Mina Bern | Versatile actress, 98

Mina Bern, 98, a plucky and versatile actress and singer who was one of the last links to the scrappy world of Yiddish theater in New York, died Sunday in Manhattan.

She died of heart failure, said her friend Eleanor Reissa, a Yiddish entertainer who directed Ms. Bern in four shows.

Ms. Bern was known not as much for her dramatic powers as for her cabaret-singing and comedic flair. She would play a coquette in one sketch, a busybody in another.

She also took roles in Hollywood movies calling for older immigrant women, among them Crossing Delancey (1988). In 2005, she performed a one-woman show on her life.

She was born Mina Bernholtz into a Yiddish-speaking home in Bielsk Podlaski, Poland.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, she and her daughter fled east, and she entertained audiences in the Soviet Union. At some point - there are conflicting accounts - she spent time entertaining Polish refugees in Uganda and then ended up in British-mandate Palestine, performing Yiddish revues in a land where people were emphasizing Hebrew as the new language of an emboldened Jewish people. In 1949, she came to New York with the revue Shalom, Tel Aviv.

- N.Y. Times News Service