Who Knew Rejection Could Be So Inspiring?

When you’re labeled “too Jewish,” what’s a Jew to do?

Pounding the pavement as a struggling actor in New York City, Avi Hoffman tried to soft-peddle his ethnic origins. Not that he wasn’t proud of his Jewish heritage, but he’d met with enough rejection from casting directors, who nixed him, sight unseen, simply on the basis of his name.

In their knee-jerk estimation, Hoffman says, he was “too Jewish” to be considered for mainstream roles. Even his acting credits, stemming from his first professional production at age 10, couldn’t convince those in the New York casting establishment--many of them Jewish themselves--otherwise.

The situation might have been funny if it weren’t so unfortunate. At the time, Hoffman and his actress wife, Laura Turnbull, were expecting their first child, were deeply in debt and were about to be evicted from an illegal sublet on New York’s Upper East Side.

“Desperation is the mother of invention,” says Hoffman, 42, speaking from his home in Coral Springs, Fla., where he and Turnbull have since settled with their daughters, Arielle Bluma, 6, and Liana Rose, 2. “There we were, about to have our first child, penniless and almost homeless. Of course, my wife and I were madly in love and happy as clams and all that kind of stuff, but the situation was really the worst it had ever been financially. I had no idea what I was going to do.”

At that critical juncture, the resourceful Hoffman decided to turn a perceived negative into the biggest positive of his career. Rather than downplaying his ethnic roots, Hoffman embraced them--with a vengeance. Pondering the issue of Jewish identity and his own experience of rejection, he sat down to write a “one-mensch” show.

The result, “Too Jewish? A Mensch & His Musical,” opens today at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse and runs through New Year’s Eve. The show, which premiered off-Broadway in 1995 at New York’s Houseman Theater, earned glowing notices, such as Clive Barnes’ rave in the New York Post: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love

Hoffman’s ‘Too Jewish?’ ” Hoffman has since played to sold-out houses in New York and Florida.

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Flush from the success of those engagements, Hoffman is convinced that his solo musical--actually an amalgam of the original “Too Jewish?” and a sequel, “Too Jewish Two!”--can fill the mid-size Freud for its L.A. run.

“All I can say is that, wherever I’ve been with this show, it’s done turn-away business,” Hoffman says.

“Too Jewish?” ranges from outright shtick (offbeat parodies of Broadway shows sung in Yiddish) to the surprisingly profound, such as his rendition of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s eloquent Nobel acceptance speech. An accomplished vocalist, Hoffman performs a variety of musical selections, from popular standards to Yiddish children’s songs. He also does a loving impression of Menashe Skulnik, a Jewish stand-up comic from the ‘30s and ‘40s whose humor has influenced generations of subsequent comedians, from Jerry Lewis to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld.

In his show, Hoffman deliberately mixes the humorous and the poignant to make a point. “Without being too pedantic about it, I wanted to show that the Jewish culture in general and the Yiddish language specifically run the gamut from the biggest shtick to the most profound depths of beauty,” Hoffman says. “And this magnificent culture, that I’ve known all my life, is now permeating our mass culture here in America. I think part of what my show is all about is bringing all those far-flung elements together in a way that is very entertaining but also moving and educational.

“I would say that our audiences are about 90% Jewish. But the fact that we do have a fair amount of non-Jews coming to see a show called ‘Too Jewish?’ is pretty amazing. And the people who see the show, whether they’re Jewish or non-Jewish, young or old, they seem to be able to somehow identify with what I’m talking about.”

Certainly, “Too Jewish?” seems to have touched a chord with critics and audiences alike. “We opened six years ago in September,” Hoffman says, “and lo and behold, we got rave reviews.”

In 1995, Hoffman was nominated for a Drama Desk award and a New York Outer Critics Circle award for outstanding one-person show. He also was named performer of the year by New York’s Press magazine.

“It was just this giant hit. That was the irony of it all. For most of my years in show business, I kept avoiding doing things that were ‘too Jewish.’ I guess you can’t really run away from who you are. The day that I [embraced] my identity and sat down and wrote the show was the day that my life changed in a major way.”

Hoffman had no idea just how big a change he was embracing. The runaway success of “Too Jewish?” in Florida eventually spurred Hoffman’s relocation to the Sunshine State and also inspired Hoffman to found the National Center for Jewish Cultural Arts, a Coral Springs, Fla.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving Jewish culture.

