This one goes out to friend Bob Berger, who told me not long ago that he was the great-nephew of the famous star of New York’s Yiddish Theatre scene, Seymour Rexite (Shayele Rechtzeit, 1914-2002). Bob was one of the movers and shakers at the legendary downtown performance space Collective: Unconscious, home to such outre institutions of the ’90s and early oughts as Rev Jen’s Anti-Slam, so I found a beautiful synchronicity in the information, the Lower East Side rhyming itself across a century. The neighborhood has since moved on to yet another incarnation. Such is the dynamism of the city.
Born in Poland, Rexite was already acting professionally in childhood. His father was a cantor, his mother a music teacher, his older brother an actor and songwriter. Part of his legend (a true part) is that, though he had emigrated to the States with his father and brother, his mother and other siblings were stuck in Poland due to America’s immigration quotas. Seymour’s brother Jack wrote a song called “Bring Me My Mother From the Other Side,” which Seymour had the opportunity to sing before members of Congress and President Coolidge, resulting in the reuniting of the family.
Rexite became a star of Second Avenue, the Yiddish Rialto, performing in Yiddish Vaudeville and shows like The Rabbi’s Melody and The Song of the Ghetto. He began singing in Yiddish on local radio in 1927, and appearing in Yiddish language films in 1930. In the ’30s, he sang (in English) in Billy Rose’s nightclubs The Diamond Horseshoe and the Casino de Paree. But in time he decided to double down on Yiddish-language entertainment and make it the focus of his life.
In 1943 Rexite married fellow Yiddish performer Miriam Kressyn. For years they had a program on the socialist radio station WEVD (call letters named after Eugene V. Debs), where they sang Kressyn’s translations of pop hits (from English into Yiddish). In 1970 they appeared in the show Light, Lively and Yiddish on Broadway.
As it happens, my friend the theatrical artist and Yiddish scholar Caraid O’Brien (whom I bumped into just the other day at Torn Page’s The Whole of Time), recorded a great piece of commentary about Rexite for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. You may watch that here.
Other internet articles and resources on Rexite abound. Here are some.
The Seymour Rechtzeit Jewish Theater Collection
For more on vaudeville and show biz history, please read No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
(Travalanche) 
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