Ben Kaplan, Weekend Post
Published: Saturday, October 10, 2009

Jewish Vienna was a hotbed of culture, but when the Nazis marched in, that overshadowed everything. We didn't have much money, but we went to the theatre and my father would read plays around the table. But after all these years, the horror of the Nazi presence is still top of mind.

You can't prepare for a thing like the Nazis. They'd been in power in Germany for five years before they came into Austria. We were not unaware of how they were operating, but at the time they were not yet running their extermination plan of the Jews. It was discrimination, anti-Semitism, debasing us and subjecting us to barbaric treatment, but nobody had an inkling then about death camps.

We started looking to emigrate. My father studied Spanish in case we were admitted to South America, but we were lucky and earned one of the coveted permits to Israel, which was then Palestine.

The Austrian border guards were engaged in chicanery, they could tear up your papers. They had a newly found religion called Naziism; that gave them power. My father was smart. He booked our passageway through Germany. The Germans are a Teutonic people; if your papers are in order, they're in order. I was 14 years old and it took 18 hours to get into France, but when we crossed that bridge it was like a stone being lifted off our hearts. We felt freedom.

The country needed pioneers to work the land, but I had neither the talent nor inclination for agriculture. There were troops in Egypt and Syria and a Jewish brigade joined the British army, but I didn't figure the British needed my services that badly. On the kibbutz, I'd stage pageants and plays and I became the culture guy. The minute I started, I knew it was where I needed to be.

A year after the war ended, I moved to London to perform. My mother encouraged me. Sure, she cried. Mothers cry. Everything I'd lived through informed my performances. If you've experienced deprivation, you know how to not only play poverty, but also the rich; not only the victim, but the oppressor. Life informs what you do on the stage.

Laurence Olivier cast me in Streetcar Named Desire, opposite his wife, Vivien Leigh, who was very beautiful, very fragile. You felt she was breakable, exactly what was needed in her role. Acting careers are strange, you take what comes. I was doing a play when I got The African Queen in 1951. I figured, "I'll just sleep less." When you're young, you have chutzpah. Only later you say, "Boy, that must've been frightening doing your first film with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn," but at the time, it was an interesting job. I don't know how Bogart's performance came together. He'd mumble some lines in the makeup chair and half an hour later have a full-blown performance. Magic.

My mother thought I deserved an Academy Award. Jewish mothers. My mother would talk to any passing stranger about how great I was, much to my embarrassment. She thought I deserved an award for being born.

When I got to America in 1954, folk music became another career. I lived in New York's Greenwich Village and remember Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern. I loved the music, sometimes it was about protest, sometimes it was just plain fun. I lived in a small flat with just enough room for books, records and, oh yes, for wine. Bob Dylan was bumming around the village, very few people knew who he was. He'd write lyrics on the backs of old envelopes and come to my apartment and sing me a song he'd just written. At the time, Pete Seeger was a friend, and we were co-founders of the Newport Folk Festival. This was before there was "Bob Dylan!" In fact, at the first Newport Festival, it was "Joan Baez!" Of course, the following year, Dylan was a big deal. I didn't think his electric music had much place at a folk festival, but it had a place somewhere - that year, the sale of guitars surpassed the dollar value of sales of pianos. Things were beginning to change.

All the while, my parents stayed in Israel. I compartmentalized. When I do something, I treat it as though it were the only thing I've ever done, at the exclusion of everything else. You have to go at everything as if it were the only thing.

This new play, well, it's been germinating for years. As a boy, those plays my dad read were by Sholem Aleichem, who inspired Fiddler on the Roof and more. I wanted to intersect my own story as a human being with his journey from Eastern Europe to Western Europe to America. He wrote with a sense of humour that never quit. I remember the extraordinary humiliation of not daring to walk into the streets of Vienna. Knowing if you looked Jewish, you were dragged into the road, beaten or worse. I wrote this play to show where I ended up finding love. I feel like I can still go on for a long time. I feel well and my voice is strong. People don't believe that I'm 85. You know? Sometimes I don't believe it, too.

-Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears by Theodore Bikel is presented by Toronto's Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company and plays the Winter Garden Theatre from Oct. 13-18. Tickets $40-$75, 416-872-5555 or at ticketmaster.ca.

