Berney Theatre           

Asper  Jewish Commmunity Centre  

123 Doncaster Street, Winnipeg

 Jane Enkin's concert of tangos in Yiddish includes songs from Argentina, New York's Second Avenue theatres and Polish cabarets.  Beautiful tangos, tender and bitter, written in the ghettos during the war years, are at the heart of the performance.

Tango was born in Argentina in the 1890s. Tango band leaders on tour from Argentina in the 1920s became stars in New York and Europe. Soon Jewish composers embraced the rhythms and emotional intensity of tango, and gorgeous new tango melodies were heard in the theatres of New York's Second Avenue and chic clubs in Germany and Poland.

As Jews were forced into the ghettos of Vilna and Warsaw, they found in tango a musical language to express bitterness, sorrow, longing, irony and love in the face of the horror around them. After the war, thriving Yiddish-speaking communities in South America, North America and Israel sustained the Jewish love of tango's bittersweet beauty.

Jane Enkin shares this rich legacy with passion and tenderness. Jane is a singer, songwriter and storyteller with a wide repertoire of Yiddish songs. She performed twice in Winnipeg's Mameloshen Festival of Yiddish Entertainment and Culture. Her Yiddish tangos were featured in the Passion For Tango Festival in Victoria BC.