No subject gets discussed more often and more vehemently around the world than the sharp decline of the American economy and the upcoming election between a Democratic African-American presidential candidate and his white Republican opponent. I do not know many plays that made me think of these hard and challenging times as much as Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry—a writer who intimately knows not only the Jewish world, but the tension and underlying racial currents in the United States—the only American playwright who won three of the most prestigious American awards for dramatic writing: the Academy Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the Tony Award. 

The Hedgerow Theatre in Media could not have chosen a better play to bring together Jewish people, African-Americans, and whites to laugh, to cry, and to talk about perceptions we may have of each other. 

Temple University’s Peter Reynolds directed Driving Miss Daisy at the beautiful Hedgerow Theatre with great sensitivity, so much so that the audience at the opening night gave a standing ovation to the superb cast of the amazing Nancy Boykin as Miss Daisy Werthan, the nuanced and powerful Harum Ulmer, Jr., who played her black driver Hoke Coleburn, and the strong and handsome Andy Joos, who played Daisy’s son Boolie Werthan, a businessman in the South, and Cathie Miglionico’s, who designed the costumes, Zoran Kovcic, who created a beautiful and very functional stage setting, illuminated by the perfect lighting design of Maria Shaplin, all of which enhanced this very intimate play. 

Uhry’s drama shows an African-American chauffeur who gets belittled left, right, and center by Miss Daisy, an elderly Jewish lady in Atlanta, GA, who has trouble letting go of the memories of her poor background during her youth. Initially, she carries a great deal of prejudice against people of color, unlike her son who, from the very beginning, presents himself as an open-minded businessman. While Boolie tries to help his mother move forward, she resists it every step of the way, first making fun of Boolie’s wife Florine for enjoying the company of non-Jews, and later teasing her son’s wife for finding “heaven on earth” by “socializing with Episcopalians.” 

Miss Daisy mocks “that silly Santa Claus winking on the front door!” of a Jewish house and belittles the looks of her daughter-in-law by saying, “If I had a nose like Florine, I wouldn’t go around saying Merry Christmas to anybody.” When Hoke objects and tells her that he enjoys Christmas at her son’s house, Miss Daisy shoots back, “I don’t wonder. You’re the only Christian in the place.” The audience at the Hedgerow laughed almost non-stop during a play that shows human foibles but also the fear that sits below the humor, a kind of trembling humanity that one doesn’t see too often. 

Several times, Miss Daisy refers to her poor economic background, where the family could not even afford to feed a stray cat. Her driver then reminds her, “You is rich, Miz Daisy!”—a notion that she resists as her mindset is still anchored in the past, not in the present. “Yassum,” Hoke replies, but it “look like you doin’ alright now.” In fact, the working class chauffeur becomes a kind of reality check for her, even though she did not acknowledge it until the surprise ending of the play. 

Uhry shows the most subtle psychological shades of people from different social classes and ethnic groups who realize that deep down, they all have been discriminated against. The chauffeur, a streetwise man in spite of his attempt to be polite, has the courage to say things that one would not ask in polite society: “Mist’ Werthan? Y’all people Jewish, ain’ you...I’d druther drive for Jews. People always talkin’ bout they stingy and they cheap, but don’t say none of that ‘roun me.” In fact, Mr. Werthan is very generous from the very beginning, and tries to help his mother by paying for the chauffeur, who becomes her companion, of sorts, and her sounding board. 

Given the subtle racial tensions in this society as they are being played out every day in election commercials, articles, and conversations by the water coolers up and down the US, Miss Daisy, with her Southern Jewish values, slowly undergoes a change because she experiences some of her driver’s realities. For example, according to the laws in those days, people of color were not allowed to use a restroom at gas stations in the South. 

Once Miss Daisy experiences her own synagogue being bombed, a real paradigm shift takes place in her head. When Hoke informs her that she can’t go to the Temple, she responds in her usual Pavlovian manner: “Well, it’s a mistake. I’m sure they meant to bomb one of the conservative synagogues or the orthodox one. The Temple is reform. Everybody knows that.” 

When her driver responds, “It doan’ matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes like light or dark we all the same nigger,” Miss Daisy still refuses to believe it, but she eventually finds her way to attend a dinner in honor of Martin Luther King. While the old lady is beginning to change, her open-minded and generous son has second thoughts about any public support for a person of color. 

She teases her son: “The Werthan Company will go out of business if you attend the King dinner?” Challenged, the successful businessman then shares with her how vulnerable he feels: “A lot of the men I do business with wouldn’t like it. They wouldn’t come right out and say so. They’d just snicker and call me Martin Luther Werthan behind my back—something like that. And I’d begin to notice that my banking business wasn’t being handled by the top dogs. Maybe I’d start to miss out on a few special favors, a few tips. I wouldn’t hear about certain lunch meetings at the Commerce Club. Little things you can’t quite put your finger on…I still have to conduct business in this town.” 

He then asks his mother, “When did you get so fired up about Martin Luther King? Time was, I’d have heard a different story,” to which she replies in her contrarian manner, “Why, Boolie! I’ve never been prejudiced and you know it!” It’s at that moment that the driver says what might characterize both the situation in the past and in our own time: “Things changin’, but they ain’t change all dat much.” 

The old driver in some ways represents Everyman, who endures in spite of the forces that work against him. When his boss, Mr. Werthan, wishes Miss Daisy “Happy Thanksgiving,” he tells her, “Remember, Mama. [Florine’s] a Republican National Committee-woman now,” to which the now liberated Miss Daisy replies, full of contempt, “Good God!” 

The tough old lady also shows a caring side. For example, while planting flowers on her husband’s grave, Miss Daisy realizes that her chauffeur cannot read the gravestones. She immediately swings into action and teaches him to put individual letters together to spell. Later, at Christmas, one of the most moving scenes of the play takes place when she takes a small package wrapped in brown paper from her purse, assuring her driver that “This isn’t a Christmas present…You know I don’t give Christmas presents … I just happened to run across it this morning.” When the illiterate Hoke unwraps the package, he fights tears, looking at her gift for him, “Ain’ nobody ever give me a book,” and laboriously reading the cover, “Hand Writing Copy Book—Grade Five.” 

But just before he may become too sentimental, Miss Daisy reverts to her regular pattern of communication: “Jews don’t have any business giving Christmas presents. And you don’t need to go yapping about this to Boolie and Florine.” 

I was reminded of Mother Courage, who, like Miss Daisy, was not exactly a paradigm of virtue and gentleness; yet, audiences around the globe always admired her toughness and her feisty way of defying the world. Bertolt Brecht, who wanted his Mother Courage and her Children to be a didactic play that teaches about the forces of evil, rewrote her role numerous times to roughen up her character, and still the audiences loved her. 

The same is true for Uhry’s Miss Daisy: no matter how prickly and narrow-minded and suspicious she appears at times, her innermost goodness comes through powerfully. For example, when in her nineties, frail and helpless, and living in a retirement home, she takes Hoke’s hand and tells her former driver—now an old man who can’t drive any more but who still visits her as often as he can—that he is her “best friend.” He then cuts a small piece of the Thanksgiving pie and gently feeds her like his own child. 

Quite a few members of the audience laughed and cried many times during a performance that, as the discussions afterwards showed, reminded many theatre goers of our own times and those hidden forces that make people vote their fears and not their strengths, punch the screens of voting machines with old prejudices and not new visions. Miss Daisy, the former schoolteacher and her black chauffeur are still driving, not only on the stage of the Hedgerow, the oldest theatre in the Philadelphia area, but also in the minds of all those who opened up to one of the most moving plays in modern American drama. 

As a college professor who conducts a weekly workshop on “News Around the World” at Martins Run, America’s oldest Jewish retirement home, I asked myself, “and who is going to drive the many Miss Daisies and the many Hoke Coleburns of our own time to the election booth on November 4th?” 

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Driving Miss Daisy, Hedgerow Theatre (610) 565-4211
by Alfred Uhry
Directed by Peter Reynolds 

September 12-October 5, 2008 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Open letter to the President of the Muslim Women's Coalition and the President of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance

Salam and Shalom, dear Dr. Tasneem Shamim, dear Ms. Carol Kaufman Newman, 

Seeing the American premiere of Anna Ziegler’s Dov and Ali, produced by The Playwrights Realm and performed at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre in New York City, I thought of the train driver whom I met on a ride from Bombay to Igatpuri in India. He told me that, however inadvertently, he decapitates and mutilates the bodies of about half a dozen people each day, all year round: “I kill poor farmers who can’t feed their families any more and young women who have been raped and who are being rejected by their families or threatened with honor killings. These desperate people just wait behind bushes and then jump in front of my engine, but I can’t stop the train.” 

