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[0:00] ♪ Musical number: "When Lightning Strikes" — performed by Tom McGovern ♪

[0:26] Jeryl Brunner: Hi, this is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes, where we talk about the tingly mic drop moments that led you to becoming an artist.

[0:39] Zalmen Mlotek: Zalmen Mlotek is the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. He and his son Avram Mlotek are the forces behind Amid Falling Walls: Unveiling Resilience and Hope During the Holocaust. Arranged by Zalmen with a libretto by Avram, this Off-Broadway production presents songs created and performed in ghettos, cabarets, concentration camps, and theaters. The show is currently playing at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at The Museum of Jewish Heritage. Welcome to you both.

[1:29] Avram Mlotek: Thank you so much.

[1:30] Zalmen Mlotek: So good to be here. It's such a thrill to have you both here. Can you talk about when Amid Falling Walls came into your orbit, when you knew you had to do this piece?

[1:45] Zalmen Mlotek: Well, I've grown up really learning this music, studying it, teaching it to people of all ages for many years. I did some recordings back with the US Holocaust Museum and with other artists where we looked at material, songs that specifically were created in that period of time that expressed hope and resistance. We found a fascinating repertoire, mostly that was collected right after the war by this artist. He was a partisan, a fighter, and a poet, Shmerka Kachaginski. He collected after the war close to 300 songs that he would go and interview survivors in displaced person camps, in hotels, wherever he could find survivors in Europe, to ask them what songs, what poems did they sing, did they speak to each other that gave them some kind of solace and hope during these incredibly terror-filled years.

So I've always been concertizing this music for more than a decade, but my director, Mattel Didner, urged me to consider a theatrical version of it and putting it on the stage so that more people could see it. That's when I turned to Avram to help me with the libretto. I wanted his perspective as my son, also as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, as a rabbi, etc., and as a writer. I wanted his input with it. I think it was about a year that we were really sitting down and working on it seriously.

[3:58] Zalmen Mlotek: I wanted to read something from the script that just encapsulates how beautiful and the triumph, dare I say it, of the human spirit, you know, in the midst of all this horror and terror that with the Nazi occupation and the closing of Jewish schools and businesses, pre-war institutions and organizations banned. Within weeks of these closures, however, underground activity had already begun, house concerts were organized, and amateur groups sprang up all over the city, giving performances in makeshift locations. You know, yeah, that inspired us.

[4:49] Avram Mlotek: Yeah, no, I mean that text, a portion of that text comes from the Holocaust historian Shirley Gilbert's book of music in the Holocaust, which along with Katsaginski and so many other texts really were our go-to guides in understanding the context of this moment in time. But I think what that passage captures is the need for the human spirit to continue living and for artists to continue making art and performing and writing and sharing their innermost spirit even amid this type of horror.

[5:15] Zalmen Mlotek: Here you have all this material, and you both are credited as the arrangers. What does that mean to you?

[5:15] Avram Mlotek: Well, I mean the arrangements are from my head. I've always accompanied, I've created arrangements. The songs themselves we found with barely melodies, just the melodies, and I would imagine if this was a theater song, I would imagine what kind of harmonies, what kind of arrangement we might have heard with these melodies. It was basically from my work at the piano that I created the score, and then I turned to good friends of mine, Frank Lunden and Michael Winograd, to orchestrate the piece, keeping in mind that I wanted the music to sound as if it were performed then. Some of the songs are with a solo violin, some are accompanied just by a drum, some are accompanied with a full cabaret style or orchestra. We took pains to try to bring this material to life in the most honest way to the material itself.

[5:15] Avram Mlotek: I'll just add that more than being billed as a writer, I think curator or a collager feels more accurate to describe my role for sure. The authors and the original composers of this material were young people, kids, teenagers, folks in their 20s, maybe 30s, who lived in the ghettos and in cities across Eastern Europe, most of whom perished during the war years. They were the originators of this material that we've tried to bring back to life and share with new audiences in new ways. It was a collage effort in terms of assembling this material, and we have screens all throughout the auditorium that are carefully curated photographs and video that have rarely been seen, accompanying each moment to let people get a bit more of the sense of the environment in which this material was spoken and sung. It's incredibly powerful, and it's also joyous, which is quite beautiful. That's our hope; that was our goal.

[5:15] Zalmen Mlotek: As we wrestled with this very difficult material, we tried to find those moments in the cabarets where they would have fun, where they would joke, where they would tease each other, where they would let their hair down a little bit for a moment while outside the cabaret doors the most horrible things were happening. We tried to blend the material together, and as you remember, the final 20 minutes is all about the fight, the resistance, the determination to survive, the determination to not stand there and go like sheep to the slaughter.