From actor to ethnic preservationist may seem an unlikely transition, but Hoffman came by both callings naturally. His mother, Miriam Hoffman, a musician and a playwright herself, also happens to be a professor of Yiddish at New York’s Columbia University.

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And if “Too Jewish?” was born in adversity, so was Miriam Hoffman. She was born in a Soviet prison, where her father was being held by the government, and spent her early years in a Siberian labor camp. After the war, she and her parents escaped Russia in 1945.

“I was about 9,” recalls Miriam Hoffman, speaking from her New York home. “We walked from Poland to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Germany. It was very traumatic, because we were refugees, and we were crossing borders, not knowing whether we would be arrested or let go. We were in limbo. We finally made it to the DP [displaced persons] camps in Germany. And once we were in the American zone, we felt complete relief. We had the sense that, once we were protected by the Americans, nothing bad was going to happen again.”

Avi Hoffman was born in 1958 in a Jewish enclave of the Bronx. He spoke only Yiddish when he first entered elementary school. His father, Mendl Hoffman, an Auschwitz survivor, later moved the family to Israel, where Hoffman spent the bulk of his adolescence.

Hoffman later visited Auschwitz during a Jewish cultural festival in Poland, where he was invited to perform. That experience informs much of his play. It’s appropriate that he begins “Too Jewish?” with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy--in Yiddish, no less. Although he is aiming for an uproarious tone, his show is, in essence, a meditation on the nature of existence, not only of the Jewish people, whose lives and culture were decimated by the Holocaust, but also on of Yiddish, an endangered language that Hoffman and his mother are committed to preserving.

Despite naysayers, who bemoan the demise of the language, both are convinced that Yiddish is in the midst of a heartening resurgence. “People have been prophesying the death of Yiddish since the 1800s,” says Hoffman. “Yet Yiddish never dies. Japan, of all places, has an enormous love of the Yiddish language. And Germany, of course, is now a great supporter of Yiddish. I think the guilt of having nearly annihilated it has created this opposite effect in Germany.”

Miriam Hoffman agrees. During her 10-year tenure at Columbia, she has seen her Yiddish classes swell from a handful of students to record enrollments. “I teach Yiddish literature and Yiddish theater arts and the Yiddish language at three levels, beginning, intermediate and advanced,” she says. “And I’ve seen it grow to an enormous registration--over 75 students. We’ve never had that many before.”

After Avi Hoffman returned to the States, he attended the University of Miami--the same school in which his mother enrolled a year later. “At the age of 45, my mom went back to college,” recalls Hoffman. “I’ll never forget that day. She was so frightened that I had to take her by the hand and walk her through the registration process. And she ended up being this incredible scholar, this specialist in the whole ethnography and linguistics of the Jewish culture.”

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It’s a culture that Hoffman and his wife are passing on to their daughters. “My wife was a non-

practicing Episcopalian. But she did convert to Judaism when we got married,” Hoffman says. “It was important to me, but it was especially important to my parents. For them, the whole concept of continuing our culture is paramount, and of course, according to the Jewish religion, Jewish descent is matrilineal. There aren’t really Yiddish schools anymore like when I was a kid. But I speak Yiddish to my kids and I sing them Yiddish songs, so they’re getting it by osmosis.”

One of the most unexpectedly touching moments in “Too Jewish?” happens to involve a children’s song--Hoffman’s rendition of “Oyfn Pripitchik,” which translates as “On the Hearth.” The song describes a snug scene of Jewish youngsters gathering around the fire to learn their letters, but the lyrics seem singularly plaintive: “When you, my children, when you get older, you will understand for yourselves how many tears are in the letters of the alphabet, and how much sorrow.”

For Hoffman, that kind of dichotomy, the juxtaposition of the obvious and the subtle, the hilarious and the harrowing, is typically Jewish. “In that children’s song, we teach our children the joys but also the sorrows of their heritage,” Hoffman says. “There’s also a very deep side to our experience, and children are never too young to really understand that.

“You know, one of the great things about being Jewish is that there is so much humor in everything, even in adversity. We laugh at everything, we laugh at ourselves, we laugh at our problems, we laugh at our persecutors. And that ability to laugh is, I believe, one of our great contributions.”

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“Too Jewish? A Mensch & his Musical,” UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, Westwood. Wednesdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 31. $25-$30. (Special New Year’s Eve show and party, $50.) (310) 825-2101.