Given the battles and the wounds that we experienced throughout Ziegler’s latest play, I was moved by the trails left behind by emotionally scarred victims in a battle for the souls of young people, especially women.
The play introduces realities that hit hard when two cultures clash. I experienced Dov, a young and forever wavering English high school teacher as if he were a Jewish Hamlet—Prince, not of Denmark but of Illusions. His lifelong indecisions on practically everything, from not finishing his Ph.D. to eventually even quitting his job as an English high school teacher, lead him into a cul-de-sac with no hope but insipid daydreams scrawled on the walls of his mind, for example, when he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a successful rabbi, too, even though Dov has few convictions. 

Dov’s counterpart, Ali, his 17-year-old student, presents himself as a very stern young man who never smiles, the fervent son of an orthodox Muslim father who dominates his family in the American Midwest. With his menacing and threatening tone and his mock-subservient demeanor, created brilliantly by Ziegler, Ali clearly has the upper hand in this play. 

An arrogant young man, Ali is cock sure of his knowledge of Islam and Islamic traditions—all carbon copied statements of what his orthodox father told him, without a shred of the young man’s own thoughts: “See, I believe we should be governed by God because some decisions are too complicated to make on our own. I think we should look to our traditions as though they were maps. I think you think so too.” 

The young Muslim student, brought up on a diet of rigid thinking cannot fathom that there may be different ways of looking at a text, different ways of living one’s life, when he blurts out: “Why are there so many interpretations? I don’t see how one piece of text can mean so many things.” 

He reveres his father as the symbol of authority and thinks nothing of parroting his prejudices. When Dov casually acknowledges in class that he respects his father but does not always agree with him, Ali retorts, “Then you don’t respect him.” And when the doctrinaire young high school student gets accused of “being very limited in your definition of respect,” Ali shoots back what he really wanted to say all along: 

“I believe [. . .] that Israel shouldn’t exist. I believe it because my father believes it and his reasons are sound. He is a very reasonable man.” And as if that stab wasn’t enough, Ali then tries to goad his teacher with the yarmulka with another assertion about Israel, “The Jews stole it.” 

Jew-baiting is a sport that Ali plays only too well. When reprimanded for being rude, Ali replies: “Is there a law against rudeness in the Torah? Is it one of your ten commandments? Not to be rude?”

Though less rigid in his thinking, Dov finds himself equally bound by his tradition. His Jewish orthodox background and his chronic indecisiveness does not allow him to commit to his girl friend of two years. Sonya (Heidi Armbruster) is seen as a 30-year-old blond and blue-eyed Aryan shickse. She tries to connect with her colleague Dov, the man she wants to marry and for whom she is willing to convert to Judaism, even if religion doesn’t mean much to her. However, nothing comes of her hopes, as the young teacher is scared of offending his parents with a marriage to a non-Jewish woman. When Sonya wants to meet his parents, she pleads for his bridge building: 

“if you’d just let me meet your parents, I know I could make them like me. Or at least approve of me. Modern Orthodox Jews are modern for a reason, right?” 

However, the young orthodox high school teacher refuses to even talk to his parents about the woman he loves but fears to marry because of the restrains of the religious and cultural traditions with which he was brought up. 

Christians might look at the old Jesuit motto—“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man"—except that this modern drama which found great resonance on the British stage last year and is currently experiencing its American premiere, shows that the turmoil of a one-sided upbringing of two sons, both of whom had fathers whose “love was opaque,” can do great damage to any individual, irrespective of the person’s religious or ideological upbringing. 

When men, including rabbis, place their careers above their relationships with their families, women and children could easily feel neglected. Dov admits that his mother had been bugging his father, the popular rabbi, to stop thinking only of others: “You have time for everyone else,” she says, “but not for me. And I’m your wife, I bore your children.” 

Dear Ms. Newman, dear Dr. Shamim, as I see both of you and your organizations as bridge builders, I was wondering whether you would be willing to see this play of clashing ideas with as many of your members, with as many young people as possible, and to engage in dialogues that could lead to important joint projects. 

Dov and Ali’s dramatic god-fathers seem to be two famous plays: Biedermann and the Arsonists by Max Frisch and Oleanna by David Mamet, both of which present antagonists who worm themselves into the lives of the protagonists—forever changing them. 

Recognizing that things are badly falling apart, the teacher in Ziegler’s latest play asks his student, “I don’t know what you want from me.” When Ali lectures him—“There’s nothing wrong with feeling certain, Mr. Gold!”—Dov gathers all his strength to ward off the attacker: “I can’t help but think that every word you say is some recycled, inferior version of something your father has said.” 

And when the teacher apologizes, he gets to hear, “I accept your apology. And I understand that it must be difficult for someone like you to talk to someone like me.” 

The playwright presents a wide range of interpersonal and ideological conflicts: Islam vs. Judaism, student vs. teacher, traditions vs. free thinking. Once the student has boxed his teacher into the corner where he wants him in that ring of power and control, Ali comes out with his deeply seated anti-Semitism: 

ALI: Don’t all Jews ask those sorts of questions—Who am I? Why am I here? What am I meant to do? 
DOV: Doesn’t everyone? 
ALI: No. 

The play powerfully demonstrates the contrast between different mindsets, different traditions, and how they both can lead to major problems: 

DOV: You don’t think there’s value in being open-minded? 
ALI: I think you’re talking about being uncertain, about walking around not knowing who you are, and that’s different than being open-minded. . . . With all due respect, Mr. Gold. 

And just as the young woman in Oleanna snares her professor in a linguistic net from which he cannot escape and verbally controls him, Ali knows exactly how to get to and goad his teacher: 

DOV: Ali, would you mind if we reschedule this conversation— 
ALI: Why – are you hung-over from the Sabbath? Was it a rage this weekend? 

And when the teacher assures his student that everything is fine and that he’ll be happy, Ali snaps back: “But that’s where you’re wrong. With all due respect, Mr. Gold—life isn’t about being happy. It’s about being right.” 

Triumphantly gloating, Ali puts his Jewish teacher down more than one peg: “I don’t want to believe, as my father would have me believe, that my teacher is an imbecile.” 

In the end, Dov, the young high school teacher, retreats, simply dissolves his relationship with his loving colleague and quits his job, without having found anything else he could do. Jobless and without his best friend, without any major convictions of his own, he suddenly wants to become a rabbi like his father, clinging to the star of David which turns out to be nothing but the straw of his mind. The most he does, like a child, is to murmur in his sleep the word “father” in Hebrew, “Aba, Aba, Aba.” 

In contrast to the two male characters, Sameh (Anitha Gandhi), Ali’s bright younger sister, acts not only as a character, but also weaves in and out of the play as the narrator. At times she appears like a ghostly voice, reminiscent of the spirit of Hamlet’s murdered father. We see her as a young woman who is forbidden to have views of her own, let alone take an active role in life. At times, she is almost serving the role of a classical Greek chorus, her hijab a living shroud. 
Sameh falls in love with a young Muslim student, bound for MIT, but who is not considered “a real Muslim” by Ali and his family. Unlike her brother, she feels pulled in different directions: she follows Muslim traditions while, at the same time, she also wants to come into her own. Befitting her role in life where she only plays a minor part, forced to be subservient to her father and her brother, she is not given a full role in the play either: 

“At home, I was reading so many novels, devouring them like candy because I felt that I too was a character in someone else’s story. Nothing seemed real.” 

Like many women in orthodox environments, she is being kept in the background. But when she speaks, either as Sameh or as a commentator, theatre goers who expect a traditional story line may get frustrated. In an almost Brechtian manner, she alienates the audience and chops apart the story line with her comments and reflections in between, thereby forcing the viewers to look at this drama of ideas from a disturbingly different perspective: 

“You’d think, given the circumstances, that this is where the story begins. It’s not. In fact, most stories have been going on forever, and this one is no different. And so we enter it in the middle.” 

Bertolt Brecht rewrote his Mother Courage many times because he wanted to prevent the audience from getting emotionally attached to the main character and thereby not think about the underlying issues that he wanted to present. Like Brecht, Ziegler roughened up the play in such a way that Sameh does not simply come across as a romanticized victim, a Muslim Ophelia, but as a figure who appears and disappears, a participant, a commentator on the events, or even a ghostlike narrator. The viewer, instead of getting lost in pathos, is confronted by a wide array of socio-cultural and interpersonal issues. 

Having been betrayed by Ali who leads his father and his male relatives to the place where his sister and her boyfriend were kissing, swift action follows: the teenager gets punished. Not even her mother can help her. In the words of Ali, “We let my mother out of her room. She screamed and sobbed. She rent her hair. She cursed us,” while the male family members arrange for the forced deportation of the young wayward Muslim girl, the 16-year-old high school student, who, against her will, is made to marry an old widower in Pakistan who wants children. 
Sameh despairs and does as she is told, feeling totally abandoned, alone in Pakistan, a foreign land for her: “I sit by the window and watch the women walk by like a flock of crows, or ghosts.” 
Ali comes to regret his involvement deeply: “I’ve lost my sister forever. I will never get her back and I will never forgive myself. Or my father.” 

