Pacific Resident Theater delves deep into Jewish immigrant history with its digital production of A Bintel Brief (“A Bundle of Letters’). The letters were addressed, over a 60-year period, to the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, the paper of choice of the Yiddish-speaking, first-generation Jews in New York City. Confronted with a strange new world—not to speak of a brand-new language—the immigrants often turned to the Forward’s advice column for help and guidance.>
Carol Rusoff has done a splendid job in selecting some of the best letters (translated into English by Diana Shalet Levy and edited by Isaac Metzger) and working with a 14-person cast to bring them to life in a theatrical and compelling way. Her use of the Zoom format is masterful: the actors may be separated from each other by social-distancing restrictions but they handle the text smoothly and flawlessly, delivering their lines in a mixture of voices and attitudes. From time to time, a Klezmer musician (Horacio Romero) punctuates the action with his wailing clarinet while a montage of photos from the Lower East Side with its tenements and tumultuous street life fill the screen.
The main character in A Bintel brief—in effect, the Forward’s “Dear Abie”—was Abraham Cahan. As skillfully-portrayed by Robert Lesser, Cahan dispenses advice to his readers in a wise, patriarchal way. He proves generally modern and progressive in outlook. When, for example, a married woman writes complaining about her husband who objects to her going to night school twice a week, Cahan takes her side and strongly defends her right to an education. But when it comes time to advise a young man who had fallen in love with a non-Jewish girl and wants to marry her, he responds angrily and sourly, denouncing the young man for even thinking of such a heinous thing: ”You’re from two different worlds,” he tells him. “Forget her! Love alone can not fill a life!”
The documentary style devised by Rusoff and producer Marilyn Fox works well throughout and makes for an entertaining and engrossing experience of a show that pays tribute to the world of our fathers in praiseworthy, moving fashion…and left this reviewer wishing for more.
