The Lullaby of Second Avenue: Yiddish Urban Theater
Tuition: $240 | YIVO members: $180**
This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish.
Instructor: Mikhl Yashinsky
What’s that racket down at the street corner? Someone hawking knishes two for a nickel? Fisticuffs over the relative merits of the Forverts and the Tog? Or is it maybe… just maybe… the call of someone drawing audiences into the glittering, raucous, seltzer-spattered and sunflower seed-strewn space of the Yiddish theater: “Kumt arayn! Kumt arayn! Tragedye, komedye, we’ve got it all!” In this class: it is all of these together. Writers for the Yiddish stage in New York City took inspiration from the over-full metropolis they called their new home, all its startling sounds and smells and sights, as they wrote their urban-set comedies and dramas for the enjoyment of the teeming hordes of the Lower East Side. We will take inspiration from the same city they did, and in which these plays are set, as we imagine their motivating forces—the miseries of the sweatshop, the delights of the dairy café—while examining a series of powerful theatrical scenes, reading, understanding, and playing them out together. Each week, we will delve into a new scene, mining it for its theatrical as well as linguistic qualities, discovering what it may teach us of the Yiddish language. Our understanding of these play excerpts will be enhanced by lively textual artifacts of the time that give us further insight into the milieu of these works.
Classes will be conducted entirely in Yiddish, though scripts will be provided in Yiddish characters as well as in transliteration, so no background in reading the alefbeys is required, likewise no background in acting — just a curiosity about the Yiddish theater of the city, and a desire to lend your own wild voice to its unearthly cacophony.
Yiddish Level:
This course, conducted in Yiddish, is designed for intermediate Yiddish students, or those who are able to understand written and spoken Yiddish. Students who do not read the alefbeys are welcome, as reading the play texts in transliteration will be an option.
Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all required course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.
Mikhl Yashinsky is a writer, singer-actor, and teacher in Manhattan. He was born in Detroit and graduated with a degree in modern European history and literature from Harvard. His “Di psure loyt khaim” (The Gospel According to Chaim), put on by New Yiddish Rep in 2024, was hailed as the first new full-length Yiddish-language drama produced professionally in the United States, outside of the Hasidic world, for many decades and “jolted the repertoire with a work that is both traditional and delightfully subversive” (Forward). His Yiddish-language erotic one-act “Vos flist durkhn oder” (Blessing of the New Moon) premièred at 2022’s Lower East Side Play Festival. With National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, he has performed in “Fidler afn dakh” (Fiddler on the Roof) directed by Joel Grey, “Tsvishn falndike vent” (Amid Falling Walls) and “Di kishef-makherin” (The Sorceress), in which Mikhl brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role (New York Times). In 2023, Yashinsky made his Carnegie Hall début, singing the anthem of the Vilna Partisans in the Holocaust memorial concert “We Are Here.” He has taught Yiddish at Columbia, University of Michigan, Tel Aviv University, UMass Amherst, the Yiddish Book Center, YIVO, and The Workers Circle, and co-authored the award-winning textbook “In eynem.” His translations of the memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, the “Mama of Yiddish Theatre,” and the detective stories of Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes,” are forthcoming from Bloomsbury and the Yiddish Book Center, respectively. More information on his website: www.yashinsky.com
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