“May you grow like an onion — with your head in the ground and your feet in the air!”
“May you discover a gold mine but still be too poor to pay your doctor’s bill!”
“May you live like a chandelier — hang by day and burn by night!”
Only in Yiddish could one more or less invite an enemy to drop dead and do it in such a roundabout, amusing way.
“The curse words in Yiddish, there’s nothing vulgar about them, they’re rather poetic. The images are so stirring. When you’re in a hurry, you say, ‘Take your feet and put them on your shoulders.’ The language is peppered with all of these lingual spices,” said Eleanor Reissa, an actress and artistic co-director of the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre in New York.
“Yiddish moves you and moves the soul in ways that English doesn’t,” she continued, “And little bits of the language have certainly crept into English, because saying ‘He’s a meshugginah’ is more fun, and more accurate, than saying ‘He’s crazy.'”
Reissa, an actress, singer, playwright and director with deep roots in the world of Yiddish theater, will be appearing in San Jose for a lecture tomorrow and concert Sunday at Congregation Sinai.
Folksbiene, now in its 86th season, is the oldest continually producing Yiddish theater company in the world. Reissa’s co-director is Zalmen Mlotek, who has been involved in a number of Bay Area productions.
Although Reissa said she’s most attracted to Yiddish tunes with “weight and meaning” behind the lyrics, her favorite song has no words at all.
“Within wordless melodies, you get to express so much,” she said of the song ‘Nign.’ “It’s the story of a poor man who has nothing, but when he sings, wine pours from the cups, he leaps for joy and he’s ecstatic.”
While Reissa has been acting and singing in Yiddish theater for almost 25 years, perhaps the greatest number of viewers caught a glimpse of her on the big screen in 1992’s “A Stranger Among Us.” The film — which alternatively could have been described as “Witness” but with Chassidim — starred Melanie Griffith as an undercover cop within a fervently religious New York enclave, masquerading as a newly observant Jew.
Her time in front of the camera was only fleeting — as “Yiddish Woman No. 2,” Reissa admits. “I can’t remember what I did. I just remember I wore a shaitel” — but her experience on the movie was, nevertheless, rewarding.
She choreographed the Chassidic dancing scenes, and, in a dream moment, sang the movie’s title song with “Fiddler on the Roof” composer Jerry Bock. Also, “it was fun seeing Melanie Griffith as a ba’alat tshuvah,” or returnee to the faith.
While the phrase “Yiddish theater” may conjure up images of vaudevillian performers in suits that were out of style when Fyvush Finkel was still an embryo, Reissa — significantly Finkel’s junior — stresses that contemporary Yiddish theater is alive and well.
She describes a typical audience at a Folksbiene production as ranging from “13 to nonagenarians.” In fact, the company put on its family play, “2001: A Space Mishugas,” for the third straight season this year. That show is promoted as “90 percent English plus 10 percent Yiddish.”
“You’d see three or four generations in a theater for a musical that’s sort of an introduction to Yiddish,” recalled Reissa. “And that was pretty cool.”
Between acting, directing and writing, Reissa seems to have reached an equilibrium point.
“I’m just sort of happy doing what I’m doing,” she said with a laugh. “It’s momentary contentment.”