On the website of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance one can find this brutally honest admission about the “agunah, the wife trapped in a dead marriage [. . .] one of the most painful challenges facing the Jewish community.” That statement could also have appeared on a website for Muslim women. The great grand daughters of Sarah and Hagar, it seems, share much the same pain from the same oppression, even today, even in contemporary America. 

Anna Ziegler has the courage to go where few playwrights dare to trod: exploring the explosive environment of Jewish and Islamic orthodoxy and the often devastating impact of religious ideologies on young people, especially when sacred texts and traditions are taken literally. 

It’s against this background that it may not come as a surprise to learn from the author about the genesis of Dov and Ali: “This play came from a number of places. First, I was teaching Lord of the Flies to my high school English class, as Dov is at the top of the play. I was working at a Jewish day school outside of Washington, DC, and was around a greater number of religious people than I ever had been (many of whom were Modern Orthodox, and served as inspiration for Dov and his family).” 

Given the many probing questions that Ali asks relentlessly of his teacher, I was wondering whether Ziegler’s English students influenced the portrayal of Ali, but she told me that he emerged from her imagination: “I tried to think of a way to write someone realistically who was so sure of things superficially but underneath has real doubt. There are boys in The Lord of the Flies who are like that, too—who are incredibly tough, even brutal, throughout the book, but crack open when they are saved at the end.” 

At a deeper level, though, the playwright, challenged by her orthodox environment in the DC area, “began to question things based on the experiences of my colleagues and students. How are we supposed to handle situations in which things we want directly conflict with what our religion is telling us to do or be?” 

Such questioning, refreshing as it is, can easily turn off those who consider any questioning useless or even blasphemous. However, I hope that you and the members of your two organizations will have the courage to continue to question and to keep dialogue open, not only within your own communities but with “the other” in those cultures and religions that appear different from yours.

The women who get forced into marriage and who lead lives of quiet desperation, the women and men who throw themselves in front of trains, may serve as a reminder that we have not done enough to build effective, meaningful bridges to our fellow human beings.

I left the theatre thinking about the impact of traditions on our own lives, and whether these traditions are destructive or whether they could serve as signposts. I walked through New York City, wondering about the play, about a statement the 16-year old Sameh had made: “A recurring dream Dov and Ali both have: a thousand old men are perched in the trees. They’re humming. If they stop, the world will fall away.”

Dear Dr. Tasneem Shamim, dear Ms. Carol Kaufman Newman,
I’d like to conclude my Open Letter to both of you with this quotation from the recent speech by President Obama at Cairo’s University. It may pull together many of the strings of this play and illuminate some of the issues that the grandchildren of Sarah and Hagar face in today’s world: 

“The Holy Quran tells us, 'Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’ The Talmud tells us, 'The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.' The Holy Bible tells us, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.'” 

Shalom and Salam to both of you. Salam and Shalom to all the students who ought to see and discuss this important play—not only this week but in the years to come. 

Henrik Eger, Ph.D. 

www.henrikeger.com  

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The American premiere production under the direction of Katherine Kovner can be seen in New York City till June 27, 2009. For tickets, contact or call 212-255-3089.
Interest in Dov and Ali is so great that the next production is already being prepared for a run at the Berkshires at the Chester Theatre, directed by Michelle Tattenbaum, July 1-12. Contact or call 413-354-7771. 

This letter was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

Metronome Ticking (Das tickende Metronom), a brutally honest yet uplifting docudrama—the only play in the world in which the son of a concentration camp survivor and the son of a Third Reich propaganda officer and war correspondent, stand next to each other on stage—will be performed in German for the first time on November 9 at the Hamburger Kammerspiele Theater from 11 to 1 pm. 

This performance is part of the nationwide 70th commemoration services of the infamous Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, when, all over Germany and Austria, synagogues were systematically burned, Jewish homes and businesses destroyed, and the deportation to the concentration camps accelerated in ever larger numbers.
Discovering Third Reich secrets 

Metronome Ticking came about when I asked my mother in Germany to send me my father’s many handwritten journals in which he had documented his life during the Third Reich on an almost daily basis. 

I knew from many accounts that my father, Ernst-Alfred Eger, known as Alf, was a lively, highly talented young writer who worked as a foreign correspondent in London before World War II, a propaganda officer in occupied France, in charge of the press in Cherbourg and the west of France, and later as a war correspondent in Russia, but that was about all. 

In spite of many conversations with my mother during my teenage years, I had no idea of my father’s involvement in the Third Reich, let alone that of my mother who consistently denied any involvement. 

My mother, however, always told me that when I was old enough, she would give me my father’s journals. As a youngster, I took one at random and forgot about it until, many years later, I opened it at random, and discovered an entry in which my dad gleefully described a visit to a local priest in 1935 during which the priest at the Catholic rectory happily told my father that he had been a member of the NSDAP (the Nazi party) for many years. 

At that moment I had a suspicion that there may be more information in those journals that would shed light on the inner workings of the worst time in German history. I therefore asked my mother to send me all of my father’s many journals and added, naively, that I wanted to publish excerpts. 

I regret that statement to this day because my mother subsequently took my father’s handwritten life work and threw all of his daily journals into an incinerator at the garbage disposal unit of her hometown. I was so upset that I could barely talk with her. 

Determined to write a play about this scenario, I then searched for photo albums that my mother had given me many years ago. In between those 20 or so old tomes I found half a dozen albums with handwritten love letters that my father had written to her and which, mercifully, my mother had forgotten, letters that made frequent references to the importance of my father’s daily diaries. 

Rescuing important texts from oblivion 

As I cannot read the old German Suetterlin handwriting, I almost despaired, but found the Suetterlinstube in Hamburg, an organization that transcribes old letters, diaries, and documents into modern German and sends the documents via MS Word documents to readers all over Germany and as far as Israel and the US. 

The seniors at the Suetterlinstube—under its coordinator, Dr. Peter Hohn—who already had worked on the writings of Holocaust survivors, went all out and faithfully transcribed the 500 letters my father had sent my mother from occupied France, a total of about 2000 pages. 

Once they arrived in Philadelphia via e-mail, I could not stop but read and highlight the best and the worst parts, ranging from funny, witty, highly original passages to devastating statements about making Europe “frei von dem Juden” (“free of the Jew”). 

I found myself laughing one moment and crying the next, learning a great deal about my parents and even the beginning of my life, but also feeling utter despair when I came across racist and anti-Semitic comments, such as, statements on what to do with Jews and the “racially mixed.” 

German-Jewish cooperation in Philadelphia, USA 

It was at that time, in the summer of 2006, that I met Bob Spitz in Philadelphia. His father, Fredl Spitz, an Austrian Jew, had been transported to Dachau and later to Buchenwald. Bob’s young mother, Lily Spitz, after some nerve-wracking experiences at the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, managed to get Fredl out of the concentration camps, just in time to take the last train out of Austria before the borders closed with the outbreak of World War II. After horrifying years, constantly being on the run, the little family survived and made it to the U.S., where Lily Spitz later wrote her memoirs. 

As soon as I read those haunting memoirs, I knew that I needed to change my play and, instead, base it on the survivor’s memoirs and my father’s personal writing. Many months of feverish editing and translating over two thousand pages led to the first performance of Metronome Ticking on Nov. 9, 2006 in the presence of quite a few Holocaust survivors at Martins Run in Media, America’s oldest retirement community. 

Various performances at synagogues followed, with many audience members crying and asking us many questions afterwards, and with lots of hugs all around. 

Inside the heart of Darkness 

Metronome Ticking, the docudrama, makes visible the process of language being used to conceal: Alf manipulates through censorship of the press in occupied France while Lily’s mother tries to find a way around the German censorship imposed on the inmates in a death camp near Minsk, omitting explicit details, while foreshadowing her own execution with the use of just one word: “Amen!” 

ALF: In Normandy, even though I write less than before, I now steer, lead, entice, manipulate, and mislead in order to head off the cross-flow of the French press. I am busy translating French articles; that is one of the main things that should bear fruits later. I negotiate with directors, with high ranking clergymen; I make many newspapers wastepaper basket-ripe, promote only a few daily papers, and play one against the other. In short, it is excessively interesting. 

Politically there’s a lot going on, more and more French activists are joining our plan. You know as well as I that the red vermin must be destroyed, and with it the gold kings [his code word for Jews]. 