As told to Ben Kaplan

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The Canadian Jewish News
Theodore Bikel brings Sholom Aleichem to life
By Kathryn Kates
Special to The CJN

One of the Jewish community’s most beloved thespians, Theodore Bikel, is bringing his acclaimed one-man show to the Winter Garden Theatre next week.

Written by Bikel, Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, is a look at Aleichem’s life through music and stories. The show, presented by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, is in Toronto Oct 13 to 18.

Russian-born Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916) was the popular Jewish humorist and author of Yiddish literature who introduced the world to Tevye the Milkman. The character inspired the landmark Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, with Bikel as Tevye. The Viennese-born actor gloriously brought Tevye to life more than 2,000 times over 37 years.

"Sholom Aleichem has been part of my life ever since I was a small boy," said Bikel, 85. He said Aleichem is the quintessential Yiddish writer who epitomizes everything about the Old World and the shtetl. "For his time, he was an intensely modern man as well, who knew world literature. While he concentrated on the milieu of his people, he was well versed in everything else as well."

Bikel said he is writing about two kinds of journeys. "One is my own journey as an artist and as a Jew, which then intersects with Sholom Aleichem’s journey, in which I am able to take pieces of his writing and bring them to life." Bikel will be playing dozens of Aleichem’s characters, from young boys to old men and women.

"Let’s face it, something that is written on the page for the purposes of performance has to be lifted and made three dimensional."

Bikel thinks that "laughter through the tears" is something that goes through Jewish life. "We always manage to find the laughter, even in the midst of sadness. We certainly know in the midst of laughing and humour, there is always that little tear. It is a Jewish trait that we do have. It is kind of unique. I don’t know it in any other people."

Bikel wrote the play based on Aleichem’s writings, which he grew up with. "I have all his volumes on my shelves. After dinner, my father used to read to us a short story, a monologue or even a whole play in Yiddish, so that has accompanied me through all my life."

Bikel has always championed the Yiddish language. "It has been threatened by extinction in some many ways – the Holocaust not only murdered six million people, but also a language along with it," he said. "There were survivors, and the survivors carried the language with them. Today, Yiddish is threatened in other ways, by apathy, laziness and Jews, who tried to make an either/or proposition out of Hebrew versus Yiddish."

Coincidently, this year is the 150th anniversary of Aleichem’s birth, and Bikel performed this show to rave reviews in Washington, D.C., and Florida, and will be taking it to New York after the Toronto run.

He said the show appeals to both Jews and non-Jews. "People have told me that they are taking away from this show a renewed appreciation of the lasting value of ‘folk writing.’ Sholom Aleichem wrote of a time and a place that can only live with us, if we manage to get the descriptions of the huts that they lived in, and of how exquisitely they treated their own poverty."

Bikel, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, is a star of stage, film and television, an accomplished musician and renowned social activist. The actor has appeared on stage with Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Peter Ustinov, and played Captain VonTrapp in the first production of The Sound of Music on Broadway.

Bikel’s film career began with the 1951 classic The African Queen, in which he played opposite Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. He received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the southern sheriff in The Defiant Ones in 1958.

On the small screen, the Emmy Award-winning actor, appeared in numerous shows, including The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O, All in the Family, Murder She Wrote, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Law and Order

The folk-singing troubadour, a longtime recording artist, co-founded the Newport Folk Festival.

For tickets to Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, call the box office at 416-872-5555 or contact Ticketmaster at www.ticketmaster.ca.

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HAROLD GREEN JEWISH THEATRE COMPANY
ANNOUNCES 2009-2010 SEASON

Theodore Bikel to star in Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears

The HAROLD GREEN JEWISH THEATRE COMPANY, Toronto’s only professional theatre company established to celebrate, illuminate and share Jewish culture, today announced their 2009/2010 subscription season.

The Company’s 2009/2010 season features one highly acclaimed work prior to its New York engagement, an important new work by a local playwright and a musical featuring 23 songs by one of America’s greatest composers.

Academy Award- and two-time Tony Award-nominee THEODORE BIKEL's new one-man show, SHOLOM ALEICHEM: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS, a biographical look at the Yiddish writer's life, will have its Canadian premiere at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre.

