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AUTHOR'S NOTES

NO THEATRE IN A GRAVEYARD

For many Israelis of my generation, the genocide of European Jews constitutes a frightening, repulsive kind of ‘noli me tangere’ subject. I was never naturally inclined to it. In fact, I kept it at a distance, the kind of distance which I always keep from those subjects or issues that haunt me, and that almost always end up, one day, by imposing themselves. One day you read a phrase, one day you meet a man, one day . . . one day what one is trying so hard to avoid becomes unavoidable.

It all started one day, when a friend proposed that I write a short scenario about the activity of the Jewish youth-movements in Europe during the Second World War. I set out to read a few books dealing with the subject, and I was ready to dismiss the whole topic as ‘overexposed’, when, all of a sudden, I found that slogan launched in the Vilna ghetto: ‘No theatre in a graveyard’. So there must have been a functioning theatre in the Vilna ghetto. A theatre that did, as the slogan testifies, what theatres should always do: defy reality, affront conventional taste, challenge hypocrisy. The forbidden game, the thing one can't help doing because one should not do it, the fool which clever people pretend not to hide deep within them . . . A theatre in the ghetto.

I began to look for every piece of information relevant to that theatre: memoirs, documents, testimony. I went in search of Vilna survivors living in Israel, only to discover, to my great amazement, that the ex-artistic director of the theatre, Israel Segal, was living in Tel-Aviv, a few blocks from my apartment. I continued my research for three years, never writing a word of the play, never even thinking I was going to write a play. One day my students in a playwriting workshop at the University of Tel-Aviv asked me what I was working on. (They probably wanted to divert my attention from the subject of the lesson.) I started to tell them about the Ghetto theatre, and when I had finished–two hours later–the lesson had long gone by . . . I went home, I sat down at the typewriter, and I obeyed the play, which used me as its instrument.

I must admit that I try sometimes to understand what made me write this play. It may have something to do with the relationship that I, that all Jews, have with their history. On various festive occasions our tradition demands that we remember. On the first night of Passover, which is the celebration of the freedom of a nation born of slavery, every adult participating in the feast is invited to tell the story of the Exodus in as much detail as possible. In other words, everyone is encouraged to reimagine the past, to revive it for his children by telling it as if he had lived it himself. History should be a constant and permanently-living presence, the fruit of creative and imaginative memory. Maybe because it is the only possible way to assume it and yet to go on living, to survive.

 

A FROZEN OCEAN OF TEARS

My generation started to write at a moment in the Israeli theatre, shortly after the Six Day War in 1967, when we felt that issues were so crucial, the situation was so serious, and it was clear something extraordinary had happened to Israeli society. What happened is that everything turned upside down.

After the great victory of the Six Day War, people found themselves taking up positions which were 180 degrees contrary to what they had previously said and thought. People who had no religious background started using theological language and mystical notions to refer to reality. Authors and poets - who used to be rational people - started using symbolism reminiscent of Christian theology, using language that had more to do with the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail than with the Bible. It was a real crisis in Israeli society.

I felt, as many in my generation did, that we had to cope with what was happening, to start dealing with the problems of our society. This coincided with the arrival in Israel of the American director Nola Chilton, who brought with her the tradition of the Method. Her encounter with Israeli society left her thinking that our theatre, which was copying what was being done on the Left Bank of the Seine and in London's West End, had to be replaced by something more meaningful. She introduced the young writers in Israel to documentary work in the theatre. I was among the people who started running around the country with tape recorders, recording people, talking to people, trying to see how they spoke, what kind of language they used. Whoever grew up with Hebrew feels a foreigner in his own language. Hebrew changes so rapidly and so wildly that you have to run after it to render what is said. Language in Israel is always being reinvented, in curious and devious ways.

Together, Nola Chilton and I made a play about old people in Israel, called The Days to Come, based on a series of interviews in old people's homes. To my great shock, I discovered that the country was living on a suppressed ocean of tears. In every interview, at a certain point, the man or woman being questioned broke into tears and started crying. All these old people were living with an imposed or self-imposed silence of shame and humiliation which had been suppressed and which Israeli society could not allow to come out. It was the horrible experience of the Holocaust and of having survived "shamefully".

I started to realise that we are living in Israel with a very comfortable light, one that screens or veils truth for us; that we have built up a series of myths and comfortable versions of what happened in the ghettos and camps, a version which makes a great event out of certain facts of armed resistance, but which imposes a silence on something that is surging and burning, sobbing in the depth of a collective soul. It was trying to make the surface, but was constantly suppressed.

Israel was born out of the most horrible violence of the 20th century. We are a people who swallowed this violence. The cruel war out of which the state was founded killed 6,000 young people out of the total population of 600,000. It left a terrible wound. Then the country went on living under the spell of violence. This violence created an extreme anxiety that every failure might be fatal. This feeling creates a culture that tends to suppress everything to do with failure or humiliation, weakness or unmanliness.

Living in Israel gives you the feeling that history is present, that you have unfinished business with history, that it's a superpower which dominates your life, decides your fate and the fate of your children. It enters your home and takes away your children when they turn 18. It brings them back once they finish three years in the army, transformed, other creatures. Sometimes you don't know them any more. Sometimes you don't know yourself any more after these three years.

History is present, and it's a partner you didn't choose. It's a partner who alienates you from yourself and changes your life if you do not dominate or control it.

I remember the shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the horrible fear that we were going to lose and probably finish out our existence. Then a change came. I had been serving as a reservist on the Golan Heights. We had a lot of talks in our unit. Things can't go on as before, people said. Something must change radically.

The army tried to re-educate the soldiers after the shock of the war, so they sent out intellectuals and professors to speak to the different units. We had a very eminent historian, a specialist on the Holocaust, who came to our unit. We asked him what the result of the war would be, how it would influence Israeli society. He told us that everyone would get more entrenched in his former position. "Those who were doves will become more dovish, and those who were hawks more hawkish. Everyone will be convinced that the other party is to blame."

"That's impossible," we said. "It makes no sense". And he said, "This is how historical events work." And this is exactly what happened. His words turned on a red light in my memory and I remembered the story of the destruction of the Second Temple and the Jews' revolt against the Romans. I became in 1973 an obsessed reader of this history, and that reading brought me to write my latest play, The Jerusalem Syndrome.

The play is a metaphor of the terrible schizophrenia in which we live today in Israel: either we indentify with our history and cannot identify with our present acts, or we identify with our present acts and we have to divorce from our history. We either have to lie to ourselves or to admit that we are schizophrenic and urgently need help.

Our country lives on a frozen ocean of tears; my urge is to use an axe, to break this ice and to let the tears come out - to let all the suppressed humiliation come out and be shared with the rest of the world. It is an artist's duty to express and to offer. One way of reconnecting ourselves to the rest of humanity is to to say: "Look what happened. Look what history has done to us."

Joshua Sobol, 1989

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