[5:15] Avram Mlotek: It's profoundly moving to hear it and experience it in Yiddish. That's also what I love about the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, is that you get to really experience this language that's so authentic.

[5:15] Zalmen Mlotek: Thank you so much. It's so interesting to me that particular your comment about that, that it's so good to hear it in Yiddish. I assume that you don't understand Yiddish, correct?

[5:15] Avram Mlotek: Just the few words that my grandparents spoke over the years, maybe a handful of words.

[5:15] Zalmen Mlotek: It was a purposeful decision not to translate these songs into English, not to find the English words that could possibly describe this because we knew that we couldn't. We knew that we needed to present it in the original, with supertitles, of course, so that people, you know, like our Yiddish Schwiddler, would know what was going on every moment. But we felt that it was so important for people to hear it in the language that it was created. I'm glad that that resonated.

[10:57] Jeryl Brunner: What would you like people to know about the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene? If somebody were to ask you, what is this theater? Why is it special? It's got such a legacy.

[11:14] Zalmen Mlotek: Well, we bring to life Jewish life. We show Jewish life from all different times. We present the music, we tell the stories of Jewish civilization, whether it was here or wherever it was. We present it in the most professional way, with the most respect for history, while wanting to present it with the same production values that you would see in any theater. We are determined to make sure that this theater and shows in this language are heard by as many people as we can get to see it. Of course, with supertitles, so that people understand it, but that they will enjoy something that they've never seen before. They will experience something that they can't see on television, in books, or recordings. But you can see it performed by young people, young American actors, Broadway caliber, talented, amazing performers.

[12:45] Zalmen Mlotek: And it's also the longest continuously running Yiddish theater in the world.

[12:52] Avram Mlotek: That it is, that it is. You know, in America there were scores of Yiddish theaters down on Second Avenue in New York, 14 theaters going on at the same time, some with 3,000 seats, playing twice a day, packed audiences. This was a Yiddish-speaking population at that time. The Folksbiene was created in those years to bring more literary work, pieces that touched on social justice themes as well.

[13:32] Jeryl Brunner: What year was it founded? When did you become involved?

[13:45] Zalmen Mlotek: I became involved in 1998 as the artistic director, but I had been working with the Folksbiene prior, composing some scores for them. I was the musical director for a few of their productions, but I became the artistic director in 1998.

[14:07] Jeryl Brunner: So I'd love to know from both of you your lightning strikes moments when you knew you had to be artists. I know you're both so multifaceted, but when you knew this was your path? Well, from what I read, Zalmen, you studied at Juilliard?

[14:34] Zalmen Mlotek: Yeah, I studied with Bernstein. I talk about Bernstein as being one of my inspirers, of course, to the many millions, of course, but I was lucky enough to have personal contact with him in his classes at Juilliard and also at Tanglewood. It was he who actually urged me to follow this course. I had been studying to be an opera conductor and a symphonic conductor, and he said, "Who needs another conductor of Traviata when you know your music so well, and no one does it as well as you?" So it was that charge that kind of set me straight. But when I think about the first moments, I have to think about the moments that I was sitting under the piano where my mother would hold court basically with her contemporaries, Holocaust survivors who survived the war, lived in the Bronx, building new homes, and they would get drunk and high and sing and have these incredible nights of fun singing.

[16:09] Zalmen Mlotek: I think it was hearing that enthusiasm in their singing and my mother's playing, of course, that inspired me to try to do it on my own. Was this singing in Yiddish? Because I think about how you're now an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music, and it's such a piece of your DNA.

[16:37] Zalmen Mlotek: Yeah, it certainly was, you know, in the early parts mostly Yiddish, but then my mother was a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan. We loved Tom Lehrer, so all of that material was also part of our family singing. But how did you know, okay, I'm going to take this wonderful gift, this wonderful music that I've been exposed to, and I want to focus on that for the rest of my life? You know, or I want to go to Juilliard; I want to keep pursuing it.

[17:22] Zalmen Mlotek: Well, as I said, it was because I could play the piano and because I had an ear and I could basically play anything that I heard. I learned all these songs. And then, as a young kid, as a 16, 17-year-old, I taught these songs to children at summer camps, and I made plays and pageants, and I became a producer in those little summer camps of this music, a director and musical director. And of course, you get enough excitement creating a show in summer camp, and it builds to you wanting to do it professionally, and that's basically how I turned to it.

[18:25] Jeryl Brunner: So wonderful. And how about you, Avram? Here you are growing up in the midst of this wonderful musical household. When did you know that this was your path?

