Non-Jewish KC native in NY Yiddish revue

How does an Episcopalian from Kansas City wind up the star of a Yiddish revue in the Big Apple? Like the old joke about Carnegie Hall, the answer is “Practice, practice.”

Thus, 41-year-old KC native Shane Bertram Baker stars in the New Yiddish Repertory Theatre’s presentation of “The Big Bupkis: A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville,” which began an open-ended run Nov. 7 at the venerable Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring in Manhattan. (For details, visit www.newyiddishrep.org)

According to Baker, “The show starts out with my growing up in Kansas City.”

“I talk about my first exposure to Yiddish, which was when my father took me to see the re-release of ‘Animal Crackers,’ and Groucho Marx says the line ‘Did someone call me schnorrer?’ So I asked my parents what does it mean, and they said it’s a made-up word, nonsense.”

Clearly, Shane’s parents can be forgiven for not knowing that “schnorrer” means something like “beggar.” And yet their goyishe son has since come to understand that word and most others in the Judeo-Germanic-Hebrew language Yiddish, to the point where he is now called upon as a translator and his day job is with a Jewish cultural organization.

Yiddish just seemed to keep coming up in Shane Baker’s life. He recalled a teacher at Bishop Miege High School discussing how, along with French, and Latin, Yiddish words had made their way into English.

“I found out a whole language we didn’t know about,” Baker said. “It was kind of interesting to me.”

As he pursued his youthful interest in magic and theater into adulthood, “I found out what an influence Yiddish theater has had on the American stage, from the Group Theater and Stella Adler to the influence of Jewish and specifically Yiddish humor on American comedy,” Baker said. “So when I moved to New York to pursue a theater career, I decided to look into Yiddish theater. I went to a play here, and I said ‘This is great; I wish I understood what they are saying.’ ”

Magic and Yiddish
So in 1994, Baker began studying Yiddish. In 1996, he took a summer course at the YIVO Research Institute. Thereafter, he said, “I became heavily involved in secular Yiddish culture in New York.” And he began getting work in the field, such as proofreading the Algemeiner Journal, a Chabad publication.

Baker also studied acting and recitation in Yiddish with the late Luba Kadison-Buloff, a founding member of the Vilna Troupe. She died in 2006 at age 100.

In “The Big Bupkis,” Baker performs one of the routines Kadison-Buloff taught him — a poem about a bullfight — as well as magic inspired by his acquaintance with vaudevillians.

“I have been involved in vaudeville and burlesque revivals — and non-revivals, whatever is left of it — since college,” Baker said. “I used to study magic with H. Claude Enslow, one of the old vaudevillians in the neighborhood. So this is a kitchen-sink show of everything I do.”

Baker worked on the show for the past year with New Yiddish Rep founder Allen Lewis Rickman. Rickman is featured in the all-Yiddish opening scene of the new Coen Brothers film, “A Serious Man.”

“The show is about 50 percent Yiddish, and on a pretty high level,” Baker said. “The premise is that I am there to accept the Young Yiddish Vaudevillian of the Year award, and I recount my life in the field of Yiddish vaudeville.”

The New Yiddish Repertory Theatre employs English supertitles projected on a screen near the stage to translate the Yiddish for non-speakers.

“We think that’s the future; it seems to work for opera, where no one understands the language, so there is no reason it can’t work for Yiddish,” Baker said.

Baker’s day job for the past 11 years has been with the Congress for Jewish Culture, although he left from 2000 to 2002 to earn a master’s degree in Germanic languages, with a specialty in Yiddish, at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The Congress is like a 60-year-old organization dedicated to Yiddish language and culture,” Baker said. “I help find Yiddish books to publish; new material. And we publish Di Tsukunft, the world’s oldest Yiddish publication, which is still in print since 1892, and The Future, which started out as socialist educational journal, but which became a sort of belles-lettres journal, and which we publish twice yearly.”

Theatrical feud
Clips of Baker performing “The Big Bupkis” have been posted at YouTube.com, and Baker said he was hoping the show would be reviewed soon; the official opening is Dec. 5.

Meanwhile, the New York Post on Nov. 7 reported that “a rare feud (was) brewing” between the Baker’s upstart group and the 95-year-old National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. It stemmed, the Post reported, from the NYR’s publicity stunt — seeking younger audiences by issuing a phony press release stating that no one over 65 would be admitted to “The Big Bupkis.” NYR calls itself “Yiddish theater for the next generation.”

Zalman Mlotek, artistic director at Folksbiene, is quoted as saying, or, rather, sniffing, “I would hardly call them a theater company. They perform for maybe 13 people; maybe there are 30 people. … It would be a fallacy for the Post to write that there are two Yiddish theaters in New York.”

Baker accepts the criticism from the more established group with equanimity.

“We are really seeking to do this without nostalgia and to bring in younger people to the theater, and to the Yiddish theater, specifically,” Baker said. “It’s a difficult battle. In any theater, you see gray heads. But we want younger audiences to come in and see these wonderful cultural treasures that are there for them; that are theirs to enjoy. We will even take gentiles.”

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