 Thursday, February 2nd at 9 PM
127 W. 24th Street A Bi-lingual reading of H. Leivick's THE GOLEM In Yiddish and English |
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Transformative Yiddish Theater Giving Our Past A Future דער נייער יידישער רעפערטואַר־טעאַטער מאמע–לשון איז א מחיה |
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NYR Radio Mama's Coming Back Poor Orphan An Interview with Mendy Cahan Downloads may take several minutes HELP US FIGHT THE ODDS WE WILL NEVER ABANDON YIDDISH THEATER |  In the ruins of the ghetto of Warsaw, among heaps of charred rubbish, there was found, packed tightly into a small bottle, the following testament, written during the ghetto’s last hours by a Jew named Yosl Rakover.
Making Memory Matter:
Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d If we insist on taking away from people the resources their own language offers for response to mass tragedy, everyone loses. There is an inexhaustible cultural richness in the vocabulary made available through Yiddish language. We lose it when we use words like Holocaust, a substitute that trades in the power and resonance that the term, Der Churban afforded prior generations in attempting to make any sense of the genocide unleashed in World War II. My hope in writing this paper was to provide the reader with a sense of the significance of this particular story being introduced to Yiddish theater at this juncture. This play conveys that much-needed richness. A fictional, once controversial story of the Warsaw Ghetto has once again been put into play as a collective response to Jewish life, but this time by bringing it into an entirely new medium. Just telling this story in Yiddish conveys the message that it is a story that Yiddish theater tells best.The original story was written in Yiddish; its arguments are formulated in terms that come out of the Jewish life lived in that language. Yiddish reflects and provides access to prior Jewish experiences, memories and responses to collective tragedy which prepare the idiom, as it were, to make its own arguments to G-d about the morality of the universe. Even more remarkably, this fictional story in Yiddish theater draws on the power of first person testimony to convincingly and authentically navigate between lost worlds and moralities. We are now losing the last generation of those who can describe a world that was destroyed: the loss of their first person testimony with its truth claims and clear power of authenticity is inevitable. Yet in seeing this play, the audience and even its actor react as if the story of Yosl Rakover actually happened. This staging performs a fiction deeply rooted in collective memories in its handling of suffering, resistance and the retention of humanity. Its story of the Warsaw Ghetto moves new audiences today. But even earlier this story deeply moved people like Avrom Sutzkever who fought in the Vilna Ghetto, or Emmanuel Levinas who had attended yeshiva in Lithuania. These people were caught by a story shaped within collective constructs that resonated as "authentically" stemming from the world they lost. They could imagine people in the Warsaw Ghetto continuing to believe in G-d, honoring the righteousness of G-d's laws, or remaining loyal to a Judaism seen as more just than G-d's actions. Others have seen in many other things, including an answer to the question of theodicy for believers, the problem of how evil flourishes in a world of G-d's making. Even as the attendance at annual official Warsaw Ghetto commemorations declines yearly, this play offers audiences a very different possibility for commemoration and connection. Good theater as a medium re-produces the intimacy of first-person contact. In a tradition well known to the Yiddish theater, performance interweaves a moral voice along with its implicit promised transformation of actor and audience one which like all good story-telling potentially shifts through each re-telling. Memory itself as a collective resource is tapped for the moment and for the future. In Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d, a story and its world are made to matter deeply.-Elissa Sampson For twenty years the story of Yosl Rakover was believed to be an eyewitness account of the ghetto's last hours, and the true story of a pious Jew whose fate it was to die fighting the beasts that destroyed his world. In the hours before his death he reconsiders his relationship with G-d and concludes that although his relationship with G-d has changed, his faith in Him remains, and his love for Him burns as strongly as ever. The story was actually written in 1946, by Tzvi Kolitz, a young Palestinian who as a delegate to the World Zionist Congress traveled extensively to speak on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. His clandestine purpose was to recruit fighters for the Irgun, of which he was a member. While in Argentina, he was asked to write an article for a Yiddish paper in Buenas Aires for their special Yom kippur edition. The result was Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d. Through a set of bizzare circumstances the story was republished in an Israeli Yiddish journal without his name on it, and was assumed to be real. It has since been recognized as one of the classics of Holocaust literature, been translated into many languages, and been the subject of essays by theologians and philosophers. Adapted for the stage and performed by David Mandelbaum, it makes for powerful and compelling theater. In Yiddish with English Supertitles. |