Wednesday, November 04, 2015
Review: ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Yiddish
The New York Times: There are moments in New Yiddish Rep’s “Death of a Salesman” when language comes memorably to the fore: the “achtung” Linda Loman utters when she tells her sons that attention must be paid; the phrase “riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” which acquires a striking musicality when said in Yiddish.
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2 comments:
I was really surprised to hear there was a Yiddish Rep given that the number of people who speak Yiddish is dwindling. If I go back 3 generations in my family, most, if not all, of my great grandparents spoke Yiddish as their first language. None of my grandparents speak it because of the pressure to assimilate at the time when my family immigrated to the US. I speak a handful of Yiddish words mixed in with English, but for the most part, I’ve completely lost that part of my culture, which is frustrating. Because of that, I think the idea of performing plays in Yiddish is really cool. Yiddish didn’t just die out naturally, it died out due to antisemitism, and I think though at a glance Yiddish theater might seem useless in the US, it makes a powerful statement. Even though I don’t speak Yiddish, I would probably go see one of the Yiddish Rep’s performances if I had the chance.
I was sad to read that to production was not really cool because of the design when these producers are taking, what I think is, a pretty big risk of staging a play entirely in Yiddish. I myself only know a few words and phrases and I can, rarely, understand what someone is telling me in Yiddish, but I would love to see a show ad hear the language carry out such a well-known play. I love to listen to Yiddish and Yidddish speakers and I am one hundred percent sure that I am not the only one out there. The language sounds familiar, but still interesting and really the language is almost a character on its own with its complexity and attitude. When I listen to my mother speaking in Yiddish it make me feel a stronger cultural connection to the Jewish community, not to mention it makes me sad to think that the language is dying in the newer generations. It is a shame that the design was just a distraction from the performance, I would have loved to see this too.
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