Deeply researched, powerfully felt and beautifully sung, SHOLOM ALEICHEM: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS is based on the true tale of the great Yiddish storyteller's youth, fame and challenging journey to America and contains a rich catalogue of Yiddish (and English) songs performed with Grammy Award nominated TAMARA BROOKS on piano and internationally-renowned Bosnian accordionist MERIMA KLJUČO. Theodore Bikel is a world-renowned stage and screen actor as well as one of the world's most beloved singers of folk music.

Set in Toronto’s Orthodox Jewish community, YICHUD (SECLUSION) is an unforgiving, tender and humorous exploration of the universal desire for intimacy, and how we cope with the repression of that desire. Written by JULIE TEPPERMAN and directed by AARON WILLIS, with Directing Consultant RICHARD GREENBLATT, YICHUD (SECLUSION) was developed by Convergence Theatre as part of the Toronto Fringe’s Next Stage Theatre Festival and is being co-produced with Canada's oldest alternative theatre devoted to the development and production of new Canadian work, Theatre Passe Muraille. A remarkable new work, YICHUD (SECLUSION) provides a window into an extraordinary Toronto community with a story that is accessible to all.

Called "A wholly original, wholly delightful review" with "drop dead gorgeous tunes" by the Los Angeles Times, THE SOUL OF GERSHWIN, THE MUSICAL JOURNEY OF AN AMERICAN KLEZMER features 23 all-time Gershwin classics cleverly bundled with musical surprises guaranteed to bring theatergoers - young and old - to their feet.

George Gershwin, as narrator and storyteller, joins three master-class vocalists and a matchless onstage band to take audiences on a compelling musical journey that transports them back to his world: New York City in a burgeoning new century bustling with diverse cultural influences and seemingly disparate musical genres: Yiddish theater and Jewish liturgical melodies; popular tunes; folk songs; blues, jazz and opera.

THE SOUL OF GERSHWIN, THE MUSICAL JOURNEY OF AN AMERICAN KLEZMER is an aurally illustrated examination of how a generation of Jewish-American composers was influenced by the cross- pollinating sounds of the day and is the ultimate expression of immigrant assimilation: something greater than the sum of its parts.

Founded in 2006, the HAROLD GREEN JEWISH THEATRE COMPANY aims to illuminate humanity through a Jewish perspective by inviting artists and audiences to participate in live theatre, the meeting place of all the arts.

3 - Play subscriptions are now on sale and range from $99 - $162 and are available by calling 416.366.7723 · 1.800.708.6754 · online at www.stlc.com.

Single tickets are on sale September 14, 2009.

SHOLOM ALEICHEM: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS Starring Theodore Bikel · Directed by Derek Goldman Musical Direction by Tamara Brooks Tamara Brooks, Piano · Merima Ključo, Accordian October 13 -18, 2009. Opening Night: Wednesday, October 14, 8pm Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge Street Tickets: $40 - $75 Call 416.872.5555 · www.ticketmaster.ca

YICHUD (SECLUSION) · World Premiere By Julie Tepperman · Directed by Aaron Willis February 5 - March 7, 2010. Opening Night: Wednesday, February 10, 7:30pm Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue Tickets: $30 - $42 Call 416.504.7529 · www.passemuraille.on.ca

THE SOUL OF GERSHWIN, THE MUSICAL JOURNEY OF AN AMERICAN KLEZMER Music and Lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin Additional Lyrics from Porgy and Bess by DuBose Heyward Created and Written by Joseph Vass Directed by Peter Moore May 1 – 9, 2010. Opening Afternoon: Sunday, May 2, 2pm Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge Street Tickets: $43 - $78 Call 416.872.5555 · www.ticketmaster.ca

A limited number of $20 tickets are available for specific dates, seats and performances.

For group rates please call Jordi at 416.932.9995 x 224.

For more information please visit www.hgjewishtheatre.com

Media Contact: FLIP Publicity & Promotions Inc., 416.533.7710, www.flip-publicity.com Grant Ramsay X222, grant@flip-publicity.com or Carrie Sager X224, carrie@flip-publicity.com