"Maurice Schwartz, the monarch of New York's Yiddishtheater, plays a sweatshop owner in Uncle Moses°. Patriarch andexploiter, cunning businessman and dazzled suitor, Moses is a symphonyof contradictions, which Schwartz orchestrates brilliantly."(Richard Corliss, Time, 1992) A portrayal of life on the Lower EastSide, Uncle Moses depicts transplanted Jews whose values are not somuch unraveling as transmogrifying before our eyes in the sweatshops andcrowded tenements. Moses-in Poland, a lowly butcher, in America, thebenevolent despot of Orchard Street-would seem the apotheosis of change,but not really. He himself represents an old order, the patriarch whoasserts that his workers are mishpokhe (family-but they're not buyingit), whose vanity produces sundry progeny, whose deep pockets buy him abride (or rather, her family). Change only comes when he realizes that,as a human being, he is powerlessness in pressed pants. Then Schwartz'sdelightfully comic ham transforms into that thing that had him known as"the Olivier of the Yiddish stage."