[18:38] Avram Mlotek: I'm still figuring it out, to be honest. I work as a rabbi, and I think what I love about the rabbinic work is getting to work with people. At the heart of working with people is learning their stories. And as a writer, I've always been a writer. I think the uncovering of people's stories has just been central to my identity, and it's what makes working with this particular material so precious. Because when people think of the enormity of the Holocaust and the numbers of individuals that perished, it's sort of, as we say in the beginning of our show, quoted by Katsoginski, unfathomable to even try to comprehend. But when you focus on a single song or a poem and can let your heart open to that world of that particular artist, somehow you gain an insight that's otherwise hard to capture. So, you know, the arts for me is a vehicle for connection.

[20:04] Jeryl Brunner: Did you grow up? Was your dad always playing music in the house when you were growing up?

[20:10] Avram Mlotek: Always. I teased my father that I grew up singing Yiddish Holocaust songs before I knew English nursery rhymes. I only later learned that that was because that was the tradition he was raised with. He was a child of survivors in a survivor community, and you've heard him describe the milieu of my grandparents' living room. I'll just add that my grandmother's piano, which was at the centerpiece of so many of those gatherings, is now housed at the Volksbina office and is actually in the pit of the Amid Falling Walls orchestra. It's what my father plays every night, so it connects the generations in a pretty powerful way.

[20:59] Jeryl Brunner: Oh, that's really beautiful that you brought her piano to the theater. And what was it like to collaborate together, father and son, working on this piece?

[21:15] Zalmen Mlotek: It's a gift. It's been a gift. A real gift for me. I needed my son's perspective. I needed some space from the material, and he offered that. I needed his wisdom that he has. It's been a true gift, I have to say.

[21:49] Jeryl Brunner: And what was it like for you, Avram, to work with your father?

[21:54] Avram Mlotek: I think a gift is accurate. The material, as we've alluded to, can feel burdensome at times, understandably so given its heavy nature. But we also describe just how hopeful it can feel, if not joyous at times. Leaning into this process and our relationship of what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it was sort of a compass for us in going forward. It was really about sharing these songs with a wider circle than just our own families.

[21:59] Jeryl Brunner: Yeah, and I think about the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the incredible successes you've had just in the last few years. I mean, Fiddler on the Roof, how Hal Prince said it was one of the most powerful Fiddlers he's ever seen. Here's someone so entrenched in this musical, and yet he saw this modern-day production and was so terribly moved by it. Yiddish Harmony just went to Broadway, and now you have Amid Falling Walls. Why do you think, here, there were so many Yiddish theaters back in the day, and you're the longest continuously operating one? Why do you think it's been so successful, this theater in particular?

[21:59] Zalmen Mlotek: The theater really was founded by people who were committed to Yiddish theater, to Yiddish literature, and to social justice values. That persistence was the glue that kept this theater alive. It was originally funded by the Workers Circle, which was a fraternal organization created at the turn of the century to help immigrants assimilate into American life. The Forward newspaper was a part of our board in those early years. Then we expanded the board and our reach to understand that Yiddish was not necessarily connected with a political idea or with a religious idea. It was a language; it was the way that people spoke, you know, a whole generation of people created literature, music, and songs. It's been my goal to present this material and present theater in the most professional ways, so that people could come and not say, "Well, that's Yiddish theater," and look at it condescendingly, but really see it for the art that it is.

[25:38] Zalmen Mlotek: I was very gratified that people like Hal Prince and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a whole slew of people who came to see our Fiddler were so moved by hearing it in Yiddish, even though there were no Yiddish speakers among the people I just mentioned. Many of the celebrities that came, because you say the language resounds in such a way, and that is our goal. I think that's why we have survived, because unlike many other Jewish theaters that do translations of Jewish work, we may and we do pieces in English. As you noted, Harmony was of course in English, and our upcoming piece that we are doing for children called Kids in Yiddish will be 90% in English, 10% Yiddish. The marketing slogan is "100% fun." We will look at pieces that will bring the Jewish experience to life in an entertaining, thoughtful, and meaningful way.

[25:38] Jeryl Brunner: Well, I'm excited to see what you have next at the theater, and congratulations for Amid Falling Walls. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[25:38] Zalmen Mlotek: Thank you for your interest and your enthusiasm. We hope to see your listeners at the show and would love to greet them afterward as well.

[25:38] Jeryl Brunner: Sounds great! Have a wonderful day.

[25:38] Zalmen Mlotek: Thank you.

[25:38] Avram Mlotek: Thank you.

[25:38] Jeryl Brunner: Lightning strikes.