"Joel Grey, the Academy Award-winning master of ceremonies in Cabaret, finally tells his remarkable life story. Born Joel David Katz to a wild and woolly Jewish-American family in 1930's Cleveland, Joel began his life in the theater at the age of nine, starring in local productions of touring Broadway hits. He was hooked, and the search for the spotlight took him from the Cleveland Playhouse to seedy, gangster-filled nightclubs in Chicago, and finally to the lights of Broadway and the dizzying glamour of Hollywood. Master of Ceremonies is a memoir of a life lived in and out of the limelight, but it is also the story of the man behind the makeup. Coming of age in a time when being yourself tended to be not only difficult but also dangerous, Joel was required to act both on and off stage. Deftly capturing the pain and secrets of an era we have only just started to leave behind, Joel's story is one of love, loss, hard-won honesty, redemption, and success"--

An award-winning actor on screen and stage ( The Defiant Ones , The African Queen , The Sound of Music , My Fair Lady , Fiddler on the Roof ), an activist for civil rights and progressive causes worldwide, and a singer whose voice has won him great applause, Theodore Bikel here tells his own compelling life story. Born in Austria, raised in Palestine, educated in England, and with a stellar career in the United States and around the world, Bikel offers a personal history parallel to momentous events of the twentieth century. In an eloquent, fiercely committed voice, he writes of the Third Reich, the birth of the State of Israel, the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, and the tumultuous 1960s in America. In a new postscript to this paperback edition, he looks at recent events in the Middle East and takes both sides to task for their excesses.

"As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?"--

(Applause Books). Jacob Adler, with his performances in the Yiddish King Lear , Uriel Acosta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice , became first a megastar of the exploding Yiddish theatre, and then all of Broadway. His memoirs, originally written and published in Yiddish and now translated (by his granddaughter) into English provides not only a compelling portrait of one of America's greatest actors but a fascinating social history of his time.

Pesach Bursrein, an old trouper from the Yiddish theater, recalls dramas both onstage and off in this memoir, which he dictated to his wife, Lillian Lux Burstein. The Story of Burstein's successful stage career is played out against the background of political turmoil in Europe, vignettes of life in small towns and big cities, friendships and rivalries among theater folk, family life, 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 his audiences. While Burstein is a legend in Yiddish cheater, he was little known outside that world until he was celebrated in Arnon Goldfinger's acclaimed documentary Der Komedia11t. This memoir provides the first window for English readers into the other side of Yiddish culture—the Yiddish burlesque, the traveling Yiddish theater, and the music hall. It will not only delight readers but also reveal 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 century.