“All the world’s a stage.”
Or, in Yiddish, “Der gansah veldt es a bine.”
Is Shakespeare’s line really true? Consider the dramatic stops on the lifelong tour of Chayale Ash.
Over the course of her 85 years, Ash has performed the classic Yiddish repertoire from the rooftops of a Besserabian shtetl, in the squalor of an Austrian displaced-persons camp, in Israel at the dawn of its statehood, in South Africa and in the United States from coast to coast.
Much more recently, on a muggy June day in San Jose, at a Jewish retirement community called Chai House, Ash is recuperating from knee surgery, begrudgingly leaning on a cane to get around.
But she’s still performing.
Her impish grin hints at a dramatic talent that has portrayed virtually every character in the cannon of Yiddish theater. Old, old photos reveal a face that stretches to convey emotions of the tragic, uproarious, absurd and painfully real.
But there’s another side to Ash that belies the tiny woman with the cane. It’s a determination as serious as survival. The most serious thing for Ash is to keep alive the show that is Yiddish culture.
She was, after all, literally born on the stage.
Both of Ash’s parents were in the theater, her father a director, her mother an actress. “Being on stage, in 1920, Mother got labor pains,” Ash explains while poring through ornate volumes of Yiddish-theater history, “and I was born on stage. They called my grandmother, a midwife, and backstage, they gave birth to Chayale. I was an actress from before the day I was born because Momma used to perform with me — they would dress her up in big skirts and big coats only to mask the pregnancy.”
Imagine a covered wagon straight out of the Old West, but actually in the Old Country. The family traveled from shtetl to shtetl throughout Besserabia, a part of Eastern Europe that changed hands between Russia, Romania and other powers like a property in a Monopoly game. It is now known as Moldavia. “Yiddish theater at the time was like a caravan. My mother used to take me to the theater. She would put me in a little basket of props.”
At 3, Ash was on stage. In winters she would go to school and live with her grandparents in Kishenev, known as “the slaughter town,” because one of the worst pogroms had taken place there in 1903. The rest of the time she was on the road with her parents.
Ash thrived on the dramatic, nomadic life and built her career — until convulsed into chaos in 1940. “Romania was occupied by the Soviet Union. They evacuated the Jews from Romania to the Ukraine. They put us to work at manual labor. I couldn’t survive watching my mother mixing cement with lye. My mother, the diva, the prima donna. I was young, I didn’t suffer. But when I watched the older actors suffer, I would get sick.”
The Jews were worked like slaves and nearly starved to death by the communists. Ash’s father met the fate of many in the work camp. He was sick with dysentery and he couldn’t work. So the Soviets shot him.
“After a couple months in the Ukraine, it got cold. They sent us away to Uzbekistan.” For four years Ash tarred the roofs of buildings that had been bombed by the Germans. The one positive thing that emerged from the work camp was Ash’s marriage to a Polish actor named Pesach Ziskind. After the war ended, the couple settled in Poland with Ash’s mother.
The catastrophe of the Holocaust was evident in the sudden absence of Jewish culture throughout Europe. Ash made it her mission to write down entire works of Yiddish literature from memory. When she became pregnant, Ash and her family decided Europe was no place to bring Jewish life into the world. They decided to journey to the one refuge of the Jewish people: Palestine. But it wasn’t easy.
They had to walk, illegally, to Austria, staying in a U.S.-administered displaced-persons camp. There Ash acted with other surviving actors from the Yiddish theater, bringing a spark of life to the camp. The establishment of Israel in 1948 re-energized the family’s desire to go to there, and Ash and Ziskind carried their infant daughter over the Alps on foot into Italy to board a ship to Israel, all illegally.
Once in the new country, Ash co-founded the first Yiddish theater in Israel, in Haifa. And what happened?
“I was arrested in Israel for performing in Yiddish. They came from the government and wouldn’t let us open the curtain. Ben-Gurion specifically. He was afraid that the country would not have a national language. Because the Jews who lived in Israel came to the kibbutzim. They were Zionists, they talked in Hebrew. Then came the Yemenites and the Sephardics. All of a sudden when the war ended millions came from Europe. The coming survivors — everyone spoke Yiddish — it was not a good thing for Israel. We [the survivors] understood that, but they didn’t understand us.”
Israeli authorities put the theater group on trial for interfering with the national character of the country. Within 24 hours, the actors organized a union and sued the government — and won. Still, the government insisted on vetting the plays before they were performed. The troupe got around this would-be censorship by switching scripts and manipulating versions.
Ash ended up traveling the world to wherever her audience was, to Yiddish-speaking Jews in Africa, South America and the United States. She eventually settled in this country so her adult daughter could have access to life-saving heart surgery.
As time went on, Ash embarked on another theater caravan — this time across the United States — and took on the role of activist for the Yiddish culture that was quickly declining in the post-Holocaust world.
It is that decline that both energizes and saddens Ash to this day. She can’t sit still because there is so much work to be done. Three stents in her heart haven’t stopped her from teaching Yiddish classes and delivering lectures on Yiddish culture at synagogues, JCCs and other Jewish venues around the Bay Area.
“I performed all over the world and it was packed with Jews that spoke Yiddish. And I say one thing that it is my ambition and I feel like I’m crying. If Hitler makes us to eliminate the Yiddish culture, he won the war. We survived, but for what? For making money? It hurts me so much it cannot be measured. I see a Jew who says ‘I don’t know Yiddish.’ Would a Frenchman be proud to say ‘I don’t know French?’ Why are you so proud to say you don’t know Yiddish?
“When I read a wonderful poem in English, it is only in here,” she says, pointing to her head. “When I speak Yiddish and perform it, it is in here,” she says, her finger thumping against her heart.
There are very few Yiddish speakers left at Chai House, but that wasn’t always the case. Twenty years ago Ash would come here to teach Yiddish classes. Now she is living here, just a few blocks from her grandchildren. She is always pleased to hear them greet her as “Bubbe Chaya.”
Poring through the stacks of letters of commendation and thanks for her hard work on several continents, Ash is proud. But her work isn’t done. Before this reporter leaves her living room, she insists he promise to return for Yiddish lessons.
“If you’re a good shoemaker, you make good shoes. If you’re an actress, you want to entertain. But with the entertainment in my mind always goes a part of our culture. This is very important, because if our Jewish kids, if they are not religious, they are assimilated, they are empty-headed. No language, no culture, no religious life. What gives them their identity as a Jew?”