Long before Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray sang “The Money Song” in the musical “Cabaret,” set in a cabaret in Nazi Germany, a performer sang a similarly satirical song about money in a real cabaret in the Warsaw Ghetto. The music was the jazz hit “Ja-Da” by the American composer Robert Carleton, but a cheeky lyricist in the ghetto had written new words for it, in Yiddish, roughly translated as:
Money, money, money is the best thing…
Back at home I used to eat oranges,
now it’s the lice and bed bugs that eat me.
Because it’s money, money money that’s the best thing…
“Mues” (“Money”), performed by an aptly sassy Daniella Rabbani, is one of the twenty-eight fascinating musical numbers in “Amid Falling Walls,” a simultaneously delightful and devastating musical revue by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, composed of songs and poems created by Jews during the Holocaust.
Now those songs are being performed with verve and heart in Yiddish (with supertitles in English and Russian) by a lively nine-piece orchestra and an adept eight-member cast, including Steven Skybell, the long-time Broadway veteran who portrayed Tevye in folksbiene/Joel Gray’s Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and will play Herr Schultz in next year’s Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”
“How Jews died, the entire world already knows. But how Jews resisted against and fought the murderers, we know far, far less,” Skybell says in English, translating the Yiddish we just heard in voiceover from Shmerke Kacgerginski, a Holocaust survivor himself identified on the screen above the stage as “Poet, Partisan, Song Collector.” Kacgerginski collected most of the songs used in the show traveling to Displaced Persons camps throughout Eastern Europe after World War II.
The songs demonstrate a breadth of tone, and a depth of talent by the creators, who ranged from amateurs as young as eleven to songwriting pros, all expressing themselves with humor and sorrow, rage and resistance, using art to help them survive their existence in ghettos, labor camps, partisan encampments and forests.
These are the “falling walls” in the revue’s title, from a phrase in a song, “Never Say,” by an 18-year-old poet and partisan fighter in Vilna, Lithuania named Hirsh Glick. The entire cast sings (in Yiddish, translated in the supertitles as):
“This song is written with blood and not with lead!
It’s not a tune sung by free birds
This song was sung by a people amid falling walls
This song was sung with grenades in their hands.
Glick died fighting Nazis in 1944 at the age of 22.
That song, which we’re told became an “anthem of the Jewish people,” comes near the end, and is meant to be inspiring. But other numbers are more straightforward entertainment
Right after “Money,” Eli Mayer and Rachel Zatcoff perform “Gangster Lovers” with the man singing to the woman that she stole his heart, but that wasn’t a good thing, because she’s suffocating him, squeezing the life out of him. She replies: “If I love you to death, that’s good…I squeeze the anger out of you.”
Cast member Abby Goldfarb sings “Mazl” (Luck) in a duet with a film of American Yiddish theater star Molly Picon. The uncommonly informative program tells us that the scene is from the film “Mamele,” which was produced in Poland in 1938 and “was a huge hit throughout the Yiddish speaking world.”
Yael Eden Chanukov and Mikhl Yashinsky as Brontshele and Berele have a comic duet with what seems a bawdy connotation, in which he asks her to open up, he’s her lover after all, and she says at first that she can’t because she’s scared of her father; he asks again, and she says she’s scared of her mother, a third time she’s scared of her sister.
Later, a different Bronshele and Berele, portrayed by Rabbani and Jacob Ben-Shmuel, revisit the song, with a twist: Now in response to his asking her to open up, she says “I’m terrified of the Ghetto authorities,” and he replies “We’ll hide together.”
Of course, all the songs come with an edge provided by the historical context.
That context is implicitly established by Izzy Fields’s costume design and Yael Lubetzky’s lighting, and explicitly in Brad Peterson’s compelling projections. Presented on narrow screens lining either side of the auditorium, the projections include photographs from the era, from scenes of smiling Jewish children to Nazi rallies, as well as reproductions of newspaper headlines. The headlines are also recited, roughly in chronological order, throughout the eighty-minute revue: Right before that second scene, for example, “Jews must step off the sidewalk upon seeing a uniformed or civilian” and “A curfew is imposed on all Jews in Warsaw from five o’clock “
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to call “Amid Falling Walls” a product of impressive – and familial – scholarship. Both the show’s writer Avram Mlotek and the show’s musical arranger, Avram’s father Zalmen Mlotek, are also being credited as curators. Avram has talked about how his Bubby (his grandmother) Chana Mlotek was a Yiddish archivist and ethnomusicologist, and how the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer called Chana and her husband Yosl (Avram’s Zeyde) “the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs.”
It wouldn’t be surprising for some to see it as a well-timed source of historical perspective or support, which concludes with a projection of the faces of all the writers, poets, composers and song collectors whose work contributed to Amid Falling Walls/Tsvishn Falndike Vent, about half of whom died in the Holocaust. The ensemble sings a final song with the final refrain that translates as:
Horrid times we’ll live through.
We live forever,
we are here!
But “Amid Falling Walls” can also be appreciated just as another artful and entertaining work of theater from the folks at folksbiene.
Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent),
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through December 10
Running time: 80 minutes
Tickers: $75 to $125
Curated and Written by Avram Mlotek
Curated and Musical Arrangements by Zalmen Mlotek
Directed by Motl Didner
Scenic design by Jessica Alexandra Cancino, costume design by Izzy Fields, lighting design by Yael Lubetzky, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier, and projection design by Brad Peterson. Assistant Scenic design by Madeline Goddard. Choreography by Tamar Rogoff. Orchestrations by Frank London and Michael Winograd. Production Stage Manager is Jason Brouillard
Cast: Jacob Ben-Shmuel, Yael Eden Chanukov, Abby Goldfarb, Eli Mayer, Daniella Rabbani, Steven Skybell, Mikhl Yashinsky, and Rachel Zatkoff
Orchestra: Zalmen Mlotek, D. Zisl Slopvitch, Jordan Hirsch, Sabina Torosjan, Valeriya Sholokhova, Dimitry Ishenko, Alec Bart, Rick Snell, Peter Saleh
Photographs by Jeremy Daniel
