Since moving to Austria in the summer of 2024, Lea Kalisch has been on a whirlwind journey, one that has led the multitalented, multilingual singer/songwriter/musician to add writer/director/actor to her resume.
“I would definitely say, in the last two years, a lot of has happened in my career,” Kalisch said. “There’s been some kind of up leveling of some kind.”
Kalisch’s will be back in Minnesota – where she lived with her husband, former Temple Israel Rabbi Tobias Moss – for two events on Nov. 23 and 25. The first event, at Hook and Ladder Theater will be Lea Kalisch & Her Shtetl Cabaret, with special guest Jewbalaya. Nov. 25, Kalisch will be premiering her short film, Un Tango Para Rachel (A Tango for Rachel), a Yiddish Tango film set in 1920s Argentina.
Kalisch’s Shtetl Cabaret has performed in Minneapolis a couple of years ago as a part of a Jewbalaya show, but the show has expanded and the Minneapolis stop is one part of her North American tour that includes stops in Detroit and Vancouver.
“It’s Jewish, feminist, rap, Yiddish, salsa, all in one night,” she said. “I performed it again in 2025, and now we’ve created this whole tour around that. That’s my cabaret: Touching the shtetl souls. But also being super modern and straightforward.”
The film has very different roots, starting with Kalisch’s fascination with prostitution and the Tango.
“Since I was nine years old, I had some kind of fascination for prostitution,” said Kalisch, who in 2021, learned a Yiddish folk song about prostitutes in Argentina. “I was like, I gotta follow this song. That means that Jewish history and Argentina and prostitution are somehow connected. And so I went down the rabbit hole and found this whole underworld of Jewish history.
“For three years, I did some research, and I knew that I wanted to bring my passions together, Judaism, Yiddish and tango.”
Un Tango Para Rachel was made possible, in part, with the support of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship that Kalisch was awarded in 2023 in the Theater, Performance and Spoken Word category. She spent some of the grant award on a filmmaking mentorship with Israeli writer/producer Ela Thier at her Independent Film School.
Kalisch had written a script within four months, and she went to Argentina in February 2024 with her tango shoes and script. Her Minneapolis dance teacher, Sabine Ibis, told her to meet with a tango dancer from Montreal who was now in Buenos Aires.
“I asked him ‘Do you know anybody in the film industry and connected to tango?’” Kalisch said. “And he said ‘I know one Jewish woman who’s into tango and is a filmmaker.’”
Kalisch met with Yael Szmulewicz before flying back to Minnesota.
“I sat down with her and said I have a script and I have money, but I need a production,” she said. “And I need to shoot my film in Argentina. That was very clear to me.
“I said to Yael ‘I’ve only known you for an hour. You’re going to be my producer. We’re going to make this film.’”
The film was shot and edited in June and July of 2024 – right at the time Moss and Kalisch were packing up their Minneapolis home and moving to Vienna, while also finishing up the Jewbalaya album, and recording her own album in Prague last summer.
Lea Kalisch with her husband, Rabbi Tobias Moss (Courtesy/Photo by Yannic Steuerer)
“Making a film in a foreign language for the most part, with a completely foreign team, was kind of insane,” she said.
Kalisch also acts in the film, but which part she was going to play wasn’t clear.
“I wrote two female parts, and I wrote both with the same passion because I didn’t know which part I was going to play,” she said. “Somebody who came in who was so right for [Rachel], that I just said ‘OK. I’m doing the other.”
Writing the role with passion wasn’t enough for Kalisch to be good at acting.
“Yael said, ‘Lea, you need to work on this role. You have so much to do with your directing, but you need to work on your acting,’” Kalisch recalled. “I’m like ‘Oh my God I can’t act!’
“A week before the shoot, I suddenly freaked out and called my friend in Israel, who’s a great coach, and said, ‘I can’t act. Can you please help me?’ There were definitely freak-out moments along the way.”
Having a hand in every part of the production was overwhelming at times, but Kalisch wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Being the director, the producer, the writer, and an actor is insanity too,” she said. “But that’s how it had to be.”
