-M1111111111/- Born in 1955 in Paris, France, Tova came to Canada when she was 18 months old with parents who spoke seven and nine languages, respectively. Although she had an uneventful childhood in Calgary, attending Yiddish schools and acting in school and community theaters, the night- mare of her mother's experience in Poland during the Holocaust was etched into her consciousness. "My mother and her cousin basical- ly spent five years in the woods," she says. "Her father had been a leader in the Warsaw ghetto, and when Hitler came to power, her father said, `If he's going to get anyone, it will be me,' so the family sold their possessions and hid out in the country. "My mother and her cousin, both 14 years old, both named Bryna, were in the cornfield when her father was captured and shot. He shouted at them to run, so they ran and they never stopped." As an adult, Tova crafted a musical play about the two girls' experiences, as filtered through the multiple lenses of love, imagination and feminism. The play, Still The Night, opened in Toronto in 1996 and has since won four Dora Awards, the Canadian equivalent of a Tony Award. "I'd been telling these stories my whole life," says Tova. "Growing up in the '70s, reading Betty Friedan, I said, `Wait a minute, you're talking about brave women, women taking control? I'll tell you about brave women.'" Still The Night is included in a new collection of plays, A Terrible Truth: An Anthology of Holocaust Drama; the second volume in a series, it is slated for publication in February 2004. Tova's musical play will be in good company; also included in the col- lection will be Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller's Playing for Time. Tova began her career as an actor, not a singer. She started working on stage when she was 17 and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Alberta. Over the years, Tova has worked with directors Peter Yates, Nora Ephron, Peter Bogdanovich and oth- ers. She has been in the United States touring production of Ragtime, soloed with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas; and appeared in leading roles at Canada's Stratford Festival, including director Susan Shulman's production of Fiddler on the Roof, in which she played Yenta. But it was as one of the stars of the television show "ENG," which ran on Canadian TV from 1989 to 1994, that she gained the most name and face recognition. This recognition is what launched her cabaret career. "I had never been trained as a singer," explains Tova, who is married and the mother of two teenagers. "I had done some singing in shows, and a friend asked me to come down and open this gay bar in Toronto. Because I was somewhat of a TV celebrity, they thought it would draw people in." She sang at that bar "every single week for the next two years." An introduction from the president of Toronto's Jewish gay and lesbian organization resulted in her singing for a Holocaust memorial event, and her exposure in the Jewish community blossomed. Over the years, she has sung at Toronto's Jewish Film Festival, been a featured performer at the Ashkenaz Festival held at the city's Harbourfront Centre, and entertained at countless Jewish and ethnic events in Canada and the United States. In 2001, she performed in the bilin- gual musical Songs of Paradise, a satiri- cal retelling of the Book of Genesis, at New York's Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre. She has produced two CDs combining jazz and Yiddish — some- times singing the same song in two languages. Tova, who prefers songs that were written by Yiddish poets and musi- cians to folksongs, says she has an edge over most other contemporary Yiddish entertainers. "Unlike others, I'm fluent in Yiddish," she says. "These songs live in my blood. "The stories of my mother find a life in this music. If it speaks to me — if I can tell stories through these songs — then I can make them speak to others." Ili Theresa Tova performs 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18, at Temple Shir Shalom, 3999 Walnut Lake Road, in West Bloomfield, in a concert of the Birmingham Temple's Vivace Concert Series. Tickets: $15 Birmingham Temple and Shir Shalom mem- bers and seniors; $18 non-mem- bers; $12 groups of 10 or more; $8 students (under 18). 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