LILY: The contact with our mothers was only interrupted while we were in Napoli in prison. We had no newspaper. All we knew was that the war was still going on. The only strange thing was that mother ended her letters and postcards with "AMEN". It disturbed me, but I had no explanation for it. One day a postcard came from a Gentile friend of my mother, to let me know, that my mother had also gone on "vacation" like so many of her friends. 

Now we understood: they were taken to concentration camps. When I read the card I started to shake. I had no control of my arms and legs and I could not speak coherently. 

Ironically, Alf, the German propaganda officer who once had manipulated as many influential French people as possible to join the “German mission,” later saw the result of that “mission” at a mass execution that he witnessed as a war correspondent in Russia. Afterwards, the man, once dedicated to Hitler and the Third Reich, no longer wanted to talk and even lost his will to live. In one of his last letters to my mother, the young Third Reich Faustus recognized that he had made a pact with the wrong Party, when he wrote: 

ALF: Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart. 

The silence of the Jewish grandmother in Minsk echoed Alf’s silence on his last visit back home before he, too, got killed in Russia in the summer of 1944, at the age of 31. Interwoven with this theme of being confronted by harsh realities is Lily’s lifelong guilt for not having been able to rescue her mother. 

Both Alf and Lily are overcome by emotions and recognize that it’s too late. Yet, their two sons stand on the stage together—the sons of Abel and Cain—playing both their parents’ roles, even changing their roles, embracing each other, aware that we must be vigilant and never allow another Kristallnacht to happen again. 
Jewish and Christian Cooperation in Hamburg, Germany 

The various performances, co-sponsored by the Suetterlinstube and the Jewish Congregation of Hamburg, under the leadership of Board president Ruben Herzberg—a school principal and Middle East coordinator of the School Dept. of the Hamburg Senate where, among others, he arranges meetings between Jewish and Palestinian organizations—will also include a performance at the Thoraschule, now the Jewish Community Center of Hamburg, a community that is made up largely of Russian immigrant families but which also has many students from other schools who will attend the event on Nov. 10, a performance at the famous Ansgarkirche, and a farewell performance at the Walddörfer-Gymnasium, a Hamburg high school. 

The first performance on Nov. 7 will take place at the Ansgarkirche (church) where Anita Ree, a Jewish artist had been commissioned in the early 1930s to paint the Ansgar Triptych. The church elders at that time, however, withdrew the offer for “cultic reasons” when they found out that her parents were Jewish, even though she had been baptized as a Christian. Hounded out of the Hamburg Artist’s League because of her ancestry, she committed suicide in 1933.
Pastor Tobias Götting, the minister at the Ansgarkirche today, takes an active stand on discrimination issues, and organizes annual programs on the pogroms of November 9 in memory of the victims of the Nazi period—of those who had no chance. He even refused to have an old brick swastika removed from the church tower as a symbol of evil and a daily reminder of the past and the lack of support for one’s fellow human beings during the Third Reich. We will read the first German performance of Metronome Ticking next doors to the copies of the burned originals of Anita Ree’s art work at the Ansgar church. 

The songs in Hebrew, German, English, and French that accompany the play will be sung by Hanna Wehner of Krefeld, Germany, whose father, a young worker for the post office in Celle during WWII, passed the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp daily and secretly threw clothing and food over the fence until his wife threatened him with divorce as there was little left in their home. He then asked for donations from the postal workers in Celle and they chipped in so he could continue throwing his food and clothing packages over the fence, until he was drafted and sent to Russia where he died young, just like my father. 

Metronome Ticking ends with the “Healing song” by Aryeh Hirschfield, sung in both English and Hebrew, followed by “Hevenu Shalom Alechem” peace be with you—moving from a dirge-like rendering to a joyful song that invites everyone to join in, ending a docudrama that encourages the audience to respect others in their otherness, aware that, ultimately, we have much more in common than anything that might separate us. 

The son of the Jewish concentration camp prisoner and the son of the German propaganda officer during the Third Reich who have become friends in Philadelphia, will stand next to each other on the stage of the Kammerspiele in the former Jewish quarter of Hamburg, the hometown of Alf Eger, with the metronome of consciousness ticking, even now, 70 years after the horrendous event. 

May we always listen to our innermost voice and act accordingly. May we always be there for each other. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, November 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

While driving from Philadelphia to Michigan, I found it difficult to imagine a conference that could match last year's spectacular International Theatre Conference in Vienna, Austria. However, the Association for Jewish Theatre (AJT) and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s (JET) Artistic Director Evelyn Orbach ensured that this year’s conference in Detroit brought together some of the best Jewish and pro-Jewish theatre professionals and board members from the US and Canada, and from as far as Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Tel Aviv, who conducted many engaging workshops, eye-opening performances, challenging seminars, and one enlightening discussion after another. 

Because of the diversity and caliber of their work, I witnessed a range of outstanding performances and a depth of discussion that at times challenged me deeply. 

Every morning, some conference participants met to hear Michael Posnick present texts by Martin Buber and other philosophers, leading to deep discussions about the spiritual aspect of theatre. Ellen Schiff’s presentation on how actors and playwrights could draw upon a collective experience or “racial memory,” forced me to grapple with issues of race and identity. Her talk challenged me, because whenever I think about the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, I juxtapose it with the possibility that any so-called racial and cultural identifiers might be little more than social constructs. 

I was also intrigued by Rick Stein’s report about the recent IsraDrama Festival, where many Israeli playwrights tackled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on. It seems that the opposite takes place in the United States, where in the absence of large subsidies, commercial success often dictates the choice of plays, and political theatre suffers. 

However, JET did not shy away from controversy when they presented one of the conference’s most thought-provoking events: their performance of a scene from Women’s Minyan by Naomi Ragen, which turned the small stage in Detroit into a classical Greek theatron—a “watching place.” Here, the audience witnessed the anguish of one soul after another, as her plot took us deep into the heart of Orthodox darkness, showing ten women of all ages who each suffered differently under the confines of strictly-interpreted and enforced Judaic laws—an extraordinary play that succeeded in making audiences cry in theatres as far apart as Jerusalem and Detroit today. 

For the conference’s Playwrights’ Forum, I hoped to dramatize these challenging themes and ideas, tying in notions of race and ideology in a scene from Mendelssohn Does Not Live Here Anymore. Like Women’s Minyan, which Ragen based on real-life incidents, writing about one’s own family or group presents many difficulties, especially when their actions are anything but praiseworthy. However, through the use of documents and other historical sources from the Third Reich, including letters from my father, I hoped to show that labeling other people racially—in this case, Jewish people that are considered “vermin”—can bring about disastrous consequences for both the abusers and the abused. 

I owe a great deal to the many people who made this conference an extraordinary event, including Norman Fedder, Diane Gilboa, Mira Hirsch, Ralph Meranto, Rick Stein, Kayla Gordon, and of course, the staff and many volunteers at JET. Organized by Moti Sandak and Howard Rypp, a future conference will take place in Israel for the first time. This non-Jewish writer has always wanted to say goodbye with a famous Jewish farewell. On the last day in Detroit, and for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to say to some of the most extraordinary theatre people one could possibly meet: “Till next year in Jerusalem.” I felt damn good in saying it. And I felt deeply connected. ​

This article was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 2007. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​I never thought I would witness the day when I would see Anne Frank liberated, alive in the city of brotherly love: Anne Frank, remembered as the author of the world’s most famous diary and as the heroine of historical dramas and films, the girl who inspired countless period pieces, performed in schools all over the country.

Teachers in many cities insisted that students see the story of Anne Frank on stage—generally with a whole host of characters—and more than one administrator in parochial and public schools in the United States insisted on censoring the well-known section where the girl in hiding describes her body parts. In short, millions of theatre-goers and film audiences were exposed to edited versions that presented more of a famous historical character than Anne Frank, the teenager.

Anne and Anna: The New Multi-Cultural and International Theatre In Between

Not so in Philadelphia, where Anna Watson, a young German actress who recently moved to the United States, performs Teenager: Anne Frank, a play that she has put together based on Anne Frank’s writing. This piece allows us to really see the adolescent come alive, complete with her ups and downs, including those scenes that Anne’s father had excised when the first edition of the diary was published in 1947, namely the confrontations between the teenager and her mother—scenes that countless young girls experience when they go through puberty.

I have seen theatrical versions of the life of Anne Frank edited, directed, and performed in many different ways but never like this production by the new multi-cultural and international Theatre InBetween . Richard Watson, the Jamaica-born producer and executive director of the fledgling company married Anna, his German high-school sweetheart of twelve years whom he met when she had a scholarship to study in the US for one year. The director, German TV, film, radio, and theatre actor Frank Brückner had also moved to the US recently and is married to Lise Raven, an award-winning writer and director, who teaches film at Drexel University. Anti-Semitism forced Lise’s mother, along with her sisters and parents, to flee Nazi Germany.

