Vet kumen di nakht un vet zingen lyu-lyu

[sovay]

I just found out Theodore Bikel has died.

I am going to listen to a lot of Yiddish folksongs and then set about finding a copy of The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) stat.

Comments

[sovay]

Inter alia, he was a fabulous dreadful Hungarian.

It's very likely that I saw him first as Karpathy, but my definitive film memory of him really does seem to be the Soviet submarine captain who wants a closer look at America and promptly grounds himself and his crew on a sandbank off Cape Ann. For similar reasons, Alan Arkin will always look to me like a harassed political officer doing everything in his power to keep an international incident from starting out of sheer accidental stupidity. (He actually spoke Russian, unlike Bikel who could just sound very fluent. I respect that. I like to know something about any language I'm singing in, but that doesn't mean I could hold conversations in all of them.)