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Bikel’s heart resonated in story and song

On his passing, Theodore Bikel (1924-2015) was eulogized as a singer, an actor, a labor organizer, a human rights advocate and a humanitarian.
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September 16, 2016

“My great-great-grandfather lived in a time when everyone was forced to take a name…”

— Theodore Bikel, “While I’m Here”

On his passing, Theodore Bikel (1924-2015) was eulogized as a singer, an actor, a labor organizer, a human rights advocate and a humanitarian. He was a Renaissance man, to be sure, but central to all of Bikel’s roles and talents was his love of narrative and story. A gifted raconteur, he charmed and held his friends and acquaintances spellbound at innumerable parties, dinners and soirees.

Now some of those stories are available for the first time to his public, on one disc of a new two-CD set, “While I’m Here” (Red House). A second disc gives an overview of his recorded folk singing.

“Theo was a marvelous storyteller,” said his widow, Aimee Ginsburg Bikel. “He experienced life as one big story. Everything that happened to him was arranged in chapters, and he delighted in sharing his stories.” 

Bikel tells stories that are personal to him — his family, his travels and his activities — yet they all have a universal quality: a Czarist decree, the conflict between his secular and Jewish values, a grandmother who wangled her way out of Nazi-controlled Vienna, a kibbutznik who hated living on the land, parents’ misgivings about a life onstage, a young man’s yearning to test his abilities. 

As the old advertising campaign admonished: You don’t have to be Jewish…

Musician and producer Artie Butler witnessed many of Bikel’s spontaneous monologues, including a restaurant tour de force. 

“After the opening of ‘The Producers’ on Broadway,” Butler said, “we were waiting for our food. And Theo did bits of Nathan Lane’s performance as a Frenchman, as a German, as an Israeli, a Democrat, a Republican — all before the pasta and veal cutlets arrived!”

Recorded near the end of his life, Bikel takes the tone of a wise secular rabbi on the spoken-word disc. This is not Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof,” his most famous role, exulting “Tra-di-tion!” or the apoplectic submarine captain of “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” The marvelous baritone voice that charmed generations on stages and screen all over the world is stripped down to its essence.

Butler maintains: “Whenever he spoke Yiddish, he sounded like my grandfather; I was instantly transported back to Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.” 

Bikel would perform seders, and Butler recalls one year at the house of labor arbitrator Lou Zigman and his wife, Fran, Bikel conducting the whole ceremony in Yiddish. “It was the real mama loshen!” he said, using the Yiddish word for “mother tongue.”

Simon Rutberg, who operated the Hatikvah Music store on Fairfax, always relished whenever Bikel dropped in to talk. “I loved to hear him sing,” Rutberg said. “I loved to hear him speak. Every sentence was like calligraphy.”

“I would stand on heaps of manure and sing songs about the work I wasn’t doing.”

Born in Austria, Bikel once saw Hitler driving by his home window as a child. Bikel’s family fled to Palestine when he was a young teenager in the late 1930s. A refugee, he carried concern for the plight of refugees with him for the rest of his life. “The Israel of 1949, that was the Israel that Theo carried around with him,” Rutberg said.

 Life on a kibbutz proved a terrible fit. Bitten by the acting bug, Bikel eventually made his way to London and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1952, he landed in the United States.

“I spent eight years in England, and I never felt English. … After eight weeks in New York, I was a New Yorker.”

As the folk music revival smoldered in the 1950s, Bikel almost singlehandedly carried the songs of Eastern Europe and Israel to American coffeehouses and concert stages. 

“He was an integral part of the folk music of the ’50s,” KCBX-FM broadcaster René Engel said. “And he deserves to be thought of with Chava Alberstein as musical ambassador of Israeli song.”

Photographer Bob Barry, during his years as a New York singer and actor, played Mordcha the innkeeper to Bikel’s Tevye in a 1970 production of “Fiddler.” 

“On the off days,” Barry recalled, “Theo would book concerts, usually at synagogues, where he’d play his guitar and sing. And his introductions to the songs were always special. He used to say, ‘I’m not the best singer or the best guitar player, but I am the best explainer!’ ”

“I’m a Kohen, a priest …”

“Theo’s gift was his musicality,” Butler said. “He had the ability to speak and sing different languages authentically — not just as a veneer. And his heart was so big, musically. He brought that acting ability to the music.” 

Hazzan Michael Stein of Temple Aliyah, echoed those thoughts: “The essence of his gift was his brain. Theo was a brilliant man who saw everything and drew on his great intellect — but with warmth and a twinkle in his eye.”

“He made the album as a gift,” the late performer’s wife, Aimee, said. “Theo knew he wouldn’t be here to see the enjoyment of his audience, but he wanted them to have it.”

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