Jake Ehrenreich always wanted to be a real American. He excelled at stickball, played the drums, listened to Christmas music and spoke Yiddish – which is what always gave him away.
Jake Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich, who wrote and performs in the one-man play A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, is the son of Holocaust survivors. Born in the United States, he spent years fighting his culture. Now, he’s fighting to give it a voice.
“The story of Holocaust survivors has been told. I said, ‘One day, I’m going to tell this story from my perspective,’” said Ehrenreich, who will be performing his play in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre from April 28 to May 16.
“The story didn’t end. These people had children.”
Ehrenreich’s play delves into his immigrant experience, which includes his father’s Holocaust testimony, his sisters’ and mother’s battle with early onset Alzheimer’s and his desperate need to fit in with American culture.
It’s also a musical comedy.
“Judaism has a wonderful tradition of the circle of life. There’s a time for mourning and a time to end mourning,” he said. “When you get people to laugh, they become more emotionally attainable… when people laugh with you, they trust you.”
When writing the play, Ehrenreich, a musician and actor in his early 50s, was careful to keep a balance between light and dark. He never laughed at anyone, he laughed with them.
“My great-aunt, she looked like Yoda. Did I love her? Of course,” he said, adding that he’ll never forget her response when asked her age for a medical form.
“She said, ‘A woman can’t tell her age.’ I felt like saying, ‘Your age? I can’t tell your gender.’ That’s an important part of where the laughter comes from. It’s laughing at ourselves.”
For Ehrenreich, the jokes were the easy part.
“The most challenging parts were always the most personal,” he said.
This includes talking about his family’s experience in the Holocaust.
“[My great-aunt] said, ‘All you need to know is the best of us didn’t survive.’ [Survivors] lived with a tremendous amount of guilt,” he said.
Along with comedy and multimedia displays, such as his father’s Holocaust testimony, Ehrenreich tells his story through music, using both Yiddish and rock songs.
“Music to me is really a way I relate to the world,” he said.
“I play instruments in the show… I’m so surprised how people relate to the drum solo. Drums are extremely elementary and people go crazy. The applause you get is different than everything else.”
About a year and a half ago, Ehrenreich was asked by Health Communications Inc., the company that publishes the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, to turn his play into a book of the same name as the play.
“The book was the biggest surprise of my life. I thought it would be a snap, but it was an arduous undertaking,” he said.
In the book, he discusses parts of his life that were left out of the play, including his extensive drug use, which caught up with him in his late 20s during a gig at the Red Parrot Nightclub in New York.
“I had done so much blow that my heart felt like it was exploding out of my chest, and I actually felt like I could die right then and there,” he wrote.
Ehrenreich was also able to go into detail about what he calls his womanizing (he lost his virginity at 15) and the life lessons that he learned, like taking responsibility for his mistakes.
“I wanted to maintain that same balance of humour and life lessons,” he said.
Ehrenreich attributes some of the play’s success to the fact that his story is universal.
“It’s a very traditional Jewish story, but I’ve been told that [I] can be speaking Korean,” he said. “The journey we all share is one that deals with loss and fear and laughter and who we are. I wanted to be an American. It took me a long time to realize, ‘Why can’t I be both?’”
For tickets to A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, visit www.mirvish.com.
