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March 17, 2006
Storyteller's roots
Play explores identity and Yiddish with poetry.
VERONIKA STEWART
Though two Canadian Jewish women born over a generation apart,
both with origins in Galitzia, Ukraine, have never met, one has
helped the other bring their native tongue back to its homeland.
Helen Mintz, a Vancouver-based storyteller, once believed Yiddish
was for recipes and cursewords, but through the work of Rochl Korn,
a pre-Second World War Yiddish poet, she has come to recognize the
merit of what she calls a "devalued culture."
Mintz's one-woman play, On the Other Side of the Poem, based
partially on the work of Korn as well as her own journey with Yiddish,
has been invited to Germany as part of the Stolpersteine project,
which memorializes Jewish life before the war throught art. The
project also involves putting plaques on the houses where Jewish
families once lived. While in Germany, Mintz intends to put on storytelling
workshops and is involved in another production called The Healing
of Our Broken World.
Mintz says besides being curious about going to a new country, she
is also apprehensive.
"I'm nervous, because I've become the emblem of the culture
that was destroyed," Mintz said. "That's a heavy burden
for a person to bear."
Another hurdle Mintz has had to overcome is learning Yiddish. Although
Mintz said she grew up with Yiddish, she realized when she began
to write the play that her grasp of the language was "abominable."
By spending time with Jewish elders and with help from her translator,
Seymour Levitan, she said she is improving.
"The biggest challenge in learning Yiddish is that there's
no environment in which Yiddish is spoken," Mintz said. "I
haven't had the opportunity to live in the language. So my written
Yiddish is much better than my spoken Yiddish."
In her play, Mintz takes the viewer on a sometimes-humorous look
at the narrator's journey to find an identity as an artist and to
connect with the language of her grandparents. Within the play,
Mintz also shares several of Korn's poems, which reflect life in
eastern Europe before the Second World War. The play premières
as part of World Storytelling Day on Saturday, March 18, from 3-4
p.m., at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver at 49th and Oak. Tickets
are $5 at the door.
Veronika Stewart is a student intern at the Independent.
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