Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish

Williamsburg Brooklyn, now-ish

Twenty-year-old LAZER is running petty scams for food and weed money with gorgeous, Entourage-obsessed pal MENDY. The boys are living in a cube van, divorced from their homes and community: the ultra Orthodox Jewish sect: "Satmar".

Running out of scams, they should really leave town. But Mendy has been bitten by “romantic love," a concept which doesn't exist in Orthodox Yiddishkeit. He is “waiting for a call.” Lazer ridicules him. “Love is a fiction, like Kashrut and the Resurrection.” The boys, although born in Brooklyn, converse in their first language: Yiddish. English is a dim third with which they are still struggling.

AVA is a middle aged ER nurse with a short fuse and a background with the Orthodox she won't discuss. She is now a secular Jew with more than passive aggression toward the Orthodox. In grad school to better her life, she gets saddled with translating "Romeo and Juliet" from old Yiddish to current Yiddish. Her take: “The world's most irrelevant language".

At work in a Brooklyn ER she snipes at Satmar EMT/Rabbi ISAAC about the frequent ex-Orthodox overdoses. She takes pity on another young homeless 'leaver', ZALMAN, and gives him her house key when he is no longer permitted to crash on a hospital gurney.

Zalman is convinced he has O.D.’d on studying Kabbalah at Yeshiva, and has "Kabbalitis". He's "leaking magic" and a little worried about it. Overwhelmed by Ava's inadvertent adherence to "Chochnassus Orchim", an obscure Jewish tenet of hospitality, he enchants her studio apartment. Everything: the Romeo manuscript, her Chagall print, and the large, old fashioned baby carriage she is using as a bedside table gets a dose of Kabbalah magic from the perplexed but gracious young Hasid.

When Ava throws in the towel on translating the play herself, Isaac calls the boys. When they arrive at her apartment with unruly, Yiddish-rapping friend "BUBBLES" in tow; she is quietly appalled that they have never even heard of the play.

As they start to “modernize” the archaic pages, the boys become interested in the story. With a little help from Zalman's random Kabbalah

dust, they begin to live it in their minds. In their fantasy world of "Romeo and Juliet", Romeo is Satmar, and Juliet is Chabad (Lubavitch). Although both sects are ultra-Orthodox, they have nothing but scorn for each other, and rarely inter-marry. And of course, the play is in colloquial Satmar Yiddish, with Rabbi Laurence replacing Friar Lawrence, and Juliet's tomb an Orthodox "taharaschtiebel". And the humor is subtly different. If Juliet will have him if he renounces his name, Romeo is all about calling the moil!

Although “banished” from their normal lives and haunts in reality, in their dream life the boys crash the Capulet feast, now a Purim party with a lax, Chabadnick "mechitzah", (room divider) dividing the sexes. As Purim is the holiday at which a Jew is commanded to drink and to become drunk, no one notices the instantaneous romance except Juliet’s Nurse, made corporeal in their communal fantasy as Ava.

Romeo pursues Juliet and Lazer tries to comprehend their actions, frustrated by his “home” being towed, his real life father refusing to acknowledge him, his nagging drug habit and a fleeting glimpse of a beautiful girl, Juliet’s real life counterpart, FAIGIE. Faigie is another disgruntled Orthodox teen, gorgeous, brainy, wondering where her real life mother is as she tries to stave off a "shidduch" (match).

By the end of this 92 minute confection, set to temp strains as diverse as Itzhak Perlman and Panic in the Disco, family is redefined, Shakespeare evaluated, Ava happier, the viewer not only understanding a little Yiddish, but thinking that boys in long black coats and peyos can actually be really sexy and cute. A meditation on love, and a stab at rapprochement between secular and Ultra-Orthodox. If the issues are not yet solved, they linger in the air like a little Kabbalah magic.

ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH is not MPAA rated. Please be aware that there are 5 seconds of partial nudity in this film. Viewer discretion is advised.

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