A CHUTZPAH LINE
For the cast of ‘Indecent,’ the accent’s on Yiddish
YOU don’t have to be Jewish to love Yiddish. It’s the only language in the world that has as many words for “stupid” as Inuits have for snow — a mitzvah in a city that doesn’t suffer schmos gladly.
Even a Midwesterner can manage a “mazel tov,” but Yiddish doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. That’s why Broadway’s “Indecent,” about an Eastern European acting troupe, needed an expert. Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated play-within-a-play touches on many things: art, passion, persecution, lesbianism — and the struggle to speak a language that isn’t your own.
“In my head, I can hear those English words so good,” one character says. “But then when I open my mouth, it’s like the dust of Poland is in my throat.”
Enter Moishe Rosenfeld, whose job it was to make the Yiddish in the show — three songs and some dialogue — sound like the real deal. (Stephen Gabis, Broadway’s veteran dialect coach, handled the other accents.)
“Saying ‘bagel’ isn’t a prob- lem,” says Rosenfeld, 67, the son of Yiddish-speaking parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. Other words, particularly those with the throaty “ch” of chutzpah, are harder to pronounce, he says, especially when working from a transliteration.
Happily for Rosenfeld — who played a mohel in the 1988 film “Crossing Delancey” — cast members, gentile and Jewish alike, were eager to learn: “Sometimes actors are more interested in getting the role right, but these people wanted every nuance to be correct!”
For Katrina Lenk, who grew up in the Midwest with a father who came from Germany, the biggest challenge was “just figuring out how this language fits in [my] mouth.” Granted, she’s no stranger to dialects: She played a Czech in Broadway’s “Once,” a Croatian on TV’s “Elementary,” and an Israeli in the play “The Band’s Visit.” Still, she was daunted when she realized that one-tenth of her dialogue would be in Yiddish. “But Moishe helped with everything — the way some words are stressed in sentences, the meter, the rolling of the tongue,” she says.
The language flowed more naturally for Richard Topol, whose grandparents spoke Yiddish. “There were probably a good two-dozen words that were a part of our household,” he says. “Like shiksa [non-Jewish woman], my first college girlfriend. And meshuggeneh [crazy]. I was always being called that.
“Moishe mostly reminded me that Yiddish was in my bones,” adds Topol, whose résumé includes “Vilna’s Got a Golem” and “A Dybbuk.”
“I always thought Yiddish was kind of a redheaded stepchild language, a pidgin German,” he says. “But hearing it in this play, it’s filled with a passion and musicality I didn’t know existed.”