We all fell in love with Nuchem Shtisel in the second season of “Shtisel,” the Israeli show about an ultra-Orthodox family that lives in the deeply observant and closed neighborhood of Mea Shearim. “Shtisel” was a complex, beautifully drawn portrait of one Jewish family: patriarch Shulem (Dovaleh Glickman), his children (Michael Aloni’s dreamy artist Akiva, Neta Riskin’s steady and hardworking Giti and Sarel Pitterman’s Tzvi Aryeh, the struggling eldest) and grandchildren (including Shira Haas’ fiercely independent Ruchami). When the second season opens, Shulem’s beloved mother lies in a coma at a Jerusalem hospital. Suddenly, in walks Nuchem, flanked by his daughter Libbi, set on going to see his mother; he is Shulem’s brother. Nuchem is not interested in the nurses’ idle chit chat, and mutters about the hospital workers, the “Zionists,” calling them “reshoim arurim,” accursed villains — a muttered term that is perhaps the most iconic quote of the show.
We later find out he’s in Israel for self-interested reasons, to get an apartment that belongs to the family. And yet, as selfish and kvetchy as he first appears to be, when he sees his mother, his face brightens into that of a fresh-faced boy, his smile, presence, charm, dazzling his mother awake after months of unconsciousness. Her son from Belgium is finally here.
The third, and perhaps last, season of “Shtisel” aired back in 2020 and 2021, but viewers can now experience a sort of “Shtisel” homecoming through “Kugel.” The show’s prequel aired in Israel last year and is now streaming exclusively on the Israeli content platform Izzy. At its center is Nuchem, filled with the same kind of flawed human charm as he always is, and played by an actor who has spent decades charming and winning over audiences in Israel and abroad. Of course, I’m talking about Sasson Gabay.
Sasson Gabay, born in Iraq and raised in Israel, started his career in the Israeli theater. He made it big in the cinema world winning four Ophir Awards (the Israeli Oscars, if you will), and even garnered some iconic international roles including in the Rambo franchise. He’s played historical legends like Shimon Peres in “Oslo” and President Anwar Sadat in “The Angel.” (He also played WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s father in Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed”.) In 2018, he reprised his iconic movie role of Egyptian band leader Tawfiq Zacharya for “The Band’s Visit” in its Broadway adaptation, acting opposite his son, Adam Gabay, who plays one of the Israeli locals at the town of Beit Hatikvah where Tawfiq and his band end up.
American viewers may not understand just how big Gabay is. In Israel, he can’t walk down the street without someone recognizing him from one of his iconic roles. It’s not hyperbole to call Sasson Gabay one of the greatest Israeli actors of all time. His former “Band’s Visit” co-star, Etai Benson, likened him to the Israeli Robert DeNiro. His “Kugel” co-star, Mili Avital, who plays his ex-wife Yiddis, told me she’d been dreaming for decades of starring in a project with Sasson, and talked about collaborating with him with the same kind of enthusiasm she shared about recently co-starring in a project with Anthony Hopkins.
But Sasson Gabay doesn’t have the bravado or mannerism you would associate (perhaps unfairly?) with a Hollywood star. He may have only have learned Yiddish for his role in “Shtisel,” but there’s a word in the Germanic Jewish term that everyone who meets him seems to describe him as: a mensch.
When I talk to him over Zoom, he has that same sweetness of Nuchem without any of the spikes. There’s a pure enthusiasm about this role, about acting and about the future. There’s no jadedness, just love for the craft and the opportunities it gives him to be all these differently people. And more than anything, there is a deep love for Nuchem.
“Kugel” has an intimacy to it, the kind you create over a warm slice of the fragrant Ashkenazi noodle casserole it is named after. The show focuses mostly on the adventures of Nuchem and Libbi (played by Hadas Yaron), allowing us to form a deeper sense of familiarity with them. It has a whimsical feel to it, an almost Wes Anderson vibe, a little like its protagonist, Nuchem, who also has this childlike quality. For Gabay, returning to the character felt smooth and easy, like welcoming an old friend. Gabay fell in love with Nuchem right away when he took up playing him back in the mid-2010s, and had been hoping for his return — he told me that he didn’t feel like he was quite done with this character.
“All the characters that I portrayed in my career somehow are within me,” he said about the role. “Even though I leave them, I don’t leave them. But with Nuchem he was so vivid. He was still so vivid.”
Nuchem in “Kugel” is even more complex than he was in “Shtishel,” where he wasn’t the direct and almost constant subject of the spotlight like he is in this new show. He makes him money as a jeweler by lying to new widows, telling them that their husbands had a special piece of jewelry ordered for them, and asking them to pay for it. On paper, it’s beyond the pale. But in the show, and to Gabay, Nuchem is selling these widows a dream. In the same way his daughter, Libbi, sells her fictional stories, he sells the widows a last loving memento from their husband — “he gives them this gift, they get something in return, he gives them a piece of jewelry…” Gabay said, justifying his character’s actions. “[It’s] a memory from their husband, a thing [that] is special to them… it’s not that he doesn’t give them anything and swindles them. He has a heart. When he see someone struggling, he won’t take advantage of them. He cares about these people, his motivation is positive.”
