Sabell Bender, an actress, director and Yiddishist, likes to make a clear distinction between “popular” and “art-house” Yiddish theater
“It’s like the difference between `Jaws’ and `Moby Dick,'” she said.
Bender, a lecturer at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, will deliver two East Bay talks on Yiddish theater Thursday, Dec. 3 through the Multi-Interest Day Lecture Series.
Held in the morning at Temple Beth Sholom in San Leandro and in the evening at Temple Israel in Alameda, the lectures are sponsored by the Center for Jewish Living and Learning of the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay and co-sponsored by Temple Israel Sisterhood.
Bender’s multimedia presentation includes a slide show of theater productions and an exhibit of rare vintage Yiddish theater posters. She also includes theater programs from around the world and audio segments featuring voices and music.
The 70-year-old Los Angeles resident, who speaks throughout the country, will share decades of personal experience in the theater. She acted in the Los Angeles Yiddish Folksbiene from the 1940s to the end of the ’60s. She also has directed more than 50 theatrical productions — though mostly in English — including “Diary of Anne Frank,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “Hot’l Baltimore,” and “Twelve Angry Jurors” — an update of “Twelve Angry Men,” featuring male and female cast members.
Even though interest in Yiddish theater has declined since the 1950s and only a handful of Yiddish theater companies still operate in the United States, Bender said its influence on the American stage is significant, especially in musicals.
“Yiddish plays were known for specific style of expressionism,” Bender said, citing the dream sequence in “Fiddler on the Roof” as an example.
Bender noted that popular Yiddish theater consisted primarily melodramas, vaudeville and musicals. Those lighter genres made a lot more money than more serious works such as “The Dybbuk,” but “art theater used better material and the productions were well-rehearsed.”
She added, “It’s not that popular means bad, but art theater is always a reflection of life — of Jewish life.”
According to Bender, the most enduring art-house plays, both dramas and comedies, came from writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch and Sholem An-Ski.
Many such plays captured the struggles and dreams of Jewish-American immigrants.
“They were about the social condition,” Bender said. “The material was socially conscious. There was a didacticism in Yiddish theater.”
Another key figure, Bender said, was Jacob Gordin. She called him “the first reformer of Yiddish theater. He wrote great, realistic dramas.”
One Gordon play, “God, Man and Devil,” is about “a poor scribe who becomes rich, opens a sweatshop and exploits his fellow Jews,” Bender said.
Among her favorite Yiddish plays to talk about and direct are An-Ski’s “The Dybbuk” and Sholem Aleichem’s “200,000.”
“`The Dybbuk’ is one of the most beautiful love stories that has ever been written,” she said.
In late October, Bender directed a one-man version of “200,000” for a Los Angeles Yiddishkeit festival. The play follows a poor tailor who wins 200,000 rubles in a lottery and invests it in a venture with movie people, who swindle him.
He ends up poor again. “But he realizes that he actually is much richer after returning to his people in the working class,” said Bender. “He becomes a man with greater dignity because he understands his own worth, his own humanity, and he understands himself better.”
Bender has no illusions that Yiddish plays will cross into the mainstream, becoming the bagels of the theatrical world. But she expects the Yiddish revival will stay strong for at least another decade.
“It’s part of that whole roots phenomenon. People are looking for who they are and finding out what their culture was,” she said. “The grandchild wants to remember what the parent tried to forget.”