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NEW YORK'S YIDDISH THEATER

Name: NEW YORK'S YIDDISH THEATER
Author: Edna Nahshon
ISBN: 978-0-231-17670-5

FROM THE BOWERY TO BROADWAY

edited by Edna Nahshon ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016

A witty and absorbing demonstration of the interplay of minority and mainstream—with the minority culture here being of...

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Take my wife…please! Nahshon (Theater/Jewish Theological Seminary) charts a transformative artistic lineage from the shtetl to Broadway, the Borscht Belt, and beyond.

This companion volume to a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York introduces figures who deserve a broader place in American cultural history but who in many cases are all but unknown: Jacob Adler, for one, who commanded the Jewish theatrical stage from its years on the Bowery to the Jazz Age and who, had things turned out differently, might have introduced Tevye to the Broadway crowd a couple of generations before Theodore Bikel did. Sholem Aleichem didn’t have the hit he hoped for because, the author suggests, Jewish audiences in early-20th-century New York wanted something else: they were in a new world, after all, and “had left behind the world Sholem Aleichem stood for.” By such means does art evolve. Nahshon traces the origins of a specifically Jewish theater not to biblical antiquity, though Purim does figure in the story, but instead to a Romanian wine garden where, in 1876, a writer named Abraham Goldfaden joined forces with two folk singers for whom he “provided a skimpy storyline that offered narrative continuity to their musical numbers.” Both song and story grew more sophisticated, arriving in New York as a theater of nostalgia and sentimentality that branched in several directions, including vaudeville, from which stand-up comedy in turn evolved. Familiar names turn up, among them the likes of Rodney Dangerfield and Sophie Tucker, but mostly the text, wonderfully well-illustrated with handbills, portraits, advertisements, and the like, yields a constant discovery of new show people, such as matinee idol Boris Thomashefsky, whose name was famous not just in theatrical circles, but “was evoked just as frequently for being at the center of juicy scandals.”

A witty and absorbing demonstration of the interplay of minority and mainstream—with the minority culture here being of outsize influence over the larger culture of Broadway, Hollywood, and America.

Pub Date: March 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-231-17670-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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I AM OZZY

by Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 2010

An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.

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The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.

Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.

An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.

Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

- IN THE NEWS
Ozzy Osbourne Dies at 76

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)