What a Life!

Pesach'ke Burstein, an old trouper from the Yiddish theater, recalls dramas both onstage and off in this memoir, which he dictated to his wife, Lillian Lux Brustein. The story of Burstein's successful stage career is played out against the background of political turmoil in Europe, life in small towns and big cities, friendships and rivalries among theater folk, family life and emigration to the United States, and tours through Europe, South America, Israel, and South Africa. Every personal anecdote tells the larger history: theater history and also the history of the Yiddish communities who were Burstein's audiences.
While Burstein is a legend in Yiddish theater, he was little known outside that world until he was celebrated in Arnon Goldfinger's acclaimed documentary Der Komediant. This book provides the first window for English readers into the other side of Yiddish culture - the Yiddish vaudeville, the traveling Yiddish theater, and the music hall. It will not only delight readers but also reveal to them a social and cultural history never before described in such detail. Burstein's life is the story of popular Yiddish theater in the first half of the twentieth century.