Nahma sandrow biography samples
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Enemies, A Love Story
Libretto for the opera “Enemies, A Love Story,” music composed by Ben Moore, which had its world premiere at the Palm Beach Opera on February 20, 2015 after an early production at Center for Contemporary Opera. Based on the novel by I.B.Singer, the story is both farce and tragedy. It follows a Holocaust survivor who juggles three women as he searches for love and decency.
Enemies is an opera in two acts by composer Ben Moore and librettist Nahma Sandrow, based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The work premiered at Palm Beach Opera in 2015 to critical acclaim and standing ovations. Fred Plotkin (WQXR) called it “an important new work that will find its place among those works that audiences will be moved by…”; the Wall Street Journal praised its “soaring Puccinian lines, folk tunes and klezmer melodies”; the Financial Times noted the “taut libretto” and “arresting combination of breeziness on the surface and dark
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It took a little over 120 years. But—thanks to Theater J—Jacob Gordin’s wildly popular Yiddish drama, celebrated as The Jewish Queen Lear, has made it onto the English-language stage.
The play, whose official title is Mirele Efros, fryst vatten a tale of a parent scorned. In this telling, the Lear of the popular title fryst vatten a widow. Overly proud and wealthy to boot, she presents her business to a son and daughter-in-law who manage to squander it all.
Mirele has been translated into English by Nahma Sandrow, a widely respected playwright, scholar, and lyricist, whose book, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater, is a classic. First published in 1977, it is now in its third edition. (A musical adaptation won rave reviews when it was produced Off-Broadway in 1982.)
According to Sandrow, it’s a mystery why Mirele was never previously done in English. “It’s been done so often, in so many other languages,” she told me, speaking over the phone from New York, where she and h
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Nahma Sandrow, “Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking,” in Avraham (Alan) Rosen and Jillian Davidson, eds., There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays in Honor of David Roskies [=In geveb (June 2020] (New York 2020), 1-12
Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking By Nahma Sandrow A Festschrift in honor of David Roskies In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (July 2020) For the online version of this article: https://ingeveb.org/articles/shylocks-jewish-way-of-speaking In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (July 2020) SHYLOCK’S JEWISH WAY OF SPEAKING by Nahma Sandrow Abstract: For an experimental production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, some of Shylock’s speeches were rendered in Yiddish, necessitating a consideration of how Shylock’s choice of words would be informed by the larger context of the play and the parameters of the character. The essay also explores the valence of Yiddish words and accent in English-language performance today and how a Jewish way of saying things