By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — Rarely have I seen a house so packed on a Monday night as I did at the Lyceum Theatre on June 19, 2017. But Hershey Felder is a name that gets butts in the seats. This was Hershey Felder & Friends: “The Stories of Sholem Aleichem and more” one presentation of many in the 24th Annual Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival (aka “jfest 2017”).
Felder’s story began years ago in a hotel in Beverly Hills. He sat down to a piano and while he played “Sunrise, Sunset” a group of Holocaust survivors sang along. After a little nudge, we did likewise.
Felder got into showbiz as a young boy in Montreal singing Shver tzu zayn a Yid (It’s tough to be a Jew). He sang sotto voce this sad little song about a boy who’s starving and freezing. The house was captivated. Reading Sholem Aleichem’s impressions of American funerals –with a businessman on his deathbed kvetching about his debtors- made even morbid subjects shoulder-shakingly funny.
Because of his knowledge of Yiddish and Polish, Felder was one of the people who interviewed Shoah survivors for Steven Spielberg. The famous filmmaker was recording these oral histories for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. One such survivor, after four strokes, weaved together a narrative from strands of Yiddish, Polish and English. So it was up to Felder to untangle the web … and learn that he and this man were actually related.
Hershey played the music of Abraham Elstein, the premeire composer for the Yiddish Theatre. He was joined by a cellist whom he affectionately referred to as “Yossel.” The cello, Hershey insists, must be a Jewish instrument for the beautiful sounds of sadness that it emits.
They were later joined by two vocalists, a powerful Tenor, Nathan and Soprano Allison Spratt-Pearce. They sang selections from Felder’s original score about the Biblical Noah. I would love to see a fully staged production. (Their full names were not in the program. I happened to catch Allison in the lobby.)
We closed the evening with a sing-a-long of Anatefka, also from Fiddler on the Roof. And that’s what jfest is all about, bringing our community together to celebrate who we are, the vibrancy of our culture and the wealth of dedicated artists in our midst.
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Tauber is a freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com