Having a grandmother who was fond of singing songs to her in Yiddish didn’t make Janie Respitz think of the language as something that belonged exclusively to the past. It also inspired her to imagine how she could carry those tunes into the future.
While she’s lived in Toronto for the past two years, Respitz was raised in a non-religious home in Montreal, a place where she felt closest to the cultural aspects of Judaism. She majored in Jewish Studies at McGill University—but when she pursued a master’s degree, Yiddish spoke to her more than any other aspect of history.
Respitz has gone on to teach courses at McGill and Queen’s University, and performed in places like Toronto’s Bernard Betel Centre and the Cummings Jewish Centre for Seniors in Montreal.
“It’s been interesting to see how these people spoke Yiddish in their home as children but never spoke it during their entire adult lives. But now that they’re retired and have time on their hands, they have a desire to go back and rediscover the language.”
Today, when she hears statements about Yiddish dying out, she scoffs at the notion.
“It’s always been said it’ll have a slow death but I was encouraged to see how klezmer musicians revived the language through their music in the 1980s,” said Respitz. “And as much as these musicians focused on this Eastern European music, it was also about the lyrics coming from Yiddish poets, which Canadians saw with the Ashkenaz Festival at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto—and what Europeans experienced at the Weimar Festival in Germany.”
At the Miles Nadal JCC in Toronto on March 20, she is scheduled to perform Manger’s Megilleh, a one-woman Purim shpiel riffing off Megilleh Cycle, the 1936 creation of legendary Yiddish poet Itzik Manger.
It satirizes the Book of Esther by profiling lesser-known and often fictional characters from the story, featuring Yiddish songs and English narration (the latter written by a German theatre group in the 1990s).
“I love how he makes up this apprentice tailor character who is madly in love with Esther, and how she jokes with him how she’s going to marry the king, how that devastates the tailor,” Respitz said with a wide smile. “It’s an incredible part of the story.”
She doesn’t have time to go through any costume changes on stage, but she flips between characters thanks to a range of hats on a table in front of her.
Of all the music she brings to the stage, she often comes back to a favourite tune: “‘Margaritkelekh‘, which means ‘daisies’ in Yiddish.”
Her repertoire also includes Leyg ikh mir in bet arayn (which translates as “I Lay Me Down in My Bed”) and Berl der alter shiker, a ditty about an old drunk named Berl.
If there’s any accomplishment she’s proudest of in a 40-year singing career, it involved travelling to Mexico City for the 2019 singing competition Der Idisher Idol. Strumming chords on her guitar—with the original and translated lyrics projected on a screen—she sang “Kotsk,” a lesser-known folksong about a small town in Poland, which was the seat of the Kotsker rebbe, the founder of a Hasidic dynasty in the 18th century. Respitz won the prize for best interpretation of an existing song.
“When my friend first told me about the competition, urging me to participate, I said right away, ‘What are you smoking? Is that really a thing?!’ but it was, and I applied right away.
“It was so much fun. And how many people can say they won Yiddish Idol in Mexico City?”
