arts&life

PHOTO BY JOAN MARCUS

theater

Fiddler on the Roof (in
English) made a return to
Broadway in 2016

Return To

Tradition

A pair of Metro Detroit natives are among the cast of a Joel Grey-directed

version of Fiddler on the Roof — all in Yiddish.

Joel Grey

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

M

ichael Yashinsky and Daniel
Kahn each grew up in
Farmington Hills thinking
about the possibilities of stage careers,
but they didn’t get to know each other
until 2016, when they were enrolled in
a theater workshop, part of the perfor-
mance festival Yiddish New York.
That workshop helped lead the way
to a shared milestone — joining the cast
for the first United States-based Yiddish
production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Yashinsky, who played main charac-
ter Tevye in an English version of the
play while attending the Frankel Jewish
Academy, takes on two roles — Nachum,
the beggar, and Mordcha, the innkeeper.
Kahn, who earned stage credits por-
traying many characters for the Jewish
Ensemble Theatre Company (JET) start-
ing at age 12, has the role of Perchik, a
revolutionary teacher who falls in love
with Hodel, one of Tevye’s daughters.
The musical, directed by award-
winning stage and screen star Joel Grey,
86, is staged with supertitles in English

28

June 28 • 2018

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and Russian. It runs July 4-Aug. 26 at
the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New
York and is an initiative of the National
Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the
longest continually producing Yiddish
theater company in the world.
Based on Tevye the Dairyman, a series
of stories written in Yiddish by Sholem
Aleichem between 1894 and 1914, the
musical Fiddler on the Roof has not
been performed in Yiddish since its
world stage debut in Israel more than 50
years ago, when it was translated into
Yiddish by Israeli actor and director (and
Holocaust survivor) Shraga Friedman.
Grey — whose father, Mickey Katz,
was a klezmer clarinetist and vaudeville
star who performed English and Yiddish
parodies of Yiddish songs — became a
bar mitzvah at an Orthodox synagogue
in Cleveland. Last March, he told Forbes
that he was brought into this production
by Hal Prince — the musical’s original
producer — who asked him if he’d like to
either star as Tevye or direct. “It will be,”
he told Forbes, “like the Sholem Aleichem

stories are going home.”
For this historic production, more
than 800 people auditioned for only 26
roles.
“Hearing this show in Yiddish is both
new and exciting,” says Yashinsky, who
studied European history and literature
at Harvard while participating in extra-
curricular theater. He went on to direct
Michigan Opera Theatre productions
and assisted with special projects at the
Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts.
“I revere what the [English-to-Yiddish]
translator, the late Shraga Friedman,
has done with the text. He was a native
Yiddish speaker and imbued it with
an authentic flavor going back to the
Sholem Aleichem stories.”
Yashinsky describes his Fiddler roles as
representative of people who lived in the
shtetls of the Sholem Aleichem tales.
“Mordcha conducts the wedding fes-
tivities, sings little songs and tells jokes
to entertain the audience,” explains
Yashinsky, 29 and single, about his larger
role. “He’s sort of a merry guy with a full

heart. He likes to make people happy
even though they’re living lives of poverty
and deprivation and facing threats of
violence.”
Yashinsky began learning Yiddish by
listening to his grandparents speak-
ing the language and his parents using
lots of Yiddish words. His grandmother,
Elizabeth Elkin Weiss, led Yiddish activi-
ties in Detroit.
After college, immersion in the lan-
guage became a special interest, and
he attended a creative writing program
at the Yiddish Book Center before buy-
ing a textbook and teaching himself
the vocabulary and idiom. One way
he applied his knowledge was through
songwriting, and he introduced a song of
his at a music festival.
“My connection with NYTF started in
December, when they put on a produc-
tion of a classic Yiddish operetta, The
Sorceress, that the company restored,” he
says. “I auditioned for it on a whim and
got the title role. It’s a drag part, always
played by a man.