What distinguishes this production from other Anne Frank plays is the fact that we see a contemporary Anne, who takes us on a roller coaster of feelings, thoughts and adolescent experiences, all against the backdrop of the pitch-black Philadelphia skyline. The performance takes place on a roof of the thirteen-story Parkway House, built by the first female architect in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Fleisher, along with co-designer Gabriel Roth, “in homage to Art Deco and international styles.” The stunning view of the gleaming lights and the extravagant buildings of the city’s skyline from this historical Pennsylvania Avenue building—diagonally across from the famous Philadelphia Museum of Art—represents a future that was denied Anne: a human being, a teenage girl, German, Jewish, and, above all, a real Mensch.
This production is the most transparent one I have ever seen, both physically and dramatically. The Achterhuis, that secret Annex or hiding place on top of a building in Amsterdam, becomes an 8-foot-by-8-foot white cube made of PVC piping, a space filled with nothing but a little table, a tiny mirror, Anne’s handbag with photographs of her favorite actors and a little stuffed animal inside. It is so wholly modern in design that Anne becomes contemporary. She even wears a girlish pink cardigan with appliqué roses and an aquamarine tank-top underneath—the kind of clothing that teenagers these days are wearing all over America.

Young German Theatre Artists Search for Anne Frank in Philadelphia

Anna Watson, who has performed in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, had read The Diary of Anne Frank many times and decided some years ago to compile the best and the most relevant teenager portions of the diary and arrange them in a such a way that the audiences would have a chance to get deep inside the soul of this extraordinary teenager in occupied Holland. When Watson had performed her play in Vienna, it was still halfway between a period piece and a modern play.
After she had met Frank Brückner by chance at Philadelphia’s Tuscany Café, she decided to go one step further and remove any aspects of her prior performance that would make Anne Frank a museum piece, inaccessible for a young, contemporary audience. Rather than paying their respect to the extraordinary life of this remarkable girl in an historical, and thus confining, setting, both the young director and the actress from Germany decided to liberate Anne Frank and give her a place in our own time.

Watson told me that after she moved to Philadelphia, “I was busy being homesick one day, but then I decided to sign up for the  Philadelphia Fringe Festival because I wanted to move forward and this society very much encourages individual initiative.” And so, she and first-time director Frank Brückner worked together for many months. Clearly, all the collaborative work paid off.

In this production, which showcases Brückner and Watson’s first foray into English-speaking theatre, both the actress and the director even toyed with the idea of having Anne Frank use a cell phone and record her diary on a voice recorder. However, they both decided that they wanted nothing to distract the audience from the joy and the turmoil in the life of the teenager who was locked up in a tiny space on top of the building at Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht 267, a history-heavy street where many years later, Richard Watson, the executive director of Theatre InBetween, lived in a building near the Anne Frank House as an exchange student at the University of Amsterdam.

Teenager: Anne Frank

The play begins with a long Pinteresque pause, which can be unnerving for newcomers to the theatre. On the other hand, it creates a tension in the viewers who recognize that they are being transported into a different world. Once Anne swings into action, she walks right up to that little mirror affixed to one of the pipes and, looking at herself, becomes aware of the changes she is undergoing. Full of anticipation and joy, she applies lipstick, wanting to be pretty for Peter, “the only boy I’m going to see for a long time.” This “mirror, mirror on the wall” scene, from the very beginning, engages the viewers and connects to the lives of countless adolescents who are experiencing the same excitement that, 66 years ago, Anne, the fourteen-year-old, did.

She continues contemplating her blossoming romance: “Isn’t it important for every girl, when she gets her first kiss?” No sooner has she presented her thoughts and her defiance when she asks, “Do you think Father and Mother would approve of a girl my age sitting on a divan and kissing a seventeen-and-a-half year old boy? I doubt they do.” Anne’s rebelliousness comes through powerfully, most likely making countless adolescents feel heard and understood when she ponders, “Why should we ask anyone’s permission?” She concludes, “Sharing our thoughts with each other requires a great deal of trust, but we’ll both be stronger because of it.” Anne, very aware of her physical development but also her intellectual and emotional strength, wrote, full of confidence, “Everyday I feel myself maturing.”

This production reminded me, in some ways, of Spring Awakening, with its emphasis on the transformation of adolescents into young adults. A Children’s Tragedy, as Wedekind’s play was subtitled, can also apply to the life of the historical Anne Frank, even though Teenager: Anne Frank exudes a joy rarely matched by other productions of Anne Frank.

Young Germans Liberating Anne Frank

When I heard the actress say, “I was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany,” I thought that Anna Watson, and not Anne Frank, was talking about her own life. However, once she continued, “A few years later, my family emigrated to Amsterdam, Netherlands,” I knew that we were still following the life of one of the most talented young writers of her time, and, certainly, the most widely read young diarist of the twentieth-century: “Hitler invaded Holland in 1940. The Dutch surrendered, the Germans arrived, and the trouble started for the Jews.”

German is used sparingly but powerfully, for example when Anne juxtaposes the “German Wehrmacht Berichte and the English BBC.” Or, when she, in very vivid ways, imitates her mother with her voice taking on an ice-cold tone, a fourteen-year-old teenager rebelling against her mother: “Anne! Nein! But there’s not a soul in the building! That doesn’t matter. You can’t go down those stairs. Never?! . . . Nein! Not even then. It’s too dangerous.” Anne then lets loose a whole cavalcade of diatribes against her mother, walking around like a caged animal: “I can’t talk to her. I can’t look lovingly into those cold eyes. I can’t. Not ever! If she had even one quality an understanding mother is supposed to have, gentleness or friendliness or patience, or something, I’d keep trying to get closer to her—it’s becoming more and more impossible every day!” Then Anne’s indefatigable spirit comes through like a rainbow after a storm, “But no one can lock up my imagination.”

Anna Watson presented the mother with such a cold tone that I almost got frightened, especially with her sharp, staccato-like series of “Nein!” followed by commands of what was allowed and what was verboten. At the same time, the German actress also managed, within split seconds, to switch masterfully into the role of the young adolescent who couldn’t understand why it was important to live under self-imposed restrictions—this constant back-and-forth brought to life a scene with which many young people can easily identify.

After the outburst of feelings vis-à-vis her mother, Anne changes into a more pensive mood. Her energy level waxes and wanes in countless ways through gestures, facial expressions, body language, and a great variety of vocal tones, punctuated by reflective silences. In between those pauses, I saw a fellow human being, fighting against family customs and traditions, like wearing slippers and taking piano lessons: “Just think of the fight with Mother over my slippers. I’d rather die than wear slippers, I said. But I still had to put them on in the end.” One could hear chuckling in the audience.

Full of exuberance, the feisty teenager relishes her small victories: “So you see, as long as we’re here, I don’t ever have to wear slippers again. Isn’t that great?! . . . and piano lessons! No, now I don’t have to practice anymore! I’ll tell you, I’ll be living like a queen.” More laughter waved through the audience. However, little did Anne Frank know that not too long after that defiant and exuberant diary entry, she and the entire household would be betrayed and deported to Auschwitz and eventually carted off to Bergen-Belsen.

Unexpectedly foreshadowing Anne’s fate, Anna froze in her tracks when a helicopter flew over Philadelphia’s Parkway. She listened as if it had been a Luftwaffe plane flying over occupied Amsterdam. And then, spoken into the silence of the night, “It’s the silence that frightens me most. Every time I hear a creak in the house, or a step on the street, I’m sure they’re coming for us.”

Anne, brutally aware of her environment, reflected on the impact of politics on their lives from the perspective of a teenager: “Arguing so much about politics is just plain stupid! Let them laugh, swear, make bets, grumble and do whatever they want as long as they stew in their juice. But don’t let them argue, since that only makes things worse.” She even addresses the audience directly, asking them, “What is the point of the war?”

Clearly, Anne sets herself apart from the adults, not as a child, but as an adolescent with her own set of values, including criticism of the adults in her little world: “And so it goes from early in the morning to late at night: the funny part is that they never get tired of it.” Anne, getting a bit frustrated about this nonstop survival talk of the adults, criticizes the elders in typical Anne Frank fashion: “One broadcast, two at the most, should be enough to last the entire day. But no, those old nincompoops . . .” She stops and—like Gilda Radnor, the famous American comedienne of the early Saturday Night Live program—ends with “Never mind, I’ve already said it all.”

Clearly, Anne had not said it all: “Oh, why are people so crazy?” she asks, full of wonderment. And then shares her eternal optimism with us: “I look upon life in hiding as an interesting adventure, full of danger and romance, and every privation an amusing addition to my diary.”

