A Hollywood actress recaptures the Yiddish stage.
The title character of Avraham Heffner's film "Laura Adler's Last Love Affair," is the doyenne of what is left of the Yiddish stage in modern Israel. And like her art form itself, Laura is slowly fading away. She has been stricken by a terminal disease, and the small troupe she heads in Tel Aviv is slowly losing its audience to natural attrition. But Laura is given chances for personal and professional renewal - a night of passion with a mysterious stranger, and the offer of a role in an American movie. And for Rita Zohar, the actress who plays her, "Laura Adler" represented one more chance to return, if only in the fantasy world of film, to the Yiddish stage she forsook more than two decades ago. The picture has just opened in general release in Israel, following screenings last year at the festivals in Jerusalem, Venice and Salerno. Although critical reaction to the film has been mixed, Zohar's performance has received high praise. At Salerno she won the best actress award, and last December she won the Israeli film industry's version of an Oscar. In Hollywood, Zohar is a frequently cast character actress. She has appeared in films ("Daniel," "Amadeus") and television programs ("St. Elsewhere," "Cagney & Lacey"). She began her career as a child performer in Israel's Yiddish theater scene, after immigrating in 1950 from Rumania with her mother, also a Yiddish actress. "On the radio they were always telling us not to speak Yiddish at home," Zohar recalls of her early years in Israel.
"There was a country to build, and the Hebrew language to revive." But, despite this, she says, "we did do some wonderful Yiddish theater." In 1967 Zohar traveled to New York, to study at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. In the United States, she met and married a Mexican-Jewish businessman, and returned with him to Mexico City, where she worked as a stage and television performer for a decade before moving to Los Angeles. In the fall of 1989, at the same time as Zohar was in Israel on a personal visit, Avraham Heffner was looking for an actress to play Laura Adler. As Zohar recounts, "I was walking down Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv and met an actor I hadn't seen in decades. He grabbed me by the wrists, called someone (Heffner) on a public phone and yelled 'I've found her!'" Heffner is a director, cinema teacher (at Tel Aviv University) and novelist, considered to be one of Israel's most literate and quirky filmmakers. His three feature films - "Aunt Clara," "The Winchell Affair" and "Where is Daniel Wax?" - are frequently cited as among the 10 best Israeli movies. Zohar responded enthusiastically to Heffner's offer of the role. "'Laura Adler' was not your usual Israeli film," she says. "There was no politics, no wars, no soldiers, no Arabs. Instead, it was a simple story about a woman who had devoted her life to the Yiddish theater." Heffner sees the Yiddish-theater scene depicted in "Laura Adler" as "the metaphor for the longing of an entire generation my parents' for a world that no longer exists." In the film Laura is depicted as a living embodiment of that world, a woman who has sacrificed her personal life to dedicate herself totally to her art. The small Yiddish troupe she heads is depicted both affectionately and satirically; the high point of the film is a performance of a typically melodramatic and hammy Yiddish piece. The film had a budget of $ 500,000, with about half coming from the Fund for Quality Films and Israel Television, and the rest from private sources. Along with Zohar, a number of other veterans of the Israeli Yiddish-theater scene make up the cast of the film, including Menashe Warshavsky, Avraham Mor and Betty Feldman. Zohar is of two minds on the experience of working again in Israel. Compared with American productions the filming was, she says, anarchic. "But emotionally," she says, "It was simply wonderful - like sitting in my grandmother's kitchen."