Personal tragedy has touched Ehrenreich’s life frequently, causing him to lose his mother and both of his sisters to early Alzheimer’s disease. Describing the stress from those situations as “tremendous,” he credits his own survival to his being distanced by his age and his American upbringing. However, he states his awareness of his family and his own life has increased greatly, saying, “I found this thing, and I talk about it.”

“I just think that when you have a history like this, you need to be able to laugh,” he said. “If you can’t, you go out of your mind. One of the common threads is the ability to laugh at yourself. There’s a lot of laughing. You’ve got to go there. In my show, they’re right next to each other – it’s obvious. In any of these shows, there is the culture which has all of these challenges…I have so many people that say, ‘I cried so much at both parts. I cried nice and I cried sad. Bu I was laughing while I was doing it.’ I’m putting them together.”

He said his experience with this show has been deeply rewarding and unique. “I’m sure I will never have anything like this again. I will have other things in my life, but it’s never going to be like this.”

The response to A Jew Grows in Brooklyn has been unlike any other show he has ever done. “People stay and wait for me after and tell me the most personal things about their lives,” he said. He described the people who speak to him after his performance as fitting into four different categories: people whose parents survived the Holocaust or who are survivors themselves, people who grew up in Brooklyn, people who were visitors of the Catskills and people who are not personally related to the show’s topic in any way, but who are deeply moved by it.

Witnessing how people interpret his material personally has been a great experience, he said.

“For a 90 year old Holocaust survivor coming to the show, it is different. It’s one emotion for one person and an entirely different thing in another person….I think that is part of the creative process,” he said. “You create something and then what’s great about it is that people will take it and morph it into something that works for them. What these songs mean to me is related to what I was going through in my life. And for someone else the same song relates to something entirely different in theirs.”

Ehrenreich’s show is an interactive one, during which he permits the audience to speak out and share their own opinions and stories. He said he does not mind the interaction, as long as it is during an appropriate time in the show. He is sensitive to it, due to his experiences with his sisters and his mother when they were suffering from Alzheimer’s. If someone shares that his or her parent ...