“No One Knows Anne’s Better Side.”

Building up to a most moving final scene, Anna abruptly turns off her many joyful facial expressions and her lively movements and almost transforms into a walking pillar of salt when she stares into the void, her face eerily distorted, aware of what lies ahead of her. Walking forward slowly, as if to talk to the anti-Semitic officer, she affirms, “No one knows Anne’s better side.”

When the actress slowly leaves the cube, the audience is left with an awareness of the plight of teenager Anne Frank and perhaps the plight of countless teenagers around the world who suffer discrimination and persecution. On opening night, after a minute of silence, the audience broke out into a long, supportive applause and gave both Anna and Anne a standing ovation and with it the director and the stage designer.

Audience Responses to the Liberated Anne Frank

The responses from the audience were most enthusiastic, ranging from “Wow. Anne Frank no longer is a period piece but a thoroughly modern play” to “Hope in a hopeless situation” as Gregory Wolmart put it. Karen Fzesq was moved deeply by Anna’s “powerful silent scream” at the end of the play, and Chrissy Erickson wrote: “I realized that Anne’s voice is still alive, even though she died. Her voice lives on.”

The production brought out a wide range of thoughtful responses, including this international perspective: “This play reminded me of the lives of girls and young women in villages of Afghanistan where the Taliban or village elders are preventing girls from leaving the house” as Lise Raven observed: “Anne is less of an historical figure and more of an everyday girl.”

Maria Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Film at the University of the Arts, added, “If it helps us to become more aware of the human rights abuses against girls and women worldwide, this play would, apart from anything else, already have achieved a great deal.”

Lesley Barth, who has performed with a Yale comedy group at the Annenberg Center recently, commented, “I was struck by the mixture of the extraordinary and the ordinary—how Anne is not only a symbol, but a real human being.”
Following the opening night’s performance, Randi Boyette of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was impressed by what she had witnessed and shared with the director, the producer, and the actress that she would like to see this production performed in schools and synagogues. “In addition to a wonderful performance,” Boyette said, “Anna’s German accent lends authenticity to the role.”

When I asked the ADL representative what she thought about a young German director and a young German actress not only performing but interacting with audiences in American synagogues, she didn’t hesitate with her answer: “That’s a plus. Especially as this is such an extraordinary production.” However, she wanted to make sure that the play was short enough so that there would be enough time for Q&A sessions to allow young people to learn more about Anne Frank, the historical character, and Anne, the teenager.

The Anne and Anna Partnership on Philadelphia’s Parkway: A Great Success
​
This play, which marks the birthday of Theatre InBetween in the US as part of the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe, has added two additional dates and will run until September 20th. Teenager: Anne Frank could easily make it to the famous Edinburgh Fringe, the biggest arts festival in the world, next year—an event that could lead to many more performances here and abroad. I can visualize the headlines in the international press next summer: BREAKING NEWS: Anne Frank, Alive in Europe. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

Dear Naava Piatka, 

When I met you at the international conference of the Association for Jewish Theatre in Vienna two years ago, I was immediately struck by your passion for theatre, for the arts, for people. And when I saw you up on stage, bringing parts of the past into our own lives, I was fighting tears, but, at the same time, you also made me laugh and feel empowered by your art, your work, your life. 

And then, when you got one of the biggest rounds of applause at the international conference, Deborah Baer Mozes, artistic director of Theatre Ariel, the Jewish theatre here in Philadelphia, walked up to the stage at the famous monastic Piaristenkeller with a birthday cake and a candle whose flame shot high up on that stage. I will never forget the way you held your hands up to your chin in utter surprise, radiating even more joy and energy than before—if that is possible.
I spoke to you afterwards, wanted to see more of your work, wanted theatre goers in the Philadelphia area to come and see you on stage. You gave me your card, we had a short correspondence, and then our communication seemed to disappear in the sand of time. Naava, I did not know at the time that you were fighting cancer—just as I did not know that my only sister was struggling with breast cancer for four years. And by the time we knew, it was too late. 

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, Naava, that your joyful letter came in, if “joyful” is the right word. You announced with great enthusiasm that your very first major publication No Goodbyes—“a father-daughter memoir about love, war and resurrection,” was just published and made available on Amazon.com. I was thrilled for you but also stunned when I learned in the same email that your days on this earth were numbered because of cancer. 

Frankly, I did not know what to do. Should I buy the book and send you a get-well card, even though you had made it quite clear that the end was near? Naava, some people might visit with some chicken soup, others who live in your neighborhood might come by and hug you and listen to you. I can’t cook and I could not visit, but I write plays. And strange as it may sound, I wanted to write a play for you, wanted you, like Alice in Wonderland, present extraordinary stories, except that the Holocaust, alas, is more than a string of strange adventures underground. Naava, I was so moved by your joy, your energy that you kept to the very end, that I was determined to write a short play for you and about you by Hanukkah. 

And then your sister’s letter arrived, informing all of us that you had left, the way you had announced it via your book title: No Goodbyes. To me that was your way of saying, “Move forward, friends. Don’t be sad.” I appreciate the encouragement to move forward, but I am struggling with the sadness part. So, Naava, what did I do to find some solace? I went to the mother of all video sites and searched for the best version of Ravel’s “Kaddisch”—music which brings tears to my eyes every single time (I know, men are not supposed to cry, but the images that this piece of music evokes are so strong that I don’t resist those “mélodies hébraïques”). 

And while I listened to the various versions on YouTube, I came across the “Kaddish” sung by your Israeli sister, Ofra Haza, who also passed away before her time. Her boundless energy and beauty reminded me of you. I found her “Kaddish” so engaging that I had to listen to it almost nonstop. Wherever you are, Naava, feel free to play it. This very special Kaddish is for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cduijAP5hss&feature=related  

As you know, I come from Germany and my father, a Third Reich propaganda officer and war correspondent, hated Jews and through his writing contributed to the misery that silenced the voices of millions of wonderful people. I have never had the chance to visit a family who sat shiva with relatives and friends, but I imagine it to be a time rich in memory of you, Naava. And so, I would like to send your family, especially your children, the link to the “Shluchim Song” by a young Israeli singer, Ohad Moskowitz, whose voice expresses better than anything I could say how I feel right now about you and all those who left us before their time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMFbnkpX-fE&feature=related  

Last but not least, I never have planted a tree in Israel either, but now I want to do that—in your name. May that sapling grow and become as unique a tree as Naava Patka. And then, one day, we might say: Till next year, under Naava’s tree, not in Jerusalem, but in a place where the land really needs strong trees, strong trees like you, Naava. 

Ave Vale, Naava, fare thee well, auf Wiedersehen, and as many SHALOMS as find space on each leaf of your tree, on each page of your book—your farewell gift to us. 

Thank you, Naava, from the United States, and a special “ačiū” from Lithuania, a sunny “baie dankie” from South Africa, a grateful and pensive “Dankeschön” from Germany, and a welcoming “toda lach” from Israel, you wonderful mensch. Naava, you will live on in all those who knew you, in all those who will discover your book, even 100 years from now, and in all those who, one day, will find shade under your tree in Israel—the Naava Piatka tree. 

Shalom, Naava, Shalom, Shalom. 

This letter was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, October 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Some time ago, the Jewish War Veterans of Delaware County (near Philadelphia) invited me to conduct a workshop, “We are what we say.” Being German and non-Jewish, I almost felt like a modern-day Daniel entering a Jewish lions’ den. I went to the synagogue extra early to get to know the World War II veterans a bit better before the program began. The educational director had promised not to reveal my nationality to anyone, but almost everyone asked me all the same. I told them that I would share that later. “Oh, we know,” most of the war veterans said, “you’re from England.” I smiled and thanked them. 

And then we sat together in a large circle and I asked the person to my left to introduce himself with something about his family name and then to share one thing that made him special. The stories about Jewish names were delightful, sometimes sad, at other times hilarious. Everyone had something special to share about his or her life. After the last person had introduced herself, it was my turn, and I revealed what I had so carefully concealed all this time: 

“Thank you for your invitation. I feel very honored,” I began. The whole group smiled and nodded, and then I opened up, “I was born in the wrong country at the wrong time.” The seniors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s looked puzzled. And then I said it, “I was born during World War II in Nazi Germany with the swastika on my birth certificate. My father hated Jews, and through his writing as a propaganda officer and war correspondent, contributed to the misery of the Third Reich.” 

The silence, the disbelief, and the sadness in the faces of the Jewish war veterans who had been most welcoming during the reception hit me hard, but I had to come clean, had to share with them where I came from, and that it was an honor for me to meet the very people whom my father had maligned through his writing. 

And then the workshop began. It was an uphill battle at first as some of the seniors were struggling with the fact that the “young man” who had come to visit was not who they thought he was, say a nice gentleman from Britain, but the son of parents who supported the Third Reich. 

