Lillian Lux, who died Friday at 86, was a star of the old New York Yiddish theater community that centered on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, and the matriarch of a family of players that toured the world.

The act, billed at times as “The Four Bursteins,” included her husband, Pesach’ke (Paul) Burstein, and their twins, Susan and Michael. Pesach’ke was known as a fancy, or bird whistler, and was a master of all elements of musical theater. Susan, “Zisele” on the Yiddish stage, was touted as the “world’s youngest ventriloquist.” Michael, known as “Motele,” was a brilliant child singer who went on to an international acting career. Lillian was known to prewar Polish audiences as “The Jewish Shiksa” for her luxuriant blond tresses.

The family brought what Lux called “classical Jewish opera” to far-flung Yiddish-speaking enclaves in South America, South Africa, Europe, and Australia, as well as across America. Their best-known production was “A Khasene in Shtetl” (“A Village Wedding”), which created a minor furor when they presented it in Yiddish in Israel in 1954, a time when authorities were attempting to discourage the language Theodore Herzl had disparaged as mere “jargon.” In 1962, the family’s good fortune was rekindled with an Israeli production of “Megilla Lider,” at which no less an eminence than Gilda Meir appeared onstage for an ovation. The rehabilitation of Yiddish had begun, and the Bursteins moved to Israel.

Under the title “The Megilla of Itzik Manger,” the show was also Lux’s only Broadway credit, in two productions in 1968 and 1969 that also included Pesach’ke and Mark. The family’s journey to Broadway – where Mark performed the title role in “Barnum” – from Second Avenue via the rest of the Yiddish speaking world was the subject of the 2000 documentary “The Komediant.”

Lux was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of a costume jeweler who was a part-time inventor and aviator with theatrical ambitions of his own. He enrolled her at Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, where she began appearing in productions at age 7. She appeared on Yiddish radio and at 14 was hired as a chorus girl at the Second Avenue Theater, the epicenter of Yiddish productions. Performing at the Presidential Hotel in the Catskills, she was partnered with a young Danny Kaye. A rumored romance came to nothing, but the two were lifelong friends.

In 1938, Pesach’ke Burstein, 22 years her senior, hired her for his acting company’s tour of South America. Burstein was a leading light of Yiddish theater, a Pole who had abandoned his Orthodox family during World War I and survived the war by performing for Russian troops under appalling conditions. Brought to America in 1923 by the impresario Boris Thomashefsky, he quickly became a star of the Yiddish musical stage, as well as a recording artist. He signed a 20-year recording contract with Columbia Records and was often called upon to record Yiddish versions of Al Jolson tunes, sometimes in the same studio and on the same day as Jolson recorded the English versions.

During a stopover in Montevideo, Uruguay, Burstein and Lux were married, initiating a matrimonial partnership in the theater that would last a half-century, until his death in 1986.

The couple made a spectacular escape in 1939 when at the urging of a consular official, they elected to take the summer off during a tour of Poland. They steamed back to America days before the Blitzkrieg.

In New York, they appeared in productions together, often at the Hopkinson Theater in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 1945, despite Burstein’s apprehensions that children might hinder their touring, Lux presented him with twins. Ever the trooper, she performed into her ninth month of pregnancy. She managed to play the ingenue in “A Village Wedding” by concealing her condition with an ostrich feather.

The twins were integrated into the act from an early age and appeared with their parents for years as the family resumed world tours. The twins even had their bar and bat mitzvahs on stage in 1958, following a gala New York performance of “A Village Wedding.” The evening featured appearances by Zero Mostel and other luminaries, including conductor Sholem Secunda, who wrote “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

Eventually, Susan rebelled and abandoned the family troupe. As “The Komediant” makes clear, she resented her family’s peripatetic lifestyle, which led her to be enrolled in at least 14 schools in several countries.

Michael, who now appears as Mike Burstyn, used his varied upbringing to become a film star in Israel, a television commentator in Belgium, and a stage star in New York.

He was recently seen in the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater’s revival of “On Second Avenue,” recreating some of his father’s classic routines in a production scheduled to be restaged this fall.

After her husband’s death, Lux occasionally presented a one-woman show featuring songs the family had sung around the world. Some of them she wrote herself. Increasingly infirm in recent years, she made her last outing to the opening of “On Second Avenue” in March. Among her awards and honors was a gold star embedded in the sidewalk on Second Avenue and a lifetime achievement award for her work in Yiddish Theater conferred by Governor Pataki in 2002.

Lillian Lux

Born June 20, 1918, in Brooklyn; died June 9 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan of natural causes; survived by her children, Michael and Susan, four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and a sister, Beatrice Friedman.