Bernard Mendelovitch

Yiddish actor at the Grand Palais, Whitechapel, unusual in being an 'Englender'

When the Yiddish actor Bernard Mendelovitch was invited to appear in Brussels a few years ago, he gave his one-man Yiddish musical revue the title " Ikh hob lib teater" - "I Love the Theatre". The phrase summed up his life, which was devoted to the dying folk art of the Yiddish theatre and to his beloved Yiddish language - the vernacular tongue of the Jews of Poland and Russia which spread with mass emigration to the overcrowded ghettoes of the Western world, including the East End of London.

Bernard Mendelovitch, actor: born London 11 February 1925; died Bournemouth 8 March 2004.

When the Yiddish actor Bernard Mendelovitch was invited to appear in Brussels a few years ago, he gave his one-man Yiddish musical revue the title " Ikh hob lib teater" - "I Love the Theatre". The phrase summed up his life, which was devoted to the dying folk art of the Yiddish theatre and to his beloved Yiddish language - the vernacular tongue of the Jews of Poland and Russia which spread with mass emigration to the overcrowded ghettoes of the Western world, including the East End of London.

Mendelovitch was a unique figure among Britain's last professional company of Yiddish actors at the Grand Palais - the tiny stage in Whitechapel which entertained its elderly immigrant patrons until it closed in 1970. While all the other actors were native Yiddish speakers born in Eastern Europe, he alone was British-born, but completely bilingual in English and Yiddish. Such was his mastery of the richly expressive Yiddish idiom that visiting guest stars refused to believe he was an " Englender".

A brilliant linguist, Bernard Mendelovitch had a mental card-index of thousands of earthy, wry Yiddish proverbs, suitable for any situation. Turning up late to visit him one evening, I apologised and explained that I was busy with a number of different tasks. "Don't try and do everything at once," he told me. "Remember - ' loyfn un kakn kan nor a ferd' - only a horse can run and shit at the same time."

Mendelovitch inherited his love of Yiddish and the Yiddish theatre from his father Avrom, a Polish-born tailor and orthodox Jew who spent most of his life in Britain but never learned to read or write English. Passionately devoted to the Yiddish stage, Avrom never set foot in any other theatre. Indeed, asked once to name Lear's three daughters, he responded "Ettele, Gitele and Taybele" - characters from the reworked play Der yidisher kenig lir ("The Jewish King Lear") by the classic Yiddish dramatist Jacob Gordin.

The family home in Manchester was poor, but full of Yiddish songs and stories. On Friday evenings Avrom would entertain his children by reading serialised novels from the American Yiddish newspaper Forverts ("The Forward"). With his fluency in Yiddish, fine singing voice, and experience in the local synagogue choir, Bernard was a natural choice when visiting Yiddish companies needed a child actor. By the age of 11, he was touring to Leeds and Liverpool, playing leading roles alongside some of the great names of Yiddish musical theatre like Herman Fenigstein, Malvina Rappel and the American stars Joseph Sheingold and Frances Adler, daughter of the legendary Jacob P. Adler.

In 1944 Bernard Mendelovitch was called up for military service. He earned a reputation as a capable administrator and rose to the rank of sergeant, despite on one occasion travelling into London without a pass to see the wartime Yiddish musical hit Der kenig fun lampeduza ("The King of Lampedusa") and being charged and sentenced to detention.

He joined the Grand Palais company in 1948, playing the juvenile lead in musical comedy where his talents as an actor, singer and dancer brought him much success. This was the end of an era for Whitechapel's vibrant Jewish working-class culture, in which the Yiddish theatre occupied a central role. In its heyday at the turn of the century, Yiddish operettas and melodramas attracted huge crowds to the cavernous Pavilion theatre on Whitechapel Road. There was even a Yiddish opera house on Commercial Road.

As late as the 1950s, Whitechapel still boasted its struggling Yiddish writers, daily Yiddish newspaper and well-stocked Jewish libraries. But the Yiddish theatre was the jewel in the crown - a collective of professional actors playing a full season from October to July with a change of play each week, all without any grant or subsidy. The theatrical grapevine was the neighbouring Hessel Street market, where Jewish shopkeepers and customers compared notes after each Saturday evening's first night.

Much of the Grand Palais's repertoire in the 1950s and 1960s was the fruit of Bernard Mendelovitch's collaboration with his partner on and off stage, the Polish Yiddish actor Harry Ariel. From their tiny flat in Philpot Street behind the London Hospital, they produced a remarkable body of plays, sketches and lyrics, combining Ariel's fluency as a dramatist and songwriter with Mendelovitch's comprehensive knowledge of English theatre and popular song.

The results could be intriguing. Ariel's play Motl's Honeymoon premiered in 1952, the story of a Jewish cobbler and his three rebellious daughters. It later appeared in Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv and New York. In fact, the play was adapted at Mendelovitch's suggestion from Hobson's Choice by the Manchester dramatist Harold Brighouse - the first of a series of Manchester dramas to undergo such a metamorphosis.

Ariel and Mendelovitch also worked together to create dozens of Yiddish parodies of popular chart hits - everything from "My Way" to "Walking My Baby Back Home" and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina". Sadly, such was the frenetic pace of the theatre, none of these was ever recorded or published.

When the Grand Palais closed down, Mendelovitch took a day job with an insurance company. But he continued to tour throughout Britain in a three-handed act with Harry Ariel and Anna Tzelniker. Their performances combined excerpts from the Yiddish classics and nostalgia for the folk songs and traditional Judaism of bygone years with bittersweet satire of a community in transition.

Favourite stories included the elderly East Ender who couldn't get his ailments seen to because his three prosperous doctor sons were all too busy with their own lives in the suburbs, and the barbed account of a nouveau riche Jewish wedding where the bride's hair is done by "Velvel Sassoon" and she arrives in a "Royce-Rosel" car. Then there were the jokes - the old Jew arrested during wartime blackout in a Whitechapel alley by a policeman who insists he accompany him to the station, explaining, " Ikh hob moyre tsu geyen aleyn": "I'm afraid to walk back on my own!" All of these would be greeted by gales of laughter and affectionate nods of recognition.

After Ariel's death in 1989, Mendelovitch found renewed success with his one-man show, which he played to large crowds in the United States and Canada. He was also engaged for a season by the Folksbiene Yiddish company in New York, playing the Hasidic Rabbi of Chernobyl in a new Yiddish play, Di moyd fun ludmir ("The Maiden of Ludmir"). But, with Yiddish in rapid decline, there were fewer offers of work and, with some bitterness, Mendelovitch was forced to come to terms with retirement.

He moved to Bournemouth and began teaching a Yiddish-language class, dined regularly at a kosher hotel, and never missed synagogue on a Saturday morning, enriching the sung service with his mastery of the inner harmonies. Gifted with a remarkable memory, he was an irrepressible source of stage anecdotes even in his last weeks in hospital.

David Mazower