Bubbe's Place: Stories

The Yiddish Theater

At this time the Yiddish Theater was vibrant and flourishing. I remember seeing Molly Picon at Saturday matinees at the Arch Street Theater. I was about six years, old the first time I went to the Arch Street Theater. It was probably my birthday treat. I went with Dora (my mother's best friend). When I came home my parents questioned me carefully. First they asked me," Did you understand it? " " Yes," I replied. "Everything but the Yiddish." That answer was laughed at heartily and repeated for years. I was so honest and embarrassed at my answer and I still am.

The Yiddish Speaking world liked to see plays about themselves and their world. They liked comedy and musicals. The H.M.S. Pinafore is still playing to sold out audiences when it is performed in Yiddish. Aunt Deb and Uncle Don saw it Off Broadway in the year 2000. The Yiddish speaking public liked to see Shakespeare in understandable prose. (Yiddish)

Yiddishkeit was the Jewish way of seeing and acting in the world. As they assimilated and became American, they thought that they had left the old world behind them. They may not have talked about Tikun o'lam (repair of the world) or tzedukah (charity/justice) but they were passionate believers in those ideas. They just translated them into the modern world and they became "ists". They called themselves communists, or socialists, or Zionists. They believed in social justice and wanted to change the world into a fairer, more compassionate place. They wanted to build a new better world, a world without pogroms, without prejudice, without ethnic cleansing, and without poverty. They were still trying to fulfill the charge, the commandment of repairing the world.