group of people,' Turan continues in a November 2007 review. 'For a brief moment in time, we share their struggles, and that feels like a privilege.'

There's something wonderful about seeing these dedicated actors, young and old, partaking in their uphill production. 'Yiddish Theater' is as much survival story as it is love story, and tenacious firebrand Spaisman's spirit is entertaining, contagious and ultimately inspiring.

'We live in a Seinfeld society where everything is fast, edgy, funny, but also smells a little cynical and jaded,' Katzir says. 'Yiddish has a lot of heart and emotions.'

'Yiddish Theater: A Love Story' screens Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. at Laemmle's Monica, 1332 Second St. Katzir and Markus will speak following each screening. For tickets, call (310) 394-9741 or visit laemmle.com/viewmovie.php?mid=3304. The movie's Web site: yiddishtheater.net

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.