Visiting Mr. Baron and Mr. Green at Philadelphia’s oldest theatre 

I thought of that first experience with the Jewish war veterans when I saw Jeff Baron’s famous Visiting Mr. Green at the Hedgerow, the oldest theatre in the Philadelphia area, a former grist mill in the middle of the woods, directed by Roberta Sloan, Professor and Chair of the Theater Department at Temple University. I saw the play that is so popular that it has been translated into 22 languages, performed in 38 countries, and to this day is performed somewhere on the globe at any given time. And most likely, someone is working on yet another translation. Apart from Shakespeare, few playwrights can boast such popularity. 

In Israel alone, the Cameri Theatre production of Visiting Mr. Green, simply called Mr. Green there, has become the longest running play in Israeli history. Since its opening in July 2001, there have been more than 500 performances throughout Israel. And in Germany, according to the playwright’s website, “There have been 24 separate productions of Besuch bei Mr. Green [. . .], and the play often returns for a second or third season [. . .] The fourth tour visited 42 cities across Germany in 2007. A fifth tour took place in early 2008.” 

Just as I had tried to hide my identity as a German “goy” so as not to upset my Jewish hosts, so Ross Gardiner (the dashing Damon Bonetti, one of Philadelphia’s best actors who consistently performs with a precision rarely seen among young performers), conceals an important part of his life. 

The playwright produced a powerful dynamic by juxtaposing the working-class hero of the play who hides behind his wonderful marriage of many decades, claiming repeatedly, “We were married for 59 years, we never argued, not even once.” Mr. Green perpetually uses the Jewish religion as a shield from which he runs his attacks on Ross, the wealthy, young, Harvard-educated American Express manager. Because of an accident where Mr. Green fell in front of Ross’ car, Ross was forced by a judge to act as a kind of assistant social worker, visiting Mr. Green’s once a week and helping him get on with his daily life. 

When a bitter old man becomes a new father 

We see a grumpy old Mr. Green (Alan Kutner, a witty actor and charming gentleman in real-life and on stage, but also a tough cookie when the role demands it), well-fed by his doting wife of almost 60 years, but deteriorating now since her death several months earlier. He loses almost all interest in life, aside from religiously wearing his kippah in the apartment, until the young visitor rejuvenates him. The young Ross finds the old man a complicated human being who has harbored a secret of his own: Mr. Green has declared as dead his daughter Rachel, who had married a non-Jew. 

Many years ago, rigid and unwilling to forgive, let alone accept his daughter’s decision, he had sat shiva for Rachel, unaware of the historical facts (as described by Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch in vol. 2 of The Jewish Book Of Why): 

“This custom [of sitting Shiva] is based on a misunderstanding that dates back to the publication in the twelfth century of Or Zarua, by Rabbi Isaac of Vienna. In this book, Rabbi Isaac reported that the great eleventh-century scholar Rabbenu Gershom ben Yehuda, known as the Luminary of the Diaspora (Meor Hagola), sat Shiva for his son who had converted to Christianity. Upon publication of the book, it became widespread practice to sit Shiva for one's child who converts, despite the fact that outstanding scholars, including Joseph Caro, author of the Code of Jewish Law, insisted that doing so is not the law and hence is not appropriate conduct [. . .]. To sit Shiva for a family member who converts is, in a sense, consigning him to death, thus precluding the possibility of his ever returning to the faith of his ancestors.” 

Sloan, the director, did not shy away from presenting one of the most damning utterances by old Mr. Green who, upon finding out that his young visitor is not heterosexual, accuses him and all gay people of pederasty, unaware that he is spouting off the kind of unqualified prejudice that has been similarly hurled against Jewish people as mean money-grabbers. 

Although Mr. Green begrudgingly accepts that Ross goes shopping for him, feeds him, and tidies up every week, he gets very upset upon learning that the young Jewish visitor is gay: “Maybe you didn’t know this. Jewish boys are not faygeles,” he pontificates, reminiscent of the Iranian president who recently told the world that there are no gay people in his country. 

Sloan goes even further in making visible the wall that the cantankerous, rigid, and homophobic Mr. Green creates between himself and Ross. Building the traditional tallit into her superb production at the Hedgerow Theatre, Sloan propels Mr. Green’s transformation from a working-class senior in a dilapidated New York apartment into a high priest. Upon learning of the young man’s lifestyle, Mr. Green turns the morning prayer shawl into a mourning shawl, almost militantly adorning himself with it as though it were his armor. 

Tallit-cladded Green both ignores Ross and, at the same time, dramatically tries to exorcise the young man from the “evil spirit” of homosexuality so that, hopefully, he can marry and produce Jewish children. Mr. Green fails to understand that just as people are left-handers or are born into their ethnic groups, human beings have no choice over their sexual orientation. Ross tries to help the old man understand: “All I’m saying is that being Jewish . . . you know what it’s like to be hated for something you can’t change.” 

Instead of responding logically, Mr. Green simply ignores his Samaritan and leaves him standing there, shutting him out by closing the door behind him. Here we see another of the many examples of Baron’s well-written play, in which every move suggests that he knows both characters intimately well, so much so that Martin Andrucki, Professor of Theater at Bates College, considers Mr. Green to be an “emotionally-frozen old man” who “clings so tightly to his orthodox identity that he is strangling his own soul, committing spiritual suicide.” 

Convinced of his values as being the rule by which everything and everybody else has to be measured, Mr. Green tries several times, albeit unsuccessfully, to dispense grandfatherly wisdom on marriage to Ross, the Jewish bachelor, even though it would violate the young man’s sense of being. 

Having tried unsuccessfully to change Ross’ way of life, Mr. Green surrenders, feeling betrayed by Ross’ gayness, and exclaims: “Get out of my house! . . . You and my daughter. You think you know everything.” In a virulent attack against Ross’ sexual orientation, Mr. Green aligns Ross with his daughter in a category of “bad” Jews: 

“Here’s what you and Rachel learned in college. You learned how to exterminate the Jews. Mazel Tov. Thanks to you two, no more Jews will be born. You’re finishing the job for Hitler.” Trying to break up Mr. Green’s close-mindedness about same-sex attraction and interfaith marriage, Ross retorts: “But if Rachel is Jewish, the children would be Jewish.” Mr. Green, unfazed, concludes: “Yeah. . . Jewish like you. Who needs it?” 

Dried, old flowers or fresh flowers? 

In vignette after vignette, we see two lives converge and collide, for example, in a genuine attempt to help Mr. Green clean up his apartment—and his stagnated life—Ross discards the old flowers and replaces them with fresh flowers. However, once Ross recognizes his faux pas, he quickly retrieves the old, thistle-like bouquet of dried out, dead flowers for his late wife. Through this incident, Ross learns to have respect for Mr. Green’s past, while Mr. Green slowly accepts fresh flowers in his old vase—new life inside the silent four walls of his apartment. These scenes were masterfully handled by the director and performed by two excellent actors, Bonetti and Kutner, as powerful in their speech as in their gestures. 

The persona of Mr. Green is based on the playwright’s rather difficult grandmother while the young visitor is based on the author himself, a Harvard graduate who worked as an American Express manager, ready to climb the corporate ladder, before he gave it up and became one of America’s most widely performed playwrights. Sloan, the director, created many moving and thought-provoking moments which had the audience laugh a lot but also fight tears on more than one occasion. 

She also handled some of the more sensitive parts of the play with great delicacy, for example, when Mr. Green, full of enthusiasm, recollects the time in his youth when he was waiting outside the building’s toilet—shared by several families—where he met Yetta, a young Russian immigrant. She didn’t speak English, but he communicated beautifully with her in Yiddish, so much so that they married shortly thereafter. 

Ross, aware that the old man is refusing to eat properly and, through his self-neglect, committing a kind of slow suicide, tells him point-blank: “If you don’t eat, you’ll die. . . . You seem like a very religious man, so I’m sure you know this—I even remember it from Hebrew school. Jews aren’t allowed to commit suicide.” 

In several scenes, we see the mental deterioration of Mr. Green, from collapsing on the floor to sleepwalking, believing that Ross is his wife—a scene acted in most moving ways by Kutner, whose gestures, facial, and physical expressions cover a wide range of feelings and emotions throughout the play, especially in the somnambulism scene. Taking on an almost father-like role in this very delicate situation, Bonetti as Ross, presents a most convincing, responsible young man taking care of a person struggling with dementia. 

To connect the audience with the world of an old Jew who lives in the past, the director has added Yiddish music in between most scenes, to create an atmosphere in which two cultures and lifestyles are clashing. The play is so well constructed that each gut-wrenching moment is balanced by a humorous scene which had the audience in stitches. For example, when Ross, trying to convince Mr. Green that he is Jewish, too, switches into a thick New-York-Jewish accent, imitating Mr. Green: “Who told you I wasn’t Jewish?” 

