Yiddish

The stage lights at Colonial Players, the Annapolis Summer Garden and other community theater venues will seem to shine a bit less brightly this season because of the death of Stan Morrow, one of the area's finest actors, who died of cancer at Anne Arundel Medical Center Sept. 3. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928, Morrow moved in 1954 to Maryland, where he worked for the American Automobile Association as group travel director and operated a travel business after retiring. His greatest passion was the stage.

WASHINGTON -- Do you have to be Jewish to direct a Jewish studies program? That's the question that has roiled the campus of Queens College in New York -- spawning an indignant resignation and charges of religious bigotry.Until this month, Thomas Bird was an assistant professor of Yiddish at Queens College. He is a Roman Catholic. Ordinarily, the existence of a professor of Yiddish who is Catholic would cause eyebrows to arch -- in surprise and admiration. After all, taking the trouble to become expert in Yiddish -- the language of most European Jews until its recent decline -- suggests respect and affection for the Jewish people.

A shayna maidel is a pretty girl in Yiddish, the colorfully archaic form of German once spoken by millions of European Jews. In the crucible of death that was Hitler's Third Reich, countless shayna maidlach were tortured, murdered and fed to the ovens, along with their parents, siblings, children and extended families. Some of them, of course, did survive, only to face the nearly impossible task of getting on with their lives after having endured the unendurable for so long. The tale of such a survivor is told in Barbara Lebow's searingly intense play, A Shayna Maidel, which is in production at the Colonial Players of Annapolis through Feb. 8. Mordechai Weiss and his youngest daughter, Rayzel, got out of Poland before Hitler's noose tightened around the necks of Jews in that Nazi-occupied country.

The other day I cooed here in Wordville over the publication of the final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English , and yesterday Mary Beth Marklein quoted those sentiments in an article published in USA Today . I stand by those statements. DARE is a project underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the oldest project of the endowment, representing half a century of work. The next time you hear someone railing against government expenditure, keep in mind that your tax dollars could, and do, go for worse things than preserving the marks of our distinctive national voice.

Billy Crystal practically sprints onto the National Theatre stage to begin his autobiographical one-man play, "700 Sundays," passing through the front door of a set designed to look like the house where he grew up on Long Island. He plunges into rapid-fire reminiscences of his early years with the eagerness of a puppy, barely pausing for breath, and certainly never stopping to wonder whether anyone might not be interested. As it turns out, he has a most engaging tale to tell, and a long one. At nearly three hours, Crystal's 2005 Tony Award-winning vehicle is perhaps too much of a good thing, but it's hard to resist the combination of humor and nostalgia packed into the show.

THOSE Were the Days," which played at Center Stage a few weeks back to hand-clapping, foot-stomping full houses, was an immersion in the nostalgia of Yiddish theater.The music, the dancing, the stories -- all were calculated to recall the days when acting troupes traveled city-to-city staging their plays, the story lines of which were rendered entirely in the language of Yiddish (a combination of German and Hebrew with a little Slavic and who-knows-what-else thrown in) and drawn from the Jewish immigrant experience in New York's Lower East Side.

A BINTEL BRIEF: Sixty Years of Letters From the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward. Edited and with an introduction by Isaac Metzker. Forward and notes by Harry Golden. Schocken Books. 214 pages. $8.95.By the turn of the century, about a quarter of a million Jews, one-third of the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe, had emigrated to the United States. Many of them settled in New York's Lower East Side. There, in crowded, teeming tenements, the East European Jews established one of the United States' most remarkable immigrant societies.

Hyman Pertman, a retired Baltimore tailor whose World War II exploits included escaping from a German prisoner of war camp and later surviving imprisonment in a Russian labor camp, died of heart failure Monday at Union Memorial Hospital. The Northwest Baltimore resident was 89. Born and raised Chaim Pertman in Wohyn, Poland, Mr. Pertman was 11 when he began training to become a tailor. He was working at the profession when he was drafted into the Polish army. He told family members that he vividly recalled the September day in 1939 when he and his comrades were digging trenches along a river separating Poland and Germany, and German troops suddenly crossed the river in the invasion of his homeland.

There is no theatrical set in "Those Were the Days," the Yiddish musical revue which opened at Center Stage last night. That's why the costumes by designer Gail Cooper Hecht, a former Baltimorean, occupy a starring role."

There's a funny glossary of Yiddish words on the paper place-mats at Suburban House, but to get the jokes, you have to speak the language. Goy was one of the few words we recognized. Definition: someone who buys retail.It's a good thing the glossary didn't list goy as someone who doesn't know pastrami, or I would have taken offense. My shopping habits aside, I can recognize a great pastrami when I taste it, and this Pikesville restaurant serves it. We tried the lean, thinly sliced meat instead of corned beef in a variation of a Reuben here.