Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.118 October 11, 1993 1) Leon Liebgold, Rita Karpinovitch, and Reyzl Bozyk (Mark David) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Oct 11 21:47:01 1993 From: mhd@world.std.com (Mark H David) Subject: Leon Liebgold, Rita Karpinovitch, and Reyzl Bozyk The ranks of the surviving Yiddish actors have just in the past 30 days been decimated by the coincidental deaths of three of its most illustrious members: Leon Liebgold, Rita Karpinovitch, and Reyzl Bozyk. I'd like to just make a few brief remarks about each one. Leon Liebgold died september 3rd at the age of 83. He played major roles in three of the best-known Yiddish films: Yidl Mitn Fidl, Tevye, and Der Dibbuk. These are three of the most important, perhaps THE most important, Yiddish films of all time. He plays the (only) handsome male characters in each one: the fellow klezmer fiddler that Yidl (Molly Picon) falls in love with in "Yidl Mitn Fidl"; the "sheygets" Fedye who marries Tevye's (Maurice Schwarz's) daughter in "Tevye"; and the yeshive bokher Khonon who dies in the process of trying to conjure occult powers in order to gain permission to marry his "bashert", Leah (Lilly Lilliana, also his wife). He filmed Tevye in 1939 while on tour with his Polish acting troupe. Thanks to production delays in filming Tevye, he and his wife missed their boat back to Warsaw and were thus saved from the Holocaust. He was a seargent in the US army during WWII. He had a successful Yiddish stage career in America that lasted until the 80's. He was president of the Hebrew Actors Union for a number of years. He, Miriam Kressyn, and Seymore Rexite performed together with Menashe Skulnik for about five years, both before and after his military service in WWII. Rita Karpinovitch (aka Rita Karin) died September 10. She was born in Vilna and became a Yiddish actress at an early age. Her father ran a puppet theater in Vilna. She went to Moscow and studied Yiddish acting with the great Shlomo Michoels. She spent the war years as a refugee in Tashkent, USSR. After the war, she and several others formed a Yiddish acting company to entertain the survivors of the Holocaust. It was at first based in Lodz, Poland. After the Kielce pogrom in 1947, it moved to Munich, Germany. She documented this part of her life in a wonderful article she wrote for the magazine "Pakntreger" in the late '80s. A Boston playwrite, Alan Brody, was so moved by the story she told, that it led him to write the play "A Company of Angels", dramatizing this story. The play made its world premier at Boston's New Rep theather in April, 1993. She came to Boston to attend the first saturday-night performance, where I was fortunate enough to be able to interview her for my radio show. After coming to the US in 1950, she performed in live Yiddish Radio dramas of IB Singer's work on the Forward Hour. Interviewed recently for a National Public Radio piece on Yiddish radio, she recalled how, after her character died, IB Singer agreed to provide for her continued employment by having her return in a dream. She recorded, with others, an early collection of Ghetto Songs on Folkways records: The Wall. More recently, she recorded more Ghetto songs for a collection put out by the US Holocaust museum. In recent years, she recorded excellent readings of several of Sholom Aleichem's humerous stories on cassettes for the National Yiddish Book Center, along with her long-time collaborator David Rogow. This brought her to the attention of many of us in the younger generation of Yiddish enthusiasts, as did her numerous appearances as a teacher at YIVO KlezKamps. She acted in English on stage and in television, as well as in TV commercials. A memorial Shloshim for Rita Karpinovitch is to be held tomorrow, tuesday, October 12, at the Workmen's Circle in New York, at 4:45 p.m. Reyzl Bozyk died the first day of Sukkos, September 30th, at age 79. She is widely known to American movie goers for her American film debut in 1988 as Amy Irving's Grandmother in "Crossing Delancy Street", in which she is generally said to have stolen the show. But her acting career actually goes back sixty five years, beginning when she was six years old, playing with her parents, and later with her husband, the actor Max Bozyk (who starred in Yidl Mitn Fidl, Der Dibek, A Brivele Der Mamen, Mamele, and others). She escaped Poland in 1939 with her husband to Argentina. They then moved to New York in 1941. They played together on the American-Yiddish stage together for three decades, until Max's death in 1970. Miriam Kressyn wrote a moving obituary on Leon Liebgold in the Forverts of September 10. The New York Times also ran a lengthy obituary, with his picture, on September 11. Coincidentally, the death notice for actress Rita Karpinovitch appears on this same page of the Times. Notice of Rita Karpinovitch's death appears in the Forverts of September 18. Miriam Hoffman eulogized both Rita and Leon in the Forverts of September 29. Reyzl Bozyk's death is reported in the Forverts of October 6, 1993. The Algemeiner Journal, the orthodox New York Yiddish weekly, ran in its October 6th edition a first-page article headlined "Reyzl Bozyk Geshtorbn". The article also covered the deaths of Leon Liebgold and Rita Karpinovitch, and featured a picture of all three actors on page one. Mark David 11 October 1993 ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.118