Another fascinating clash of cultures occurs when Mr. Green recognizes that the Harvard-educated young Jew doesn’t even know the most basic of Yiddish terms, traditions, and vocabulary. So, very patiently, Mr. Green tries to explain the difference between “milchik” and “fleyshik” and how one must keep cutlery and plates separate for milk products and meat products, something that Ross, a secular Jew, doesn’t seem to understand. Yet, in a way, both men tolerate each other. 

Near the end of the play, the grumpy, bitter, old Mr. Green lets go of his anger and embraces Ross, who had practically lost his own father who had mocked him publicly—expressing homophobia in front of his own son at a family gathering in New York. The tension in the audience about such injustice was so great that when Mr. Green finally accepts Ross the way he is and when the old man becomes the young man’s father—in a wider sense of the word—the theatre erupted into a spontaneous, long, and liberating applause. 

Invite your friends 

I won’t give away the moving ending, but the long, unanticipated hug of Ross and Mr. Green, reminded me of the workshop with the Jewish war veterans, during which I received more hugs than at any other meeting. I was invited back several times. Later, when the Jewish war veterans lost their synagogue as it was torn down, making them homeless, they accepted my invitation and came to my house for a meeting. This gathering with the Jewish war veterans at my house, with more hugs, was one of the greatest gifts, one of the greatest honors, in my life. 

The director summarized the essence of Visiting Mr. Green, that crossing of cultural bridges and misunderstandings: “The play is as pertinent today as it was then, because it is an exploration of what it means to be human and to connect with one another despite our differences.” If you have not seen this fine production yet, make sure to call your friends, especially those who live alone or could do with a good dose of warmth and life during these cold days. Get tickets, snow or no snow, and hug each other. You will not regret it, nor will your friends. 

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Visiting Mr. Green, till Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010 
Hedgerow Theatre   (610) 565-4211

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, February 2010. Available via the Wayback Machine.

“Sylvia was in my body. Almost scary," said Renee Weisband, Artistic Director of Isis Productions, about her role as Sylvia Gellburg, the troubled heroine of Arthur Miller’s only all-Jewish play, Broken Glass, and performed at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio in Philadelphia. Sylvia, a Brooklyn woman, identifies so much with the victims of the infamous Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938 that she loses all feeling in her legs and can no longer walk, becoming as bedridden and horrified by her physical state as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis: 

“I can harden the muscles but I can’t lift them . . . My whole body seems . . . I can’t describe it. [. . .] Like a deep, terrible aching . . . (She stares ahead.) They are making old men crawl around and clean the sidewalks with toothbrushes. [. . .] they’re smashing up the Jewish stores . . . should I not read the paper? The streets are covered with broken glass!"

“Everything I did is stupid and ridiculous. I can’t find myself in my life. (She hits her legs.) Or in this now, this thing that can’t even walk. I am not this thing. And it has me. It has me and will never let me go."

Throughout the play, the other characters wonder about Sylvia’s sudden, emotionally and physically crippling affinity for persecuted Jewish people across the Atlantic: 

“Margaret [the doctor’s non-Jewish wife]: Getting this hysterical about something on the other side of the world is sane? 
Hyman [the physician]: When she talks about it it’s not the other side of the world it’s on the next block. 
[. . .] It’s like she’s connected . . . to some wire that goes half-way around the world, some truth that other people are blind to." 

Weisband, like Sylvia, comes from an old Jewish family and brings a tremendous knowledge of Jewish traditions and wisdom—but also suffering—into her performance. For example, one of Weisband’s aunts and uncles from Poland—the Geminders—together with their two little boys, tried to survive the Warsaw ghetto: 

“Teamed with dogs, soldiers often searched the ghetto for those they considered undesirable. Geminder’s grandmother knew the Germans were coming one evening. She had the boys hide in a pantry, then piled wood in front of the door. The wood disguised the boys’ scent and saved their lives," according to “An Unprivileged Childhood" by Paul Browning. In 1942, Weisband’s aunt heard news that the entire ghetto was going to be “liquidated." She quickly devised a plan to escape: “My mother hid me under her skirt and put my brother under her friend’s skirt. Then they walked out of the ghetto to go to work," said Robert Geminder, Weisband’s cousin. 

Unfortunately, Weisband’s aunt and uncle and their two little sons were caught and sent to Auschwitz where her cousin, young Robert Geminder, managed to lift the latch of the train and open the cattle car so that the family could escape and hide in a farm house, until eventually Weisband’s relatives came to the United States. 

The collective knowledge of the Holocaust, especially the infamous Kristallnacht, but also Arthur Miller’s multifaceted, if not troubled marriage to Marilyn Monroe, plus his public image which got shattered in 1956 when he was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to identify writers he had met at one of the two communist writers’ meetings he had attended many years before saw him being dragged in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee—events which imbued this drama to such an extent that even today one can sense the tension and the existential angst that drives this play.

Broken Glass leads to a lot of hidden but also several explosive encounters, shifting and shattering the main characters’ perceptions of reality, especially those of the Brooklyn couple Sylvia Gellburg (Renee Weisband, the essence of Jewish suffering and liberation, and the driving force behind this production) and Phillip Gellburg (the mercurial husband Barry Brait who controls not only his wife but even the audience with his precision and staccato use of language). 

It seems that Miller, after decades of writing a wide range of plays, including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible—at the age of 79 in 1994, almost 50 years after the end of WWII—gave himself permission to openly discuss both his Jewish roots and philosophy as well as his relationship with a non-Jewish woman. This cross-cultural relationship is also reflected in the marriage between Dr. Harry Hyman (Joe Guzman, a popular Philadelphia actor who, in his riding boots charmed not only his wife and his patient, but also the audience with his seasoned good looks and seductive manners) and Margaret Hyman, his wife, the Shiksa (the beautiful Michelle Pauls whose snappiness added an important down-to-earthness to the play), and especially in his portrayal of Phillip Gellburg who wavers in his acceptance of his Jewish heritage, even fighting it by criticizing those Jews whom he does not understand. 

Insecurity, authoritarian personality, and wavering anti-Semitism

Sylvia’s husband, Phillip Gellburg—embarrassed by his Jewish heritage, and yet somehow a little proud of it—lives in an emotional and societal strait-jacket whose modus operandi consists of acting in two contradictory ways: He either exhibits a slavish submission vis-à-vis his anti-Semitic boss, Mr. Stanton Case, the wealthy entrepeneur (Steve Gulick, a teacher, a peace and social activist in real life, and an actor who played the bigoted industrialist and exploiter), or he lets his authoritarian personality dominate and make miserable both his marriage and family life, as reported by (the sister of Sylvia Gellburg) Harriet (Mindy Ginsberg, the loveable and womanly sister who was so convincing that I wanted to invite her for a strudel and kugel afternoon, except that I can’t bake). 

Dr. Hyman’s wife, Margaret, refers to Phillip as “one miserable little pisser" who is “a dictator." New York Times critic Canby refers to Phillip Gellburg as “a small man but [. . .] a gigantic mess": “Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the hero of Broken Glass hasn't misread society's signals so much as he has blindly accepted them." 

“Harriet: Well, God forbid you have an opinion—you open your mouth and he gives you that Republican look down his nose and your brains dry up. Not that I don’t like him." 

“Hyman: You’re very unusual, (Grinning.) you almost sound like a Republican. 
Gellburg: Why? The Torah says a Jew has to be a Democrat? I didn’t get where I am by agreeing with everybody." 

In his conversation with Phillip’s sister-in-law, Dr. Hyman tries to learn more about possible reasons for the physical and emotional paralysis of Phillip’s wife: 

“Hyman: He doesn’t like being Jewish. 
Harriet: Well yes and no—like Jerome [his son] being the only Jewish Captain, he’s proud of that. And him being the only one that ever worked for Brooklyn Guarantee—he’s proud of that too, but at the same time . . . 
Hyman: He’d rather not be one." 

Indeed, Gellburg vacillates between a timid pride in his Jewishness and an outright rejection of Jewish life. In German, that attitude is called “the bicycle driver mentality": bowing to the ones above and kicking the ones below. For example, when interacting with his powerful Christian boss, Mr. Stanton Case, Phillip kicks his verbal pedals, even when he gets belittled for his Jewishness: 

“Case: It’s quite surprising for one of you people [. . .] 
Gellburg: [. . .] I’ll never know how to thank you. 
Case: No trouble at all. The Point can probably use a few of you people to keep the rest of them awake." 

Even when talking about the powerful Mr. Case, Phillip can’t praise enough the anti-Semitic boