Perecman’s take on ‘Cross’ renders Yiddish into stageworthy English
BY JERRY TALLMER | The banker and the hunchback come out of the club where they’ve just had lunch. The banker is Otto H. Kahn, great 19th-century patron of the arts. The hunchback is electrical genius Charles P. Steinmetz.
Kahn gestures toward the church on the other side of Fifth Avenue. He says: “See that church, Mr. Steinmetz? That’s my church.”
“Oh?” says his lunch companion. “I thought you were a Jew, Mr. Kahn.”
“I used to be a Jew,” says Kahn.
“Í used to be a hunchback,” says Steinmetz.
This reverberant (and hopefully true) anecdote could surely sound even better in Yiddish, the language of absurdity and lost causes, but Ellen Perecman’s purposes are otherwise — to render Yiddish into plain (or stage-worthy) English, as one might do with Chekhov, or Sartre, or Pirandello or Brecht — and so, in her translation of I.D. Berkovich’s “Under the Cross,” we get this passage:
MOSHKE: So you agree? Well then, what do I have to do?
ROKH’L LEYEH: Do?
MOSHKE: I’m asking: Is there something I have to do?
ROKH’L LEYEH: You want to become a Jew again.
MOSHKE: Yes.
ROKH’L LEYEH: Nothing. You never stopped being a Jew.
Moshke (or Moses) Feropontov is a well-set-up householder in a small village in White Russia (Belarus) in the early 1920s. Long ago, as a rebellious young man who’d been drafted into the Red Army, he’d converted to Christianity, and now regrets it. He has a long-suffering, devoutly Christian wife, an arrogant Jew-hating son named Yakov, and a Christian daughter-in-law too bright for her own good.
Into this equation there now steps — fleeing from a big-city pogrom of rape and murder and worse — the lovely young woman, Rokh’l Leyeh, who, hidden in the Feropontov basement, tells Moshke that he’s always been a Jew. She’s also, of course, just the kind of prey that son Yakov can’t wait to get his claws on. Indeed, he’s already done so.
Berkovich (1885-1967), son-in law of the great Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem, was a Belarus-born scribbler who was at home everywhere and nowhere — Russia, Germany, New York City. His “Under the Cross” — or “Untern Treyl’m” — is set “Today” — the year it was written (1923). The following year, 1924, it was produced in Vienna and New York, and thereafter, in one language or another, Hebrew or Yiddish, elsewhere around the world, even in Cuba.
“Ýes, Cuba!” says translator/adapter Perecman — a slim, sensitive Upper West Sider who, give or take a few years here and there, might be a stand-in for gutsy, idealistic Leyeh. In 1926 the play returned to New York in a staging, we’re told, at the Irving Place Theatre — and now, 85 years after that, it is back in New York, for the first time anywhere in English.
New Worlds — Perecman’s baby — is a project in more ways than one. Ideologically, I guess I mean. There are, in point of fact, only three Jewish characters in “Under the Cross” — Moshke, his son Yakov and Leyeh — and what do you know, these three individuals are played here by three black American actors: Charles Roby, Anthony Laurent, and Trish McCall. It isn’t an accident or a coincidence.
“I was falling asleep one night,” says Perecman, “when it came to me that black people in this country have had their own share of pogroms. Black people and Jewish people have had many common experiences. We tend to forget how close black people and Jewish people were during the Civil Rights Movement.”
She herself is the daughter of a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor, Gershon Perecman, who is still at work as a watchmaker and jeweler in New Haven, Connecticut, where Ellen was born and grew up.
“Yiddish is my first language,” she says — though you wouldn’t in the least detect it. “I’m afraid Yiddish gets a bad rap and is treated nowadays as a sort of joke.” And no, she did not like “Fiddler on the Roof.” Detested it, in fact, she signals by wrinkling her nose. Shtetl life was nothing like that, Chagall or no Chagall, Zero Mostel or no Zero Mostel. “Anyway, musicals are not my thing.”
This is single parent Perecman’s third career, and it came out of acting classes with Julie Bovasso, the brilliant Brooklyn-born actress-playwright-director who in the 1950s — in her own early 20s — had introduced the United States of America to the works of Genet and Ionesco and Ghelderode at her tiny hand-built Tempo Playhouse on St. Mark’s Place. “But then Julie died” [in 1991], leaving Perecman to pursue those other careers — one of them in something called Behavioral Neurology — until six years ago, when she founded her New Worlds Theatre Project, mainly to keep the Yiddish language alive and thriving. It has now mounted seven plays and done a great many play readings. In “Under the Cross” there is a certain push-pull balance between two of the subsidiary characters — abominable proto-Nazi Yakov and soft squishy Pyatak, a defrocked drunken priest who idolizes all Jews, in particular the fugitive girl from the pogrom. The sacrificial girl, one might say. This again — as cast — underscores the color question.
So does a recent assignment of Perecman’s 30-year-old son, Adam Franken, as an adviser to a fellow down in Washington whom she admires: a certain Barack Obama. I don’t think he and Franken conducted their business in Yiddish, even if that chap down in Washington could probably hold his own in that language if pressed.
“Just today,” says Perecman, “I was looking out the window and saw this bunch of kids, seven or eight Yeshiva boys and their teacher, entering Riverside Park. The teacher was dressed in the traditional long-jacketed black suit, white shirt, big black hat. And in his hands he had…a football. There was the play, right there.”
UNDER THE CROSS
Written by I.D. Berkovich (translation, adaptation by Ellen Perecman)
Directed by David Winitsky
A New Worlds Theatre Project production
June 3-25
At the June Havoc Theatre
312 W. 36th St., 2nd Fl.; btw. 8th & 9th Aves.
For tickets, call 212-868-4444 or visit smarttix.com
Visit newworldsproject.org
