Left to right: Shane Baker, Sasha Lurje and Michael Wex in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), which closes this year’s Chutzpah! Festival Nov. 9-10. (photo by Shendl Copitman)
“The final sketch in the show, ‘The Last Jew in Poland,’ is based on a real 1930s cabaret sketch of the same name that got Ararat, the famous Yiddish cabaret, closed down,” said creator Michael Wex of The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), which plays at the Rothstein Theatre Nov. 9-10 as part of the Chutzpah! Festival.
“The sketch, however, hasn’t survived,” he continued. “Shimon Dzigan (of Dzigan and Shumacher), who was a member of the troupe, describes the general set-up of the piece in his autobiography, but doesn’t give many details, except to say that everybody involved expected to be arrested the next day (and was surprised not to be). I’ve tried to reconstruct something that would have bothered the censors of the 1930s as much as the original.
“‘Di Endekuvne,’ one of the genuine old songs in the show, was actually banned following its first performance,” he said.
The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh is set in Poland in the spring of 1938. With only one performance left before the censor’s office closes the cabaret, and with their visas secured to leave the country, the performers decide to put on a show of forbidden material and greatest hits.
The idea for The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh came from Andreas Schmitges of Germany’s Yiddish Summer Weimar, who called Wex with a request.
“Since 2019 was the 100th anniversary of the Weimar Republic, Yiddish Summer was planning a commemorative program and Andreas wanted to know if I could put together a Yiddish-language cabaret revue that would reflect the way Yiddish culture absorbed and was influenced by the zeitgeist of the Weimar era,” said Wex.
Wex, who is Canadian, is an internationally recognized expert on Yiddish. He has many nonfiction books to his name, including Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods, on the history of Yiddish, and Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It. He’s also a translator, novelist, playwright, columnist, public speaker and performer. His creative process involves much research. For Schmitges’ proposed project, Wex first sought out surviving Yiddish cabaret material.
“I dove into scores of books, listened to even more recordings, in search of authentic material that would still resonate with a 21st-century audience,” he said. “Much of the older material just didn’t ‘read’ anymore: there were a lot of jokes about local politics and references to long-forgotten celebrities. There was fairly strong political censorship in interwar Poland, especially in the years following the Nazi takeover of Germany, which means that much of the surviving satirical material is pretty bland. I deliberately sought out lesser-known Yiddish cabaret songs, including at least one that was never recorded.
“My next resort was to see what was going on in non-Yiddish Polish culture at the time. I went through newspapers from the period to try to figure out how much international pop culture was available in 1920s and ’30s Poland and was delighted to find that Hollywood movies that would have played in Vancouver in, say, 1934, were playing in Warsaw at pretty much the same time, and that Louis Armstrong records were on sale in Warsaw record stores. I looked at the pop music charts: the most popular song in Poland in 1928 was ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ translated into Polish. This information widened the range of material that could plausibly be presented as being performed at the time and gave me the licence I needed to adapt and translate some well-known pop songs of the era into Yiddish.”
Wex wrote some songs and sketches to round out the show, then came up with the storyline that adds context: the performers whose cabaret is about to be closed, but who have ship tickets and visas to leave the country.
“Suddenly, they’re free to perform what they want to, not only what they’re allowed to,” said Wex, who also directs and acts in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh.
The other people involved – Shane Baker (United States; co-director, performer), Patrick Farrell (US/Germany; original music, arrangements, piano, accordion, percussion), Regina Hopfgartner (Austria; vocals), Daniel Kahn (US/Germany; vocals) and Sasha Lurje (Latvia/Germany; vocals) – “are the people for whom the show was written,” Wex said. “It’s like an A-list of contemporary Yiddish performers and I recall telling Andreas that I wouldn’t do the show without them. It was my one diva moment – but I think it worked.”
The current incarnation of the show premièred at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto in 2022. It had changed so much from the 2019 Yiddish Summer Weimar production that, Wex said, “Weimar could almost be seen as a workshop.”
For Wex, giving audiences an idea of what 1938 Poland was like is important “because the whole world is looking more like 1938 Poland with every passing day.”
“Arts and culture,” he said, “including but not limited to comedy and music, is really the best way we have of trying to find a common ground from which to understand conflict, stand up to tragedy and, ultimately, seek out ways to mitigate or ameliorate the feelings and attitudes from which such conflicts and their accompanying tragedies have grown. As we see every day, shouting slogans might make us feel good and brave and involved but it does nothing to establish the common ground necessary to arrive at any kind of understanding with our opponents. Arts and culture, comedy and music – they’re all bulwarks against dehumanization.”
The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh is in Yiddish with English supertitles. For tickets, go to chutzpahfestival.com – where you’ll find the whole Chutzpah! lineup – or call 604-257-5145. The festival runs Nov. 1-10.