Menashe Oppenheim, Zypora Spaisman, Mina Bern, Sara Stabin, Joshua Zeldis, and Joseph Buloff
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York
 

A review from the New York Times, November 17, 1970:

'Brothers Ashkenazi' is Staged by Folksbiene
by Thomas Lask

In one passionate scene in Luba Kadison's Yiddish dramatization of I.J. Singer's panoramic, multilayered family chronicle, "The Brothers Ashkenazi," the elder twin, Simkhe Meyer, who likes to be known as Max, complains that his wife, who hates him, and nowhere more fiercely than in the marriage bed, has not kept her side of the contract.

"Your mother brought your body, but she has kept your soul," he says to a hushed and appreciative audience. There aren't many theatres in the United States where such a line can be safely uttered, where an audience will accept it as a just statement of the case. Scenes like these are sprinkled all through the performance of the play now being given weekends by the Folksbiene group.

Those who would like a change from Pintersque silences and Beckett-like repetitions, from the eyebrow lifting, monosyllabic muscle twitching kind of acting that is so common these days will find the Folksbiene performances a rich and juicy alternative. Emotions are encountered head on, scenes are milked to the last tear drop or ounce of pathos, and the acting, like the language, is full of hyperbole.

To the charge that there is little subtlety or finesse, everyone connected with the enterprise might easily say that they are dealing with the very stuff of life in all its coursing vitality.

In the center stands Max, a man on the make, one who rises from his expected role as a brilliant student of Scripture to become the boss of the manufacturing city of Lodz. Sly, cunning, tricky, keeping his own counsel, and light years ahead of others in understanding the industrial process, he takes on all comers: his father, who renounces him because of his failing piety, his in-laws, whom he has neatly relieved of their business, his wife, his children, who feel alienated, his competitors (naturally) and his employees, who are just beginning to realize what they must do to obtain justice for themselves. He beats them all handily until history moves in to show him who is really running things.

Miss Kadison's version is long and talky, and its episodic structure does away with climaxes. But she has created a meaty and wide-ranging role for Max, which Joseph Buloff plays to the hilt, revealing every facet of the man. It's a pleasure to see such expertness at work.

No other part measures up to that one, but I liked Zypora Spaisman as the tough-minded mother of the bride and Menashe Oppenheim as the simplistic, self-righteous father-in-law. Leda Kurtz brings something intense and unsatisfied to her part of Max's wife.

Miss Kadison's Yiddish lines are flavorsome and supple, and she has even managed to get in a reference to Singer's central idea: that whether Jews are wealthy or poor, radicals or pillars of society, apostates or believers, there is no salvation for them in the Diaspora.