Tuning Into Tradition : Jewish Singer Is Devoted to Interpreting the Lyrical Side of Her Heritage

“Shir-Heaven” is the name of Lisa Wanamaker’s second album, and if you know Hebrew, you realize it’s a pun. Shir is the Hebrew word for “song.”

Wanamaker, a 16-year resident here, is a singer of Jewish songs. Last night, she sang a new Yiddish love song in the 1996 American Jewish Song Festival at Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino. And Wednesday night, she will present a program of Jewish songs in Hebrew, Yiddish, English and Ladino, a language of Sephardic Jews, at the University of Judaism on Mulholland Drive.

Mario Casseta, music director for KPFK-FM (90.7), once said that Wanamaker’s work was “the greatest thing since sliced challah.” But, as the singer explained recently, she took a decidedly roundabout route to becoming an interpreter of Jewish music.

“I started out as a dancer,” said Wanamaker, who studied at the London School of Contemporary Dance, the Toronto Dance Theatre and the Jerusalem Group of Contemporary Dance in Israel.

Born in Los Angeles, Wanamaker was enrolled in her first dance class at age 3 by her mother, an actress who used the name Basha Slobodkin when she did Yiddish theater and the name Edith Young when she did English-language plays.

At 7, Wanamaker joined the children’s group Young Players Productions, run by Tony Monaco. A Broadway veteran, Monaco produced popular children’s shows in Los Angeles, Wanamaker said, and expected his young actors to do their own makeup and take care of their costumes as well as learn their lines and hit their marks.

“Tony’s idea was that every child should learn what the theater was about from scratch.”

Wanamaker moved to Israel after graduating from University High School in Westwood and immersed herself in dance. Back in Los Angeles, after living abroad for several years, she threw herself into the lively folk dance scene that thrived here from the late ‘70s through the mid-’80s. People would queue up outside popular folk clubs like Cafe Danssa on the Westside, Wanamaker recalled.

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The club featured many kinds of ethnic dance--Russian, Greek, Balkan, Romanian. “We even learned a Japanese dance once,” she said. But Israeli was the most popular style. Israeli dance is extremely varied, she explained. There are circle dances, line dances, slow ones, fast ones, dances you can dance alone and dances for couples. She and her friends went almost every night.

“The appeal when you’re there is a rush, from the excitement of the music, the exercise, the camaraderie.”

It was at Cafe Danssa that she met Dow Lebowski, now her husband and a sales rep for computer-components companies. Lebowski had wandered into the club, figuring it would be a good place to meet women.

Folk dance led to singing. In 1980 one of Wanamaker’s friends was getting married and wanted a song from the folk-dance repertoire performed at her wedding.

Wanamaker said, “I’ll sing it for you.” But the friend wasn’t sure. “I want it to be good,” she warned Wanamaker. “I had to audition for her and her future mother-in-law,” Wanamaker recalled with a laugh. Fortunately, she said, “they were blown away.”

Wanamaker has spent the last 10 years working on what she calls “hard-core vocal production,” much of it in Studio City with octogenarian voice coach Sara Sandler, a former opera singer who recently retired to Las Vegas.

Wanamaker was encouraged to record by a Dutch friend whom she met at a Brandeis University dance camp. He arranged for her to travel to the Netherlands, where in 1994 she recorded a double album of Jewish songs, “Shirim,” on the Syncoop label. The Dutch love ethnic music and dance, Wanamaker said, and are especially interested in Jewish music.

“Some of it has to do with World War II and the Anne Frank connection,” she speculated.

Wanamaker not only followed her mother to the stage but, like so many Angelenos, grew up in a family with entertainment industry ties. The late Sam Wanamaker, the American actor who mounted a campaign to erect a reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater on the banks of the Thames, was her uncle. The actor was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and moved to England. As Wanamaker recalled, his attitude was “ ‘Do we need this?’ and he left.”

Sam Wanamaker died in 1993 before he could realize his dream, but the new Globe is expected to have its grand opening in 1997, and Wanamaker and other family members will attend. The Lebowskis’ 11-year-old son, Adam, may have inherited the performing gene as well. He plays the guitar and likes to folk dance with his parents, who now go dancing only on special occasions, including Israeli Independence Day and during Hanukkah.

As a child, Wanamaker was exposed to Yiddish language and culture at the Institute of Jewish Education, a secular school on the Westside that espoused Zionism and social action, but not religion.

She studied Hebrew at the school as well, after her regular school let out. She also practiced her Hebrew at Zionist youth camps in Big Bear and Idyllwild, where the camp director sprinkled the Hebrew words for “pool,” “flagpole” and “dining hall” into his announcements over the loudspeaker.

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For all her early exposure to Hebrew, Wanamaker said, “it wasn’t that I walked out fluent.” She learned fluent Hebrew only after she spent time on a kibbutz in Israel, where a wise friend suggested that she start by mastering the Hebrew-language baby books in the nursery where she worked.

At her concert in the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium, Wanamaker will sing songs from her CDs. Some are plaintive Yiddish standards, such as “Oyfn pripechik.” That’s a story song from the shtetl, one of the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe, about a rabbi teaching his students the Hebrew alphabet. “He’s trying to explain to them that it’s not just letters, this alphabet. It’s the pain and tears of our people,” she said. “He tells them, ‘May you find comfort in this alphabet.’ ”

Wanamaker will be accompanied by Gordon Lustig on the guitar and John Bilezikjan on the oud, a Middle Eastern instrument that resembles a potbellied guitar. She plans to open with “Zol Zayn,” a Yiddish song written early in the century when anti-Semitic pogroms blackened the skies over the shtetls and many young people dreamed of Palestine and a new life in a Jewish state.

“It’s a hope and freedom song,” she said. She will sing it on a darkened stage, lit by a single spotlight. “I want to catch people,” she said. “It can take your breath away.”

Wanamaker also has sung liturgical music. Until recently, she was a volunteer cantor at Los Angeles Reconstructionist Community Havurot. She says the only Jewish music she doesn’t enjoy singing is that referred to as Second Street, the Yiddish-language pop music that flourished in New York decades ago and produced such standards as “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

She often gets requests for that repertoire, but resists performing it. “Why would you want to do Mickey Mouse when you can do Mozart?”