From this you can make a living? Actor, translator, and teacher Mikhl Yashinsky carves out a modern-day career

Back in 2015, when Mikhl Yashinsky was a fellow at the Book Center, he went to see the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s production of Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride), a 1923 operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky. “The joy I felt in watching it was rapturous,” Mikhl, now thirty-two, remembers. “I was amazed that such a thing was taking place: an all-singing, all-dancing show, all beautifully costumed and lit, just this extravaganza, and all in Yiddish.” Stirred by the play’s Yiddish—a language in which he was becoming increasingly fluent—he wrote a rave review for the Yiddish journal In geveb. “What I didn’t disclose in the review,” he adds, “was that deep down, what I really felt while watching it was: I want to be up there!”

A native of Detroit, Mikhl has a show-business yikhes, or heritage. His maternal grandparents, Elizabeth Elkin Weiss and Rube Weiss, were actors on the stage, radio, and television, and their son, Mikhl’s Uncle David Weiss, co-founded the legendary 1980s dance-pop band Was (Not Was). While an undergrad at Harvard Mikhl interned at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and the Detroit Opera House, where he returned after graduation for a three-year stint of directing, assistant directing, and lecturing on opera. “That was the path I envisioned for myself,” he recalls, “because I was, and am, fascinated by opera.”

It was Yiddish, however, that exerted the stronger pull. “It’s part of my blood and ancestry, and I heard it growing up.” All his grandparents spoke Yiddish, and his “beloved Gramma Liz” was a devoted Yiddishist. Then his older brother, Gabriel, studied the language at university. “It was from Gabe’s experience, really, that I first learned of Yiddish being taught in a classroom setting, of young people learning it and claiming it for themselves.” Another inspiration for Mikhl was the Yiddish poet and literary editor Ezra Korman, who immigrated from Kiev in 1923 and settled in Detroit. Mikhl has since played an important role in rescuing Korman and his work from obscurity. Korman is buried near Mikhl’s forebears, just outside the city; his metseyve (gravestone) is inscribed not in the customary Hebrew but in Yiddish. “He felt an attachment to the language and saw it as a calling,” Mikhl explains. “We have kind of intertwining stories.”

If destiny was leading Mikhl toward Yiddish as his true vocation, he “sort of danced around it” for a few years before enrolling in the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center. “Yiddish came very easily somehow,” he says matter-of-factly, “and not only because I’d studied some of the source languages like German and Hebrew. I just felt it flowing through me, and my mouth formed around the words easily. I get a lot of joy out of Yiddish words and sentences. It’s a delight to me.”

A delight it may be, but from this you can make a living? Combine enthusiasm for Yiddish with a passion for acting and performing, and Mikhl’s professional path began to seem doubly precarious. “I dreamed about working in the Yiddish theater,” he remembers, “but I didn’t know whether it would ever happen.”

The answer came in 2017, when he was working at the Center and a group of young artists, writers, and performers organized by Reboot asked about contemporary opportunities in Yiddish theater. Mikhl did some research and learned that New York's Folksbiene Theater was holding auditions for The Sorceress, an 1870s operetta by the father of Yiddish theater, Avrom Goldfaden. As Mikhl urged the Reboot visitors to audition for the play, one woman had a better idea: he should audition himself.

“She was sort of hounding me throughout that week, and she even talked to my supervisors, telling them they had to give me time off.” Although he politely demurred, he secretly wished he could do so. “But I saw it as farfetched. I’d acted a lot in college, but not at that caliber, not professionally.”

Nevertheless, without telling anyone, he wrote to the theater company and landed an audition. Since the show’s title role is traditionally played by a man in drag, he donned a skirt hastily purchased from Goodwill and performed the title song of a 1936 Yiddish musical, Der dishvasher. A melodramatic lament of an old immigrant man forced to wash dishes in a restaurant to earn his daily bread the song “was not particularly uplifting, but it created enough of a sensation in that fairly terrifying audition room in Midtown!” After a second audition a few days later, he was offered the title role of the Sorceress. “I was back at the Yiddish Book Center by then, and I remember taking the call outside and hanging up with them and immediately calling my mother. We both cried, I think.”

During Mikhl’s first years on the professional Yiddish stage he struggled to balance his interest in Yiddish teaching and research with his burgeoning career in Yiddish theater. A striking turn as Bobe Yakhne, The Sorceress’s scheming anti-heroine, led to roles in the Folksbiene’s celebrated Yiddish revival of Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Joel Grey. In a sell-out production at Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, Mikhl played Nokhum the Beggar and Mordkhe the Innkeeper. Fiddler was scheduled to close in the fall of 2018, and Mikhl was scheduled to take up a Yiddish teaching position at the University of Michigan.

But the show’s run was extended (several times, as it turned out), and Mikhl reluctantly gave up his roles on the stage for a new career in the academy.

He loved teaching Yiddish language and culture in Ann Arbor. “It was a wonderful job,” he says. “But then another point of crisis came when Fiddler wanted me back because they were moving to a big midtown theater.” The idea of leaving his “curious and passionate” students and the “erudite, welcoming” faculty prompted much soul-searching. “In both these jobs, teaching and performing, I was actually working toward the same goal, which is spreading the joy of Yiddish and contributing to its vitality. I felt I would be doing that whether I was in the classroom or onstage. But with Yiddish Fiddler, Yiddish was really having a moment in mainstream culture. Yiddish theater was once a powerful force in American Jewish life. Now it was reaching a new zenith in terms of popular appeal. I wanted to be a part of that.”

