Michael Tilson Thomas

If anybody's being taken in, it's me.

She did.

That's exactly the way she told me the story.

Yeah, she was going to be in the center of it.

I mean, women's rights, feminism was a very big part of the Yiddish theater, but along with a lot of other social issues.

The Yiddish theater plays, even the so-called shunt sort of low everyday plays,

were about issues like women's rights, like about labor, capital and labor, child labor, about degrees of religious observance, about the whole issue of assimilation, about reproductive rights of women, and also a lot about...

The language.

Are we going to speak Yiddish?

Are we going to speak English?

What language at home?

What language in the rest of the world?

And what about the much larger issue, which is how can it be that somebody who was such a big shot in the old country...

became a nobody in America, and some little schlemiel from nowhere in a tiny village has suddenly in the United States become such a maher, such a big shot.

And what does an immigrant pool of people do to understand where now is honor, where is tradition?

This is a little introduction to a song called Minka's Song, Minka's Monologue, one of Bessie's most famous parts in which she's playing a girl from a little village who's come to the United States and is on the eve of a huge adventure, a Pygmalion-like experiment in which she will be elevated from her lowly parlor maid status to being the lady of the house.

1920-something.

I was lucky enough to hear her deliver a lot of her biggest numbers right there in our living room since she would arrive every weekend to our house and we would put on a little show together in which I would accompany her in some of her songs and she would do recitations and we did little scenes together.

So although my parents fondest hoped that I would become some kind of scientist or mathematician, I realized that she was already getting me into the whole theater experience right there at home.

She said your parents are very lovely people but terribly conventional.