Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof”

“She has me so intimidated I can’t think straight,” Cy the Cynic told me.

It might seem meshuganah — crazy — to stage a beloved musical in a language that most of the audience won’t understand. But Tevye the dairyman and his family will speak Yiddish in an off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey.

Previews start Wednesday for the show, which will be the first-ever U.S. production of “Fiddler” in the language its characters would have spoken.

“I always knew what this play was about and that’s how I had the chutzpah to tackle it,” Grey said during a rehearsal at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which is housed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. “We

“You’re intimidated by a sweet old lady?” I asked.

“It’s those glasses,” Cy growled.

Minnie Bottoms wears old bifocals that make her mix up kings and jacks, often to her opponents’ dismay.

“Look at this deal,” Cy said. “I played at four hearts, and Minnie, West, led a club.”

“She hates to lead from kings,” I observed.

“True,” Cy shrugged, “but she can’t tell a king from a jack, so who knows which honor she led from?

Ework in English first on the scenes so that everybody understands the characters, and the third or fourth time we do it in Yiddish, and we just keep at it.”

There will be supertitles in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t know their schmaltz from their schmutz.

“Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964 starring Zero Mostel as Tevye and ran for eight years. It has been a favorite of schools and community theater groups ever since and has been revived on Broadway four times. Its songs including “Sunrise, Sunset” and “If I Were a Rich Man” are familiar even to people who’ve never seen the show.

Based on stories by Sholom Aleichem originally written in Yiddish, “Fiddler” is set in 1905 in a Jewwho I played dummy’s queen: king, ace.”

“Next I led the ace of trumps,” the Cynic went on, “and Minnie played the king. Against you, I would have taken the A-K of spades for a club discard and led a trump to my 10 for 10 easy tricks.”

“But Minnie might have played the king from K-J,” I noted.

“I ‘misguessed’ and took the queen next,” Cy said grimly. “When she discarded, I tried a spade to dummy’s jack. I went down three.”

Eish village in czarist Russia.

A Yiddish version of “Fiddler” translated by actor and writer Shraga Friedman as “Fidler afn Dakh” was performed in Israel in 1966 but was never staged in the United States until now. Poor Cy. Minnie has his number.

You hold: & 2 h A Q 10 7 4 3 ( Q 10 3 $ A 8 3. Your partner opens one diamond, you respond one heart and he bids two clubs. What do you say?

Answer: Assume that you judge to insist on game. A bid of three hearts would only invite, and partner may have no heart tolerance anyway: He bid both minors and has a few spades since the opponents haven’t bid them. Bid three diamonds if that bid is forcing. If not, try a “fourth-suit” bid of two spades.

In the Yiddish version of the show, the song “To Life!” doesn’t have to be translated from “L’Chaim!” — It’s just ‘L’Chaim!” ‘’If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “Ven ikh bin a Rotschild,” from a story by Aleichem about a man imagines he were as wealthy as a member of the Rothschild family.

The new production shows how decades of work to preserve Yiddish by organizations including the Folksbiene — Yiddish for World Stage — have paid off.

“For more than a generation we’ve had an explosion of contemporary Yiddish arts and culture by musicians, poets, theater makers, scholars and writers who have studied the language and its history and its incredible volume of modern literature and eclectic music,” said Alisa Solomon, the author of “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” published in 2013.

Solomon said “Fiddler” is “free to just kind of be itself in a way that 50 years ago it couldn’t be in some circles because there was an absence of that vibrant Yiddish culture.”

Yiddish, which is based on German with elements taken from Hebrew and other languages and is written with the Hebrew alphabet, was once spoken by millions of Eastern European Jews but fell victim both to the Holocaust and the pull of assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won a Nobel Prize for his stories written in Yiddish, famously said the language “has been dying for a thousand years, and I’m sure it will go on dying for another thousand.”

Grey’s father, Mickey Katz, was a musician and actor who performed Yiddish comedy songs, but Grey said he doesn’t speak much Yiddish himself and has been learning while rehearsing.