Lillian Lux

Lillian Lux (June 20, 1918 – June 11, 2005) was an American actress, singer, songwriter, and author who worked across Yiddish theater and Yiddish vaudeville in the United States, Israel, and other diaspora communities. Born Lillian Sylvia Lukashefsky in Brooklyn, she came from a family with theatrical inclinations — her father, a jeweler and descendant of Nachman of Breslov, had harbored his own ambitions to act and enrolled his daughter in the Yiddish Art Theater. Lux began performing there at the age of seven. By fourteen she was working as a chorus girl and participating in Yiddish radio programs. During her time in the Catskills, she was paired professionally with a young Danny Kaye, and the two maintained a lifelong friendship.

In 1938, Polish-born Israeli actor and director Pesach Burstein hired Lux for his theater company's South American tour. The professional relationship became personal, and the couple married during the tour in Montevideo, Uruguay. They had twin children, Mike and Susan, born in 1945, and the family performed together under the billing the Four Bursteins. In 1962, the family relocated to Israel.

Among Lux's most prominent stage roles were The Komediant and A Khasene in Shtetl, both directed by her husband. Her most critically recognized performance came in Itzik Manger's Songs of the Megillah, a production that became the longest-running Yiddish production in Israel to that point. Lux was instrumental in steering the family's work toward more serious theatrical material, and that production was among the results of that effort. The show reached Broadway as The Megilla of Itzik Manger, where Lux appeared during the 1968–1969 season — her sole Broadway credit.

Beyond the stage, Lux appeared in Israeli and American films and television productions, including The Body and Law and Order. She wrote songs and musicals, and also operated a cosmetics business called Lily of Israel. In 1980, she co-authored her husband's Yiddish-language autobiography, Geshpilt a Lebn, which was subsequently translated into English. In 1996, on the centenary of Pesach Burstein's birth, director Arnon Goldfinger released a documentary about the Burstein family's life and career, also titled The Komediant.

Lux's son, Mike Burstyn, went on to perform on Broadway, in Israeli theater, and in Yiddish theater. Her daughter Susan did not continue performing after her teenage years. Lux and her husband are interred in the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance section — Block 67 — of Mount Hebron Cemetery, a section reserved for those who worked in New York Yiddish theater and maintained by the Alliance.