For Jenny Romaine, D.I.Y. Stands for Do It In Yiddish

The performer, puppeteer, and former sound archivist turns YIVO upside-down.

By LEAH FALK

Jenny Romaine has been spending a lot of time at YIVO lately. This summer, she co-led, with Shane Baker, the theater workshop for the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, introducing students to troll costumes, nigunim and sheydim (demons). This fall, she returns not once, but twice, to remind us of the ghostly roots of sukkes and to help revive one of the most celebrated pair of Yiddish puppets on the Lower East Side.

Romaine’s first stint for YIVO, “The Haunted Sukke,” her immersive-theater brain-child created with street theater troupe The Sukkes Mob, premiered at KlezCanada this summer to great acclaim. Among other things, it’s an effort to get Jews reacquainted with that most pagan and party-friendly of Jewish holidays, the feast of booths. In Hasidic communities, Romaine notes, sukkes is a time for serious celebration: get off the subway at 18th Avenue in the middle of the festival week and witness bounce castles, costumes, dancing, and food. Transmitting this sense of glee to other Jews should be easy, but Romaine also wants it to be rooted in the ancient history of the holiday: namely, the tradition of inviting ushpizin – honored guests and influences – into the sukke. Traditional ushpizin include Moyshe Rabeynu, Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, Rokhl, Rivke, and Leah. A former YIVO sound archivist, Romaine’s ushpizin might range from Max Weinreich to Adrienne Cooper to Avraham Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and beyond.

To introduce people, body and soul, to the deep folkloristic roots of sukkes, Romaine first has to transform the Center for Jewish History. Lights will dim, homemade Torah crowns will be tied to railings, and a klezmer band will transmit big brassy sounds across the Great Hall. With the help of cardboard pickles and ears of corn, the freight elevator will become a Jewish cornucopia, and audience members will gather for a séance in the second-floor atrium. (Turning a museum into a haunted sukke is no small feat, however, and she needs some help – email us if you’d like to volunteer.) Romaine likens her plan for the mobile performance to that of Sleep No More, the groundbreaking immersive theater experience based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth which toured the East Coast for several years.

In December, Romaine will return to YIVO once more, this time to breathe life back into the satirical Yiddish puppet theater of Yosl Cutler and Zuni Maud—better known in their time as Modicut—in collaboration with YIVO’s Academic Advisor Dr. Edward Portnoy. Modicut became the first Yiddish puppet theater in the United States, and a vital part of the 1920s Yiddish theater scene on the Lower East Side. Satirizing everything you shouldn’t talk about at the dinner table, from old-time religion to contemporary politics, the pair toured the world until Cutler’s death in 1935. With her company Great Small Works, Romaine and Portnoy will present a reinterpretation of some of Modicut’s original scripts. Cutler’s and Maud’s original hand puppets have been housed in the YIVO archives for decades. With The Modicut Project, they get to see the light of day again.

Leah Falk is YIVO’s Programs Coordinator.