Yiddish

Arnon Goldfinger's group portrait of the Yiddish actor and song-and-dance man Pesach'ke Burstein and his family troupe is the documentary equivalent of a page-turner, filled with anecdotes that echo through a century-spanning saga and moments that define more than one generation at a time. Born into the tight-knit, observant Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in 1906 (he lived first in Poland, then in Russia), Burstein fled home at age 15, when he hooked up with a traveling Yiddish troupe.

VILNIUS, Lithuania - His wild hair and bushy beard make 45-year-old Dovid Katz look like a middle-aged hippie, marking him as a stranger. He is not easy to miss, not even in a crowd. All this has been to his advantage. For the past nine years Katz has been combing distant towns and villages in Lithuania and Belarus. Every time he arrives in a new place, he beelines to the market square. "Where are the Jews?" he keeps asking. For centuries before World War II, Vilna, as this city was then known, was a world-famous center of rabbinical scholarship, talented cantors and publishing houses that distributed their Yiddish and Hebrew books throughout the world.

Molly Picon, a beloved American actress who died in 1992 at age 94, liked to tell a story about breaking into show business at the age of 5 in Philadelphia.After singing and dancing for streetcar passengers, she passed the hat and collected $2. Later the same day, she got $8 for her first vaudeville performance.Molly's mother was happy; after all, Philadelphia had three theaters. Molly's grandmother disagreed. Book her into streetcars, she said, there are more of those.Picon, an actress who made her early fame in Yiddish theater, first in New York and later on stages in Baltimore and elsewhere, will be honored Sunday at a gathering marking the 100th anniversary of her birth.

NEW YORK - Itche Goldberg has a lot of memories. He remembers delivering ice by horse and wagon in the days before refrigeration. He recalls the days when the Soviet Union seemed - to some people anyway - like a wonderful new social experiment. When he mentions "The War," he's not referring to the first gulf war, or Vietnam, or even World War II; he's talking about the Great War, now known as World War I. When that conflagration ended in 1918, Goldberg was 14, which means he's now in his 101st year.

Miriam Isaacs, a professor on a quest to save a dying language, wrote the Yiddish phrase schoen madel on the blackboard and asked, "What's that?One of her students said "beautiful girl," and the linguist responded with a touch of Yiddish humor of the kind that has cheered the world for centuries: "Right. Many a child has been afflicted with that saying. Usually they want something from you when they tell you that."A humorist -- such as Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish" -- Isaacs doesn't pretend to be. But her occasionally light approach helps advance a serious personal mission in Elementary Yiddish 101, a new for-credit course she offers to a tiny few at Baltimore Hebrew University."

WHEN H. L. MENCKEN wrote "The American Language" in 1936, he could cite some Yiddish words that had become part of the American usage. The very next year, the wealth of Yiddish humor and expressions fairly exploded in the consciousness of the reading public with the release of "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N," the first of Leo Rosten's marvelous novels about the Americanization process of an Eastern European immigrant.Leo Rosten, who died recently at 88, could mix humor and folklore with such skill because he himself had arrived from Poland as a wide-eyed "greenhorn."

To mark the 100th anniversary this year of Isaac Bashevis Singer's birth, the Library of America recently published all his English short stories in three volumes. Isn't it incongruous for a Yiddish writer to be admitted to the American canon, alongside Poe, Twain and Emerson? The nationality of an author's work is defined by a combination of his life, his writings and his audience. Singer was a Yiddish writer in Poland who had already published a novel and translated All Quiet on the Western Front and The Magic Mountain to Yiddish when he came to the United States, in 1935.

Seymour Rexite, 91, a one-time matinee idol of the Yiddish theater and radio, died Monday at his home in New York's Greenwich Village. A high, sweet tenor, Mr. Rexite starred with his wife, singer and actress Miriam Kressyn, for more than 40 years on the radio, performing pop standards in Yiddish. At one time they were heard on 18 radio shows a week. Known in his native Poland as the wunderkind child singer, Mr. Rexite (born Rechtzeit) immigrated to the United States in 1920 with his father, a cantor, and brother, Jack, an actor and songwriter.

* Leon Liebgold, 83, longtime star of Yiddish theater and films, died Sept. 3 in New Hope, Pa. He starred as the ill-fated son in the 1937 Yiddish film classic "The Dybbuk" and appeared in stage productions of the same work for years. He also played a leading role in the 1936 film "Yidl Mit'n Fidl." His stage credits include "Mazel Tov, Molly" (1950); "The Wedding March" (1956); "My Son and I" (1960); "A Goldfaden Dream" (1979); "The Romanian Wedding" (1981); and "L'Chaim to Life" (1986).

THERE IS NO better way of saying it. You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy ''Those Were The Days.'' You don't have to speak Yiddish, either. Some of the revue is done in Yiddish, but if you know a little German, it is easy enough to grab, and for those who don't know any German, there are translations, here and there.''Those Were the Days,'' which opened last evening at Center Stage, is a delight, beginning to end. A collection of Yiddish-Jewish songs, dances and jokes that are part of the Jewish heritage, it is almost irresistible.