“Nuchem is a very colorful character. He cuts corners,” Gabay said fondly, “I love that he’s a survivor… He just wants to make it. He wants to make money. He falls and gets back up and he never pities himself. I love that he’s a survivor in his personal life, too. His family is falling apart, he knows how to accept his dire fate, but he never falls. It’s true that he bends the rules, that he’s a manipulator, that he does things at the edge of a conman and a swindler but when you check it, it comes from a good place. He’s not really a crook.”
Gabay laughs and agrees when I call Nuchem a bit of an anarchist.
“He loves people, he loves to eat well, he loves money, he loves women, he loves life,” he said. “In his Haredi frame of life, I love how down-to-earth he is, how practical he is. He doesn’t pity himself — even when Yiddis breaks up with him, he tries to woo her back, but when she says no, the story between them is over. He just accepts it. He has his pride, his honor — he doesn’t want to burden his partner.”
Nuchem is a rebel with a cause, deeply rooted in his Orthodox life. Just like in “Shtisel,” religion itself is never a source of conflict in the show, just something that colors the lives of its characters with different rituals.
Gabay was thrilled to reunite with Yaron, playing his daughter Libbi, for “Kugel.” Just like he did with his character Nuchem, he fell in love with Yaron the moment he started working with the young actress, who was recently in “We Were the Lucky Ones.” While Nuchem’s love life is in upheaval in the show — he forms a tender connection with Pnina (Rotem Abuhab), a widow and the owner of the local kugel shop amid his divorce — Libbi is inarguably his real soulmate. He calls her his “matone,” his gift. Gabai explained that the two characters relationship is very close, and even if they argue and have fall outs, Nuchem is more sensitive to her than to anyone else in his life.
“She’s a wonderful actress,” Gabay said of Yaron, “For me just to look at her eyes and to look at her face — the expression that she’s giving… You can see her very delicate thoughts and you can feel her and it was lovely. She’s a wonderful partner.”
The two were so close and in sync as scene partners, they didn’t have to discuss much before shooting, Gabay said. “We feel each other and understand,” he explained. He had a similar experience with the show’s director, “The Chef’s” Erez Kav-El, who wrote the movie “Restoration” that Sasson starred in back in 2011.
The kind of intimate and close feeling of the show was echoed in the experience of shooting. Shooting in Antwerp was, for Gabay, a “revelation.” Some of their castmates in the city were actual Antwerp Jews and their welcome was much warmer than that of the Jews of the insular Mea Shearim where the original show was shot. While the Haredi Jews of the insular Jerusalem community do seem to watch the show, they aren’t as open and proud of it as the Jews of Antwerp. When Gabay would walk down the street with his Hasidic garb, he’d often be chased by by young people speaking to him in Yiddish about his character. He had to tell them he didn’t speak the Jewish tongue. The creator of the show Yonatan Indursky, executive producer Dikla Barkai, and director Kav-El were invited for Shabbat dinner by the local Jewish community. Sometimes, the cast would film in an apartment and the neighbors upstairs would have them over. Gabay was especially surprised by how proficiently so many of the Belgian city’s Jews spoke Hebrew, and spoke it just as fluently as he did.
The show, like Gabay’s career, is full of different languages; the actor has played roles in Arabic, Persian, French and more, and in this show, he speaks Hebrew, a little bit of Flemish and quite a bit of Yiddish.
“The main challenge for me is to master the Yiddish, but I say [that] in a positive way,” he said.
Gabay, who was born in Baghdad and moved to Israel when he was 3 years old, got an ear for accents at his dad’s grocery store, where he and his siblings would often help out. “There was the Polish accent and the Iraqi accent and the Moroccan and the French and the Russian and the American… one of the things in Israel was to imitate how people speak Hebrew in their accents,” he said. “So maybe my ear got used to that.”
Sasson Gabay turned 77 last year, but just like his character Nuchem, he still has a twinkle in his eye, a love for acting that’s pure and unblemished and big hopes for the future. He’s shooting a show with his son, Adam — “He does really beautiful things, he works, he writes, I’m so happy with him, I have five kids and I have so much pride in all of them…” he told me — where he plays a grandfather who starts an Arak distillery with his grandson. He’s in a new production of “Antigone.” He is proud of his work in season three of “Tehran,” an Apple+ TV show that is unfortunately not yet available stateside. He’s got a ton of projects in the works. But more than that, he has dreams: of coming back to Broadway (where he made his debut) in his 70s, of starring in the Israeli stage production of “The Band’s Visit” that keeps getting pushed back.
And of course, he has dreams of another season of “Kugel.” And I can’t help but wish for all of his dreams to come true.
The first season of “Kugel” is now streaming on Izzy. You can meet Sasson Gabay, “Kugel” executive producer Dikla Barkai and “Shtisel” star Michael Aloni at NY’s Congregation Rodeph Shalom on April 28. Get tickets here.
