Forget about Halloween Fright Nights. Nothing can compete with scary reality. Last night my Holocaust survivor parents (deceased for over two decades) suddenly appeared in my dreams. Not all that surprising as I’d just returned from FAU Theatre Lab’s opening of THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKER by Deborah Zoe Laufer. The last time I’d heard so much Yiddish – my first/only language till the age of 3 – was when they were still alive. My father also often quoted an Aramaic saying from the Talmud (we are a people schooled in many tongues), “Girsa de-yankuta girsa,” which basically translates to “Lessons learned as a young child are lessons learned for life.”
Learning and transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next are key themes in Laufer’s latest premiere (her fourth!) at Theatre Lab, a rare local, professional company completely devoted to nurturing and promoting new work – with nearly 100 new play readings and 26 critically acclaimed, full-stage productions since 2015. The Last Yiddish Speaker had been a highlight of the Lab’s 2022 New Play Festival where it received its first public reading. Now it’s the second stop of National New Play Network’s (NNPN) three, cross-country theaters’ Rolling World Premiere program, and the inaugural production of the Lab’s 10th Anniversary Season.
The play’s award-winning playwright also serves as director and said she appreciates the opportunity to personally assess her script before submitting the finalized version for publication. Personally, I think her script is damn near perfect and, as director, she did an amazing job. Still I couldn’t help wonder if she – like most everyone in the audience – was stricken by the irony of the play’s timing. Keep in mind, Laufer’s original inspiration (in addition to commiserating with an endangered bird species’ unanswered song) was the Jan 6, 2021 insurrection, and what life would be like if Trump had succeeded in making America an authoritarian state run by White Christian nationalists.
Her play is set in 2029 (eight years after the coup). All outsiders or “others,” including agitators and protesters, are “sent back to where they came from,” dragged at gunpoint from their homes and banished from their hometowns (though not spoken aloud, probably murdered as well). Undesirables include Jews, Gays, and basically all non-white, non-Christians. Women are put in their place to serve men and the home, no longer allowed to attend university or even work in a profession. The play’s premise is in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, recalls George Orwell’s 1984 surveillance state, and the alternative post-election world envisioned by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America, wherein fascist isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in 1940.
(as Aunt Chava) share Yiddish mischief in translation. Morgan Sophia Photography.
It seems for every generation, there comes a new cautionary voice. Deborah Zoe Laufer’s voice may be more “current” than even she anticipated. As the playwright observes: “I like to write about what it’s like to live in the time we’re in, and the time we’re in is shifting so quickly. I keep saying history rewrites my plays faster than I can.”
The Last Yiddish Speaker opens to a rather old-fashioned but comfortably furnished, wood-paneled living room where a rifle and several Christ crosses hang on the wall and a large American flag is displayed on the porch outside (fine scenic design by Michael McClain). The setting suggests a typical, bucolic, small-town cabin in upstate New York, inhabited by patriotic Christians. We next witness a frustrated father arguing with his combative teen daughter about her future. Still typical. But when outspoken 17-year-old Sarah (Gemma Berg) yells “I hate kids” in reaction to her father Paul’s (Stephen Schnetzer) vision of her future as a teacher, then asserts, “I have the grades for McGill. When our passports arrive, I’m going to Canada with or without you,” we get the feeling something’s not quite kosher.
Sarah’s father insists she call herself Mary, even at home, so as not to forget their newly forged identities in this all-white Christian town where they’re “passing” as Christian to escape the unknown fate of all Jews who’d been rounded up and evicted from New York City. But Sarah is brilliant and had always planned on an Ivy League education and a future career as a scientist, a physicist, maybe even an astronaut. Now she continues to tutor herself in calculus from banned books that they’d kept hidden from the ever-watchful eyes of their assigned inspector who stops by daily to check for contraband. But “inspector” John (Gage Callenius) is also just a 17-year-old neighbor kid in Sarah’s high school class.
John will be attending the local college next year. He plans to major in agriculture because, as the sole male among many sisters, he’ll inherit the family farm. While fully accepting the rightness of the government’s mission and his place in life, John is nonetheless drawn to, and enamored with, Sarah and her eye-opening “big city” ideas. He recognizes how smart she is and feels bad that he can attend university while she – who would benefit the most from a higher education – cannot.
For her part, Sara considers John the best of the local lot, good looking and basically a good person and, while they often conflict in their views, there is an underlying attraction and they fall in love (echoes of Nazi Rolfe and Liesl in “The Sound of Music”). It’s amazing to see this young, earnest lad take his vow of premarital chastity so seriously (as he does his role of spying for the State). John repeatedly pushes “Mary” away when her passionate advances become too heated. Here’s one male of the species with great self control.
