Aboard MV Sun Viking -- Judy Kolba, a cabaret singer and comedian who performs aboard cruise ships, likes to keep passengers guessing at what for many of them is an unusual sounding accent.

Is she from Latin America? Greece? France? Maybe somewhere in the Middle East?

The guessing goes on until her second concert, usually near the end of the cruise, when she tells them that she was born in Petach Tikvah, Israel.

At the beginning of her first show each cruise she is introduced, with no little hype, as "that international singing sensation!" In a throaty Edith Piaf type voice, she belts out songs in French, Spanish, English and often in Russian, German, and Norwegian to demonstrate her international credentials.

"I don't identify myself as an Israeli or as an Israeli singer," in the first show, she says. "I never go with the Israeli flag because I am not an Israeli representative. I work on my own. I am an entertainer. When you say Israeli, for some people you are right away bad, and I want them to judge me for what I am. So on my second show, I tell them." Then what happens? She says she never has heard any adverse reaction, but has had some interesting experiences with Jewish passengers.

DAVID CURTIS

 "I find that a lot of Jewish people come and whisper in my ear things like 'I'm a lansman, I'm Jewish,' and I say, 'Why are you whispering?""

"I grew up where everyone was Jewish," Kolba adds. "I don't understand why they whisper."

The singer prides herself on her ear for language, but says the Russian she picked up in the 1970s came not from the old country but from New York. "I saw a night club in New York that was Russian American, very sophisticated, a very high class place, " she recalled. One Monday, she asked for a chance to audition and the manager of the club asked if she could sing in Russian. She lied that she could, figuring between Monday and her audition on Friday, she could learn a song or two. "Wow, I know what I am going to do: I will go the Russian Embassy (at the United Nations) and explain my situation and ask them if they will give me a couple of records," Kolba said she thought to herself. However, a friend demanded: "Are you crazy Judy? Do you think they are going to believe you are going there for songs? The Russians, the Israelis, the Americans they will all be after you. They will think you are a spy!" Paranoid fantasy or not, Kolba decided not to take any

JUDY KOLBA

chances.  "I found an old Russian woman in Brooklyn through my friend, and I wrote out phonetically, in Hebrew letters, the words of six songs in Russian. Then I locked myself in my little lousy hotel apartment in New York and when I came on Friday, I auditioned two songs in Russian. " She got the job.

Similarly her ability to sing Greek. "I have a problem with the Greeks," she confided. "They don't believe me when I say I am not Greek. They get mad at me if I don't speak to them in Greek; they think I'm trying to be a snob!"

Kolba said when she told her Orthodox father in Israel (they moved from Petach Tikvah to Bnai Brak) that instead of being an architect like him, she wanted to be an actress, "his world fell apart."

"Where I come from an actress and a street girl were the same thing," she explained. The father said he would pay for any other kind of schooling but not for that , so she played accordion at weddings, bar mitzvah receptions and dances, and paid her own way through an acting school in Ramat Gan. 

When he saw that she perservered, Kolba's father (the family name is Kochba, but she changed the spelling so people could pronounce it), agreed to pay for further acting lessings in New York, but with one proviso. They should never discuss her career again. He didn't want to hear about it. Nor should they ever talk about her freewheeling approach to religion, which she calls her "Judy-ism" not her Judaism.

Twenty-two years later, Kolba said she believes that her late father secretly was very proud of her because "I was so much like him." He had been born to a religious family in Hungary. "When he left home to go to Israel (then Palestine), it was the biggest thing he could ever have done," she said. "They were very fanatical, and when he left, they never spoke to him again. And then they all died by the nazis."

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Another Jewish performer on the ship is David Curtis, who was born with the name David Curtis Mutter. He said he ended up dropping his family name from his stage name because of the folksinger Alan Sherman, who popularized the song that began: "Hello Mutter, Hello Fadder. Here I am at Camp Grenada."

Curtis said he inherited a musical ear that enabled him as a child to pick out melodies on the piano long before he could read music. Once, he said, the family went on vacation to a hotel which had a piano in a lobby, and after his parents heard him play songs on it, they offered him piano lessons. He was eight, and he remembers sitting on the piano bench with three other siblings, "rotating our practice sessions."

He didn't stick with it as a boy--not when there were trading cards, marbles and sports to occupy his attention--but found himself drawn back to the piano while a student at Florida state University. "I went down to the lobby of my dorm and played two or three hours a day."

A friend sold him a used piano for $100, but the fellow who owned the truck Curtis hauled the piano in also owned an Italian restaurant. He suggested to Curtis that instead of taking the piano to his apartment, "I'll put it in the restaurant, and you'll play six nights a week there, and eat Italian food." 

After he graduated from college (and the restaurant), he got a steady job as a performer -- in a music store, where his demonstration of playing the piano was supposed to end with a sales pitch. Eventually, a guitar playing friend persuaded him to team with him as a duo, and "I made more money doing that than at the music store--a Latin kid and a Jewish kid playing in a redneck bar down in Homestead."

For the last 10 years, Curtis has been playing and singing aboard Royal Carribean cruise ships, utilizing not only the piano in his act but also keyboards. "The piano is the entire orchesta--the 88 keys represent every instrument depending on the register where you play" he says. 

"I instinctively knew what instruments would sound good as I was playing the piano so I got the synthesizers which have those instrument sounds and I started getting it together...a one man band."

Curtis plays to a wide variety of audiences. There may be a couple celebratring their golden wedding anniversary at one table; newlyweds at another; people from a foreign country at a third.

"When I am on stage, it takes a tremendous amount of concentration to play not just one instrument but several instruments, and to sing, keep a reasonable beat and play sensitive music, not just a bunch of notes," he said. 

"If I am playing a standard for an anniversary couple and there are some young people over there getting real antsy because they want to boogie...I am concentrating on what I am playing but I am also picking up vibes and feedback from people," the entertainer said.

All at the same time, "I am concentrating on what I am doing, thinking of what song I will play next, what number setting I have to change to on my synthesizers to accommodate that, and a dozen different things." 

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Kolba and Curtis would seem to have achieved what the rest of us only can dream about: doing the work they like while traveling in luxury all over the world.

Yet in interviewing them, I found that while neither is discontented with the life at sea, neither would they describe it as utopian. 

Yes, they are paid to travel and they get to explore wonderfully interesting places. Yes, they enjoy shmoosing during their time off with friendly passengers who come from all over the world. Yes, there is a great sense of comraderie with other entertainers as well as with members of the crew.

But after being seagoing entertainers for years and years--cruise after cruise--they each began to wonder "is this enjoyment all there is to life? Isn't there something bigger, more important, that I am supposed to be doing?"

When the waves gently rock, the sun pleasantly warms, and the deck chair insistently invites, it can be hard for most of us to work up a great sense of ambition. It is especially difficult for those of us who are vacationing.

In contrast, Curtis and Kolba have the sense that such inducements are traps to be slipped.if their journey on earth is ever to leave a more lasting impression than the one the ship makes on the ocean's surface. 

While we from the land are escaping to the ease and glorious indolence that characterizes cruising, the seagoing entertainers sense they must escape the chains of too much comfort. They express the fear that all that sea air is quenching their ambition.

To guard against this, bachelor Curtis says he is composing an autobiographical musical about life at sea, and the difficulty of maintaining real relationships. 

Kolba says she too has been gathering material--humorous, sometimes poignant anecdotes about life aboard cruise ships. Often she thinks that "I should write a book," but as we sat at a table on the ship's fantail regarding the wake Sun Viking neatly traced on an Asian sea, Kolba confessed she probably never would get around to writing it.