Yiddish

The lilt is Germanic but the words somehow familiar:"Dei dray bern" begins Marcia Gruss Levinsohn, manipulating brown bears and a golden-haired doll as she tells "The Three Bears" in Yiddish.The Silver Spring puppeteer is just one entertainer scheduled to perform at the Annapolis Jewish Festival today at Kneseth Israel Synagogue.The fourth annual festival begins at noon at Spa Road and Hilltop Lane and continues to 5 p.m., with 50 booths featuring Jewish artifacts, educational information, jewelry, arts and crafts and gifts.

CHERNOVTSY, Ukraine -- "I'm the last of the Mohicans of the great Yiddish tradition in Czernowitz," Josef Burg said.The shine in his eyes under a shock of white hair and the vigor of his gestures seemed to contradict the calendar, which says that this year Mr. Burg, the author of many books and tales, will celebrate his 80th birthday.Mr. Burg, who speaks all the local languages, past and present -- Yiddish, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian -- calls this city by its Austrian name. Only an undertone of melancholy that resonated through hours of conversation in his home and on walks through the slushy, icy streets of Chernovtsy reflected his sense that all that he recalls so vividly is gone forever.

ISAAC Bashevis Singer was walking down Broadway on the Upper West Side of New York when he first heard Dvorah Menashe-Telushkin speak her Lithuanian-accented Yiddish."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose vivid evocations of Jewish life in his native Poland and of his experiences as an immigrant in America won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, died yesterday. He was 87 and lived in Surfside, Fla.Singer died of several strokes, his wife Alma said.Singer's stories and novels, written in Yiddish, often dealt with his upbringing as a rabbi's son in Warsaw and in a small town in eastern Poland and were redolent of the mysticism of Jewish folklore. But he also wrote about loneliness in drab cafeterias, worldliness in Miami Beach and chance acquaintanceship on the sidewalks of upper Broadway.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose vivid evocations of Jewish life in his native Poland and of his experiences as an immigrant in America won him the Nobel Prize in literature, died yesterday. He was 87 and lived in Surfside, Fla.Mr. Singer died of several strokes, said his wife, Alma.Mr. Singer's stories and novels, written in Yiddish, often dealt with his upbringing as a rabbi's son in Warsaw and in a small town in eastern Poland and were redolent of the mysticism of Jewish folklore. But he also wrote about loneliness in drab cafeterias, worldliness in Miami Beach and chance acquaintanceship on the sidewalks of upper Broadway.

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.

Just before intermission in the joyous Yiddish-English revue, "Those Were the Days," a puff of smoke wafts in from the wings, and actress Eleanor Reissa announces that she has just seen her first train. The train symbolizes the immigration of European Jews to America. As she waves goodbye, Ms. Reissa says, "We go, but we will always remember."Remembering is at the heart of this five-person revue, conceived and compiled by Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld, and now playing a two-week run at Center Stage.

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.

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."

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.