The ghost of Barbra Streisand’s father convinced her to make Yentl

There are a lot of good showbiz stories out there about fate seemingly driving someone toward making one specific, career-changing project, but rarely do those stories involve the person getting a literal message from beyond the grave that both heals an emotional wound and gives them the drive to make something they’ve always wanted to make. But that’s apparently exactly what happened to Barbra Streisand years ago, when a real psychic medium really contacted the real ghost of her father and was able to really pass along a real message from him.

That comes from an excerpt of Streisand’s book My Name Is Barbra published by The Guardian, a big chunk of which is based around the creation of Yentl—the 1983 musical drama directed by, co-written by, and starring Streisand. As she tells it, she had been interested in the project (based on Isaac Hashevis Singer’s short story) for many years, but could’ve convince Hollywood to take her enthusiasm for it seriously. At some point, her brother reached out to her to tell her he had met a woman who could contact the dead and that he had communicated with their father, who had died shortly after Streisand’s birth and who she seems to have resented a little for not being there when she was growing up.

There’s a little side trip to her father’s grave, which she had never visited before (both things are important), and then Streisand and her brother met the (real-life!) medium for a session. After establishing that there were, indeed, ghosts in the room with them, the medium established a system for spelling out words by knocking on table legs. After communicating with one ghost, who gave the trio an “A” and everyone agreed that that was definitive proof that it was the spirit of Streisand’s grandmother Anna, they got a more forceful message that apparently spelled out part of Streisand’s father’s nickname, “Manny.”

With Streisand’s father confirmed to be on the line, the medium asked if he had a message for her, and the table knocking spelled “Sorry” and then “Sing proud.” Streisand perceptively notes in the excerpt that she knows it “sounds unbelievable,” but she insists that it’s “the fucking truth” and that it was the “scariest thing” she’s ever experienced. But either way, after that experience, Streisand wanted to know more about her father and got some photos and paperwork from her brother that she felt more of a connection to than before.

One of the photos was of her father’s grave, and she could see that the tombstone next to his bore the name “Anshel”—which also happens to be the fake name that Yentl uses in Singer’s original short story when she’s posing as a man, and as Streisand notes, it’s not the most common name in the world. Streisand says she realized that her father could metaphorically live on through Yentl and through her, and she knew she had to make the film (she eventually did). Now, one could argue that the name on the tombstone alone is enough of a freaky sign from the universe without the ghost stuff, but whatever. If that’s her creative process, when who are we to judge it?