The following review of this play appeared in the New York Times, November 25, 1978:

Folksbiene Theater Enacts Aleichem's 'The Inheritors'
by Richard F. Shepard

All of us, as heirs to the wit and chuchma of Sholem Aleichem, should be delighted to hear that "The Inheritors," an adaptation of one of the master storyteller's short novels, is there for us to share in its original tongue, Yiddish, these weekends at the Folksbiene Theater, which is comfortably ensconced at 123 East 55th Street.

This is a happy comedy spun from the very stuff that used to make thundering old Yiddish melodrama. Sender Blank is nouveau riche, the man around whom all the money clings in the town of Berdichev in 1880. When he gets sick, the mishpucha -- his children and his sister -- begin salivating over bequests to come. The representatives of the town's charitable groups, the widows' fund, the orphans aid and the burial society all wait in the living room of his house. A rich man alive may be an adornment to a town, but here he means much more as an adornment framed in a coffin.

But sender doesn't die. He only only doesn't die once, he doesn't die several times when he is felled by other attacks. He ends up, in the play, eating kotchka, that's duck to you outlanders, and a plate of latkes, which are potato pancakes. That sort of denouement, one that you can get your teeth into, has to be a happy ending, doesn't it?

This year's Folksbiene production has a guest director, Jacob Rotbaum, who came from his regular chores as director of the Jewish State Theater in Poland to stage the pla in New York. Mr. Rotbaum has mounted it in his classic tradition, and this works very well. The lines are funny, and even its most indignant moments, when Leon Liebgold, as a pompous but scheming Sender, is at his most righteous, the undertow of seriousness is flooded by humor. In the way Mr. Liebgold performs, one gets some of the flavor of the Yiddish comics that people are always recalling. It is not boffo stuff, but you laugh.

The cast, in addition to the overpowering Mr. Liebgold, clearly enjoys its work. Jack Rechtzeit is a master comic as a foppish, Russified -- he keeps saying "ponimayet" and "pozhaliste" -- son-in-law of the type that must have been very familiar to the author in his native Ukraine. Joshua Zeldis plays a physician who is laughably incompetent. Mina Kern is the wife, and that irrepressible comic figure of the Yiddish stage, Zypora Spaisman, adds to the fun. Jacob Gostinsky is a bankrupt who is trying to marry his daughter off to the rich family.

A terribly sad blow for the show, for Yiddish theater and for those who love it, was the sudden death Thursday of Shmuel, or as he was better known, Shmulik, Goldstein, long a marvelous and mirthful figure onstage, who had a role in "The Inheritors" as one of the community figures waiting for the windfall. As usual, he carried off the part with zeal and humor and professional skill. An obituary notice will be found elsewhere in today's newspaper.

There are a number of attractive young people in the cast, a development that is good to see in a performance of Yiddish.

This is the 64th consecutive season of the Yiddish Folksbiene, and there's not much else around in the same line in New York to match it. Now, if the Vivian Beaumont wanted a tenant that's reliable ... but that's another story. Meanwhile, you can see "The Inheritors" Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 and 5:30. It's worth a trip.

L. to r.: unk., Leon Liebgold , Mina Kern, Moishe Rosenfeld and Joshua Zeldis.
courtesy of Moishe Rosenfeld.