Playing Yentl’s father, Billy Wilder’s gangster and Papa Mousekewitz, he was a Jewish actor of unparalleled resourcefulness
Nehemiah Persoff
By Benjamin Ivry April 7, 2022
When Barbra Streisand sang the Oscar-nominated song “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” in her film “Yentl,” she was singing it to Nehemiah Persoff’s character, Rebbe Mendel. Persoff, who died April 5 at age 102, also starred as Papa Mousekewitz in the “American Tail” movie series. Yet Persoff’s varied work on stage, film, and TV proved that acting can be a heightened form of artistic dissimulation.
Persoff was born in Jerusalem but moved with his family to New York in 1929, where he attended the Hebrew Technical Institute, a vocational high school that would close a decade later. There he learned to maintain subway signals as an electrician, a day job he would hold while pursuing his true passion.
As he related in a memoir even as a three year old in Jerusalem, he realized that he could win affection and attention by skillful prevarication. Besotted with a nursery school teacher, he crashed his tricycle into the ground, feigning injury.
The deliberate accident achieved its intended result — the teacher rushed over and embraced little Nehemiah, much to his delight. He concluded: “I learned then that I could make people believe my exaggerations and make fiction accepted as truth. I guess I was born an actor.”
Ten years later, at his bar mitzvah he was ill-prepared, so he recited the portion of the Torah which he knew by heart, but the remainder was “ad libbed,” he said. “I double-talked the rest, thinking that chances are the people did not understand Hebrew.” The New York congregation, aware that Persoff was born in Jerusalem, assumed that his babbling was authentic.
Sometimes self-deception associated with his chosen profession led to later regrets. Although he had vowed to return to his homeland to fight for its existence during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, his Broadway career was just starting to make progress at the time, and he elected not to risk personal danger and other ordeals that would have impeded his future as a thespian. He later voiced regret for this choice.
Instead of fighting for Israel, he appeared in a 1948 Broadway flop, “Sundown Beach” by American Jewish novelist Bessie Breuer, about the rehabilitation of World War II combat pilots suffering from post-traumatic stress. Despite a strong cast, including Steven Hill (born Solomon Krakovsky), later to gain fame as DA Adam Schiff in TV’s “Law and Order” in addition to Persoff, the play ran for less than a week.
More successful productions of works by Shakespeare and Brecht included a 1950 “King Lear” with special Yiddishkeit, featuring Martin Gabel as Kent, Norman Lloyd (born Perlmutter) as the Fool, Arnold Moss as Gloucester, Joseph Wiseman (who would become renowned onscreen a dozen years later as Dr. No as Edmund, and Persoff as Cornwall.
The following year, Persoff was cast in Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” staged by Lee Strasberg as a vehicle for screen star John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle) as the eponymous hero and the Chicago-born Jewish dancer Pearl Lang as Solveig. John Randolph (born Emanuel Hirsch Cohen) played a number of small roles.
That same year, Persoff participated in “Flahooley,” a musical by E. Y. Harburg (born Isidore Hochberg), which satirized the McCarthy=era entertainment industry blacklist. Persoff performed alongside the Jewish comedians “Professor” Irwin Corey as a genie and Louis Nye as El-Akbar, The Elder Arab.
Corey, a master of double talk, might have helped Persoff further hone his improvisatory skills, already shown during his bar mitzvah. Even in plays without overt Jewish content, such as 1954’s “Mademoiselle Colombe,” translated by the American Jewish critic Louis Kronenberger from a play by Jean Anouilh, Persoff found Jewish colleagues such as Sam Jaffe (born Shalom Jaffe) and Eli Wallach, both regularly cast, like him, in all-purpose European roles.
Alluding more overtly to Jewish traditions in humor, “Reclining Figure” by Harry Kurnitz, a satire on art collectors and dealers that opened the same year, was directed by Abe Burrows with the Yiddish theater actor David Opatoshu and the sole Broadway acting performance of the American Jewish TV newsman Mike Wallace.
But in those days in New York, theatergoers who attended 1955’s “Tiger at the Gates” by Jean Giraudoux would be regaled by Morris Carnovsky, another actor influenced by the Yiddish theater, as King Priam of Troy, in addition to Persoff in a supporting role. By the end of the decade, Persoff’s Broadway career was drawing to a close, as he became increasingly in demand on the West Coast for film and television roles.
One such became available because of a squabble between Jewish actors. Filmmaker Billy Wilder originally sought to cast Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg of Romanian Jewish origin) as Little Bonaparte, an homage to Robinson’s 1930s film “Little Caesar,” in “Some Like it Hot” (1959).
But Robinson had vowed never again to work with George Raft, a performer with German Jewish roots who had brawled with him on a previous film set. So Persoff played, or more accurately overplayed, the role of Little Bonaparte, while Wilder settled for casting Edward G. Robinson Jr., the eminent actor’s son, as a mob assassin who kills Raft’s character.
Persoff’s final New York stage hurrah was in “Only in America” (1959), a play adapted from a book by journalist Harry Golden, whose father Leib Goldhirsch was a former editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Persoff played the role of Golden, publisher of The Carolina Israelite, a Charlotte, NC newspaper.
As Persoff became more renowned, his sense of self-worth as a performer also increased, further developing his abilities in deception. In his autobiography, Persoff recounts how he was irked by being asked to audition for a role as a mohel, Rabbi Isadore Glickman, in a 1990 episode of “L.A. Law,” despite being well-known in show business by that time. He decided to show his disdain by appearing and claiming to actually officiate at brit milah, or circumcision, ceremonies.
Persoff told the credulous production staff, “I’m sure you know that I am an actor; but I can’t always make a living at it, so I make up for that by doing some ‘moheling’ on the side.” His lie was accepted without question and he landed the part.
This tendency to wing it continued through stage performances after he relocated permanently to the West Coast. Although not a singer of the ability of a Theodore Bikel, and lacking Bikel’s monumental stature, Persoff nevertheless starred in California productions as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Fagin in “Oliver,” and even Don Quixote in “Man of La Mancha.”
A fixture at the Mark Taper Forum in the Los Angeles Music Center, Persoff starred with Ron Rifkin in “Rosebloom” (1970) a play by Harvey Perr, author of “Jew!” An abstract stream-of-consciousness portrait of a middle-class Jewish family, it pleased L.A. critics but a New York staging with a different cast failed.
More traditionally, at the Mark Taper, Persoff also acted in “The Dybbuk” by S. Ansky, as well as his own one-man show “Sholom Aleichem,” starting in the late 1970s. Tales told by Tevye the Dairyman were a fitting apotheosis for Nehemiah Persoff’s stellar performance career, profoundly inspired by fabulation.
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