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Photo by TheYiddishtheater
By Rukhl Schaechter
October 22, 2025
Lea Koenig, who played Shulem Shtisel’s mother Malka in the popular Israeli TV series Shtisel, sings a Yiddish song in a new music video posted on YouTube. The lyrics are accompanied by English subtitles.
As Koenig sings the song, “Kum zhe mame” (“Come, Mommy”), we see her leafing through old photo albums, gazing at images of her mother, presumably long gone. The poignant scene reminds us that even a woman in her 80s could occasionally feel like a little girl again.
“Kum zhe mame” was originally a Russian song called “There’s Little Light From the Window” written in 1964, with lyrics by Constantin Vanshkin and music by Eduard Kolmanovsky. In 1968 it was translated into Hebrew by Leah Noar. Now Israeli actor Yaniv Goldberg has written a Yiddish version.
This isn’t the first Yiddish translation of the song, though. The late songwriter Moshe Sachar, who translated the songs of Fiddler on the Roof into Yiddish in the 1960s, also translated this Russian song, which the popular Israeli singer David Eshet sang on his 1972 record album Farbotene lider (Forbidden Songs).
But there’s a major difference between the two Yiddish translations. Sachar’s song is political, describing a mother in the former Soviet Union trying to protect her son, while Goldberg’s is more personal and sentimental.
Lea Koenig was born in 1929 in Łódź, Poland. Her parents were the Yiddish actors Dina and Józef Kamień. When the Nazis occupied Poland her family escaped to Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan. Her father was murdered in the Holocaust. At the end of the 1940s, she emigrated with her mother to Romania, where she studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and began acting in local Jewish theater productions. In 1961, she emigrated to Israel.
Primarily acting in Hebrew, Koenig, who also speaks English, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Yiddish, performs in Israel, particularly in the Tel Aviv Yiddish theater, Yidishpiel and all over the world.
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