Waiting for G-dot

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays.  Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Posted by Kelsey Osgood for Mosaic

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to ask a nineteen-year-old Satmar girl, equally conversant in English and Yiddish, how she decides which language to use at any given moment.

“Yiddish just sounds better for some things,” she responded. “Like when you are yelling at your brothers to get out of bed, you could say ‘Get up!’ But in Yiddish, ‘Shtay-OOF!’ It just sounds more …”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew precisely what she meant. Full of lamenting diphthongs and expressive opportunities to spit on the listener, Yiddish is to dissatisfaction what Italian is to romance. For many people, the word “Yiddish” immediately evokes comedic cliches: Woody Allen as the lone Hasid at a dinner table full of Wasps, or Henny Youngman begging someone to please take his wife. But the language also has strains of tragedy—it is, after all, the true language of goles, or exile. Whereas Hebrew has a home to return to, Yiddish—a stew of German phrases, Slavic vocabulary, and Biblical parallelisms—was born out of exile itself. Its very essence is wandering and alienation. In his entertaining linguistic history “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods,” Michael Wex writes, “Rooted as it is in the long wait for a Messiah who’s in no hurry to get here, Yiddish sometimes approaches fulfillment but never quite achieves it; until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt, there isn’t much apart from pining and dissatisafaction.”

It’s fitting, then, that Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of alienation, “Waiting for Godot,” will be performed for the first time in Yiddish in a production of zeal and intelligence by the New Yiddish Rep and staged at the Castillo Theatre on West Forty-second Street. It opens on Friday and runs through October 13th. Vladimir—the more alert of the two tramps—is played by Shane Baker, a tall vaudevillian who also wrote the translation. Baker is an oddity even in the oddball-ridden world of Yiddish theatre: a goy from the Midwest who was raised Episcopalian. As a child, he first heard Yiddish from Groucho Marx, and when he moved to New York he befriended the accomplished Yiddish theatre actors Mina Bern and Luba Kadison, with whom he spent most of his time, speaking exclusively Yiddish and absorbing the language and the culture. Now, he’s such a luminary in the world of Yiddish that he is the executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture and reads yearly at the yahrzeit (death anniversary) of Sholem Aleichem. Onstage, he manages to be both burlesque and deadpan at once, the latter especially in comparison to his counterpart, David Mandelbaum, who plays Gogo.

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