Published: 16 September 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
When Shane Baker was 25, he fell in love with a 92-year-old Yiddish actress. Now he’s bringing his Yiddish drag show to Melbourne.
When Shane Baker steps onto the stage to perform as a Yiddish drag queen in Melbourne tomorrow night, he will channel one of his first loves.
Mina Bern was a star of Yiddish theatre in pre-war Poland and continued her acclaimed career in the US until she died in New York in 2010, aged 98.
The pair struck up a relationship after Baker saw her perform in 1993 in a “Yiddish Queen Lear” production. “She was the first Yiddish actress I saw and fell in love with. She was 92 and I was 25,” he says. “It was a strictly physical relationship. She liked to see how much herring I could eat.
“I learned to speak Yiddish thanks to her.”
"She was 92 and I was 25; it was a strictly physical relationship. She liked to see how much herring I could eat."
Baker was not long out of college in San Antonio when he properly met Bern in New York at a conference. She is partly responsible for helping Baker, who is not Jewish and was born into an Episcopalian family in Kansas City, become one of the great contemporary proponents of the Yiddish language and theatre in America.
He is now director of the Congress for Jewish Culture - a US-based group that promotes Yiddish arts and literature.
As a high school student, Baker was exposed to some Yiddish through Bernard Malamud’s writing, and he had heard snippets on movies and television.
Later, in college, he asked a professor to help him learn the language and began teaching himself to read and write. “Once I started reading the literature I was fascinated with the modernist poetry and, of course, the humour.”
