Roots

Mandy Patinkin remembers Joseph Papp once asking him to learn a Yiddish song, "Youssel, Youssel," to sing at a benefit. "You have to do this music--this is your job," Papp insisted. Patinkin, whose vocabulary at the time included no more than a half-dozen Yiddish words, said that he would, and now, seven years after the producer's death, he has kept his promise. Nonesuch Records recently released an album called "Mamaloshen" ("Mother Tongue"), featuring the singer-actor in an all-Yiddish array of sixteen songs, which Patinkin, who is the son of Jewish immigrants, tosses off with great aplomb. (A few weeks ago, he performed selections from the CD at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, on the Lower East Side, with the violinist Saeka Matsuyama, in a program he will repeat, in July and August, at the same location.) Thanks to the tutelage of two Yiddish experts, and to Patinkin's palpable delight in mastering the vernacular of his forebears, the language that the Germans called a "barbarous argot" dances like the nimblest fiddler on the roof.

For all the deprivation that these songs sometimes express--a delicately shaded remembrance of a lost town called Belz, a plea from a homeless seller of cigarettes, a lament for the immigrants who drowned on the Titanic--they are full of sweet hope, recalling Leo Rosten's description of the Yiddish language as having the "exceptional charm" of a "Street gamin who has survived unnamable adversities." Above all, the songs remind us that assimilation has always been a two-way affair. Patinkin makes the point in several numbers by Jewish stalwarts of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley--Stephen Sondheim and Paul Simon among them--whose lyrics lose nothing in translation from English to Yiddish. As Patinkin sings in Irving Berlin's patriotic classic, "Got bentsh Amerike!" --Charles Michener, New Yorker, June 15, 1998