The countless VIPs who attended the Yiddish Fiddler included Meryl Streep, Bette Midler, Ruth

Bader Ginsburg, Patti Lupone, Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Hillary Clinton, Kate McKinnon, Barry Manilow, Jerry Seinfeld, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Sometimes the audience also included a sprinkling of Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews, who, they confided to Mikhl at the stage door, had lied about their whereabouts in order to attend. “It would definitely have been forbidden for them to participate in secular culture in that way,” Mikhl explained. “Just hearing women sing would have been considered posl or treyf [forbidden]. But here was a show in their own language that elevated traditional Jewish culture. Fiddler is all about reverence for that way of life. It’s set up as something beautiful.”

After theaters went dark at the start of the pandemic, Mikhl kept busy with other projects. He translated the 1920s Yiddish memoir of Esther-Rokhl Kaminska, the Polish-Jewish actress who rebelled against her religious family to become a pioneer of Yiddish theater. “Her father was a cantor and very pious, but she had a talent for recitation and singing. She broke out of her home and joined a company of vagabond Yiddish artists, touring the shtetls and putting on shows.” Roses and Thorns Along My Life’s Path: The Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska will be appearing soon from Bloomsbury. Mikhl’s next translation project involves previous untranslated stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Mikhl has also become accomplished at translating in the other direction, from English to Yiddish, often with some of his favorite songs. “I think there’s something in Yiddish that facilitates musicality and theatricality. To me it’s a musical language, and the sound of it is pleasurable.” His Yiddish version of Bette Midler’s “From a Distance,” sung by the actor Adam B. Shapiro, drew praise from the original songwriter, Julie Gold. Mikhl has also composed Yiddish songs and poems of his own, including most notably “Loshn-libe” (“Language-Love”), “an erotic love duet—somewhat tongue in cheek!—between a speaker of Yiddish and the Yiddish language.” He performed the song at “Yiddish Idol,” an international singing contest in Mexico City, and it was included in the Yiddish Book Center’s anthology Radiant Jargon: Six Poems about Yiddish.

In addition to his classes at Michigan Mikhl has been teaching Yiddish at YIVO and the Workers Circle. Demand has never been higher. His on- line class on “Yiddish and the Occult” attracted students from Australia, Russia, England, Brazil, and South Africa. “At the University of Michigan,” Mikhl adds, “I had an African American student, a French-Canadian student from Montreal, and an Indian student from India, all of them non-Jews. They were studying the language because they were studying Jewish history and needed access to archival sources.”

Some students, he finds, are interested in cultural reclamation, while others perceive a renewed vitality in the language. “They see remnants of living Yiddish culture and want to be a part of this growing phenomenon. I’ve even had students who tell me they saw Yiddish Fiddler, cried the whole time, and came out realizing they wanted to learn Yiddish.”

To anyone wishing to embrace Yiddish as a career, Mikhl offers a heartfelt piece of advice. “Connect as much as you can with the older generations. I mean, we won’t for very much longer have a whole lot of people who were raised speaking Yiddish in Eastern Europe. But some of those people are still around. There’s a group of elderly women in Detroit who call themselves Di freydike fraynd, The Joyful Friends. They’ve been meeting in each other’s homes to speak Yiddish and hear lectures in Yiddish for decades. Finding a group like that requires some searching, but I think seeking them out and learning all you can from them is really worthwhile.”

Mikhl recently had his own meaningful encounter with an elderly Yiddish speaker, at a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. “I happened to stand by this old man who was reciting the Hebrew prayers in an old Ashkenazic accent. [Outside of Hasidic and Orthodox communities] you rarely hear people praying that way anymore because they’ve usually transitioned to a modern Israeli pronunciation. I figured he was likely a Yiddish speaker because of a certain Old Country tone to his voice. After the service, I started speaking with him, and indeed he speaks native Yiddish from Europe and is a Holocaust survivor. We were delighted to find each other.” Yashinsky plans to interview him for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. “As well as all the new people interested in the language, there are these people we’ve always had, who are a treasure.”

In Charleston, where Mikhl lived for a year, he was learning about the African American Gullah culture, an interest originally sparked by George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess. “It was the first opera I saw in high school, and I’ve always been enthralled by it.” He sees parallels between Gullah, a language spoken by the descendants of slaves in South Carolina, and Yiddish, especially in the way both tongues are overshadowed by more predominant languages and often disregarded altogether. “Bringing light to these languages, to these cultures, can have a tremendous impact,” Mikhl believes.

Gullah is another intriguing chapter in a laud- ably unconventional career. Always faithful to his curiosities and passions, Mikhl will happily go wherever they take him, whether to a new city or a new creative discipline. As he reflects: “It’s sometimes said that Yiddish is a portable homeland. This isn’t a country with defined borders. It’s something that can make you feel at home wherever you are.”

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, Salon, Tablet, The Awl, The Paris Review Daily, Words Without Borders, Longreads, and many other publications. She is a frequent contributor to Pakn Treger.