The final and pivotal character to arrive on the father-and-daughter’s doorstep is Chava (Patti Gardner) or “Aunt Chava” as she comes to be called, via the unexpected (and always frightening) vroom of an automobile at night (sound design by Matt Corey) and the glare of a bright round headlight reflected through the door pane (lighting design by Thomas Shorrock). Dressed like a refugee – in multiple layers of coats, robes and house dresses (costume design by Dawn C. Shamburger) as her small suitcase can only hold so much – an elderly woman has been ejected from the fast-retreating car. She kvetches and complains in a litany of Yiddish curses as Sarah quickly ushers her inside, reading aloud the note pinned to her coat: “This is your Aunt Chava. It’s your turn to hide her. Good luck.”
shawl around Paul’s (Stephen Schnetzer) shoulders. Morgan Sophia Photography.
While Sarah is instantly enthralled by Chava and the discovery of a long-lost relative, her dad is far more suspicious, and worried about dire consequences if they’re found harboring an outcast. He says she needs to go but Sarah insists they provide refuge to what may be the last Jew and hide her in their home.
When asked about her origins, Chava replies: “The shmendrik (jerk) dropped me off here and there. Wherever I end up, bad things are happening to the Jews.” We also discover that she dates back 1,000 years (Laufer has an affinity for magic realism), has lived in a slew of countries with multiple husbands and offspring, sadly, all now dead. She appears to have survived the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.
But now she’s teaching a very-interested-in-her-heritage Sarah how to cook matzo ball soup. And when Sarah has Chava speak into a Yiddish translator app on her cellphone, they giggle like mischievous schoolgirls at all the comical Yiddish variations for the word “penis.” Even Sarah’s father melts at seeing his daughter caught up in a rare joyous moment of laughter, but then is horrified when he discovers she’d downloaded a Yiddish app, which can be traced, and demands she erase it immediately.
Triggering memories of how Jews have always lived with one-foot-out-the door to save their lives, he and Sarah pack “escape” suitcases so they’re ready to flee at a moment’s notice. While Sarah is adamant about heading to Canada where democracy still exists – if one can only get through their wall – Paul is more torn. He seriously suggests the next time they attend church on Sunday, they “come clean” by giving up their contraband books, and simply exist like their neighbors. But his daughter would prefer to die (like her firebrand, protest-leading mother likely had), than give up her heritage. Especially now that she’s found an educator who she fears may be the last Yiddish speaker, Sarah feels it’s up to her to preserve the Jewish tradition.
Father-daughter debates on whether to go, stay, or fight for their rights contain such pithy, but also humorous, observations like Sarah saying: “How am I supposed to never forget if I never knew?” We hear the common refrain: “Put two Jews in a room and get five opinions.” And when Paul tells Sarah, “You read too much.” She snidely replies: “Said no Jewish parent ever!”
Chava goes about her business, as she always has, saying Kaddish for the dead (with Sarah asking to learn, so she can join in). Even Paul eventually softens up to Chava’s presence, allowing her to place a talis (ritual prayer shawl) around his shoulders, answering Amen to her blessings and, after she lights the Sabbath candles with Sarah, wishing her a “Good Shabbos.”
If it sounds like this play contains a lot of Yiddish, it does. But it all fits the story, is frequently translated and, even when it’s not, you can feel what’s being said in your soul. For Yiddish speakers or anyone with just a smattering of Yiddish remembered from their past, hearing the ancestral language spoken so beautifully is a special treat. But knowing Yiddish is certainly not necessary to appreciate the play. You don’t even have to be Jewish. As is the case with any good drama, the specific (here the playwright was going for a Grover’s Corners Our Town feel) only serves to highlight the universal in human nature.
Still, as someone who was at least partially raised in Yiddish, I can confirm that the language, accent, and all the idioms are spot on. I was surprised to learn that none of the three Jewish-cast actors had any Yiddish-speaking background, especially Patti Gardner who holds the heaviest Yiddish load as Aunt Chava. Then again, Patti Gardner has been a highly acclaimed South Florida presence for over 30 years; there’s nothing she can’t accomplish with perfection. Stephen Schnetzer, who plays Paul with sincere anxiousness and sensitivity, holds an impressive resume as well – ranging from Shakespeare to popular TV series and soaps. And young Gemma Berg, who rocked her role as Sarah, appears well on her way to fame in theater, film and TV.
For these actors’ impressive facility with Yiddish, we must also credit our own local Yiddish expert, award-winning actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman, who served as the play’s Yiddish Consultant. I have a feeling he helped in their Hebrew prayer enunciation as well. Interestingly, there is one facet of this future dystopia that we may not need fear so much. After practically being pronounced dead with the birth of the Hebrew-speaking State of Israel, the past few decades have seen a major resurgence of Yiddish with growing worldwide interest in the language, culture, and varied literature, including Yiddish theatre.
Aaron Lansky, a 24-year-old graduate student in Yiddish literature, took it upon himself to rescue crumbling and abandoned mostly pre-WWII Yiddish books in America and then throughout the world. His army of dedicated college-age zamlers (collectors) ended up saving over a millions volumes, now housed in the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, that Lansky founded in 1980.
