We’ve received word that a five-foot tall knish will grace Second Avenue this Sunday at 4pm, leading a processional along the blocks that were once called “Knish Alley.” The event is part of the Conflux Festival happening throughout the East Village this weekend. The very creative press release states:
The walking, talking potato pocket will parade up and down the thoroughfare nicknamed Knish Alley in the heyday of Yiddish theater.
The knish processional kicks off at Abe Lebewohl Park, at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street, and will stop at the Yiddish Art Theater (now Village East/City Cinemas) and the Yiddish Walk of Fame, which showcases the names of Yiddish actors in granite stars embedded in the sidewalk. The Yiddish Walk of Fame was installed in 1984 in front of the Second Avenue Deli by Abe Lebewohl, who opened the restaurant in 1954. Lebewohl was murdered in a 1996 robbery.
Laura Silver, who will play the role of the knish, is a native New Yorker and writer currently at work on a history of the wrapped pastry, which chronicles her hunt for the food’s origins in New York, in Eastern Europe, France and Israel. Silver, whose grandmother attended Yiddish theater on Second Avenue in the 1950s, is a recent graduate of the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture of New York University and YIVO.
On October 1, she launched an online campaign through Kickstarter.com, to help raise money for her creative endeavors. She must secure $5,000 in pledges by November 1, 2010 to access the dough.
