Just Don't Let Me Forget the Yiddish Word...

"Let me come close to the joy of the Yiddish word," sighs A Traveling Jewish Theatre actress Naomi Newman in the company's current production, Diamonds in the Dark. "Give me whole days and nights of it/Weave me, bind me into it/Feed me crumbs, with the crows I'll sleep on a hard bed/Under a leaky roof/Just don't let me forget the Yiddish word/For a single/Moment." This poem - written in 1961 by Jacob Glatstein, an American Jew from Poland who died in 1971 - expresses the essence of the experimental ensemble's latest work: a lyrical tribute to a vanishing language and an endangered culture.

The bilingual Diamonds is a pastiche of extant Yiddish poetry, performed by Albert Greenberg, Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman and directed by the fourth ensemble member, Helen Stoltzfus. It includes singing, dance-like movement (staged by local choreographer Stephen Pelton), a post-modern score (by Greenberg), an abstract sand-and-metal landscape (by Matthew Antaky) and simple, evocative props (hats, a candle, a book).

Launching A Traveling Jewish Theatre's 20th anniversary season in its newly renovated 85-seat home in Project Artaud, Diamonds reflects the ensemble's deepest beliefs: "That the roots of theater lie in the realm of the mythic, the sacred and the communal; that theater can be an instrument of healing for people and cultures."

Established in Los Angeles by Fischer, Greenberg and Newman, ATJT moved to San Francisco in 1982, where Stoltzfus joined the group. One of the oldest artist-led ensembles in the United States, ATJT usually creates its own performance pieces from a variety of sources, with the overall goal of seeking connections among cultures. Thus works from the repertory - with themes as diverse as African-American/ Jewish relations (Crossing the Broken Bridge), interfaith marriage (Heart of the World), the romance between Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo (Trotsky and Frida) - have toured worldwide, from Israel to Holland and beyond. Non-linear texts enhanced by puppets, masks, original music, stylized physical gesture, a wide vocal range and simple sets are ATJT trademarks.

Diamonds, one of the ensemble's rare works that relies on published rather than original material, is the first piece all four have worked on together since Stoltzfus joined the group in 1987; the intervening decade has been devoted to solo pieces and collaborations with other artists and groups. "It feels like a reunion," said Stoltzfus.

The 22 poems, which span the 20th century, are by 13 different poets, two of whom are living, including Polish-born Rajzel Zychlinsky, a Bay Area resident in her late 80s, and Irena Klepfisz, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and the only contemporary American poet who incorporates Yiddish into her work. One of the poets, H. Leivick (a Russian immigrant who died in 1962), is known for the Yiddish play The Golem. Corey Fischer writes in explanatory notes that Diamonds' poems reflect the "passionate struggle to bear witness to the secular, mystical, erotic and political realities of our time." He adds, "In the current climate of polarization, ethnic hatred and cultural warfare, the tolerant and inclusive vision of Yiddish poetry needs to be given voice and form. It exists as a rare example of a culture that found ways to celebrate its particularity without isolating from or rejecting the 'other.'"

Based on 10th-century Rhineland German with elements of Hebrew and Aramaic (as well as every language with which Jews in the Diaspora came into contact, including Russian, Polish, Czech, Latvian and Lithuanian) Yiddish united Ashkenazi (Eastern European�based) Jews. Yiddish poetry was, according to Fischer, of necessity "a portable culture that Jews carried through lifetimes of exile. Yiddish poets have written poems that reflect the landscapes of Cuba, New England, Kentucky, Buenos Aires, as well as Vilna, Warsaw and Jerusalem." But he also points out that "Yiddish has suffered greatly from decades of association with the trivial, the vulgar or, at best, the merely nostalgic." To Americans, Yiddish is often associated with Catskills stand-up comics, a coarse/ funny vocabulary and an unfamiliar pronunciation that can sound like throat-clearing. But in Diamonds in the Dark, the language takes on a distinctive vibrancy and flexibility; it seems to express humor as effortlessly as it does loneliness and longing.

Far from a spoken-word performance, ATJT's production is the result of a lengthy creative process in which the actors experimented with various ways of making the foreign-language text come alive.

"What's making this process work is a common passion for the material," comments director Stoltzfus. "For Naomi, there's a personal connection. For me, the non-Jew, it's exciting, finding a form for the whole poetic voice. For Albert, it was giving the poetry life through music. Each of us has come to the project in a slightly different way." All four researched the material, brought their favorite poems to the table and by a process of elimination came to a final consensus. "It was a question of variety, tone, musicality, balancing, shaping and some casting considerations," explains Newman, who grew up in Detroit speaking the mame loschen, the mother tongue. Newman's father, who had been an actor on the Yiddish stage in Poland, often invited Yiddish poets to dinner. "These people appeared glamorous and bohemian," she recalls. "I remember turbans and sparkling scarves, tweedy jackets, intense eyes and smoke-thickened voices"

Some of the selected poems are downright funny, like a jazzy Yiddish rap song; others are more serious - a haunting post-Holocaust memory. At various points, the actors become a trio of giddy grandmothers, a pair of Jewish gangsters, a menacing, anthropomorphic closet, a dog, a poet caught between two languages who loses her mind. Sometimes Fischer, Greenberg and Newman are simply themselves, caressing the soupy-thick foreign words with relish, repeating them in English.

All poems are spoken in both languages, using mostly existing translations, although Newman translated one from a Hebrew-to-Roman-alphabet transliteration. Weaving in those translations provided an artistic challenge. "We had to decide who is speaking," said Stoltzfus, "and whether it's one voice, or two, or three, and which voice is speaking Yiddish, which English. We had to decide whether to intersperse the translation and so on - there were so many possible combinations. That was an interesting stage of the process, to determine the real meaning of the poem and how to best convey it. In one poem, Albert whispers into Corey's ear, providing an inner voice for Corey. We tried to find a real variety. Each poem has its own world."

Once each poem was "voiced," it was recorded; Greenberg took the recording home to score it, in some cases very precisely to the actual words, like an opera. The actors then memorized the score, not just the poem - which itself had to be memorized in both languages ("It's as easy as memorizing in English once you understand the words," said Newman).

After that, each poem was staged. "Then you rework things and find you've lost the meaning of the poem," laughed Stoltzfus. "Being a theater company, our tendency would be to theatricalize. It's been an interesting dance to make sure the poem shines through." An additional stage in the process was to create a meaningful order for the poems, smooth transitions from one to another and an overall rhythm.

"This piece really captures what the company has been doing for several years," said Stoltzfus, "breathing new life into lost and forgotten and misunderstood aspects of Jewish culture. The Yiddish language has always been a symbol of what is lost, what is considered trivial or embarrassing. We say, there is beauty and elegance in your own culture that you didn't realize." Will non-Yiddish speakers be able to understand? Absolutely, said Stoltzfus. "But we also want to honor the people who do know Yiddish. It will be a real pleasure for them."

And what about non-Jews? Poet Allen Ginsberg had the answer to that; he once told the troupe, "Yiddish can speak for all species that are being wiped out. Here's a very active, alert, international culture that may not survive another couple hundred years except as a literary language. Yiddish poetry might speak for the entire human race."

Diamonds in the Dark runs December 3-January 10, 470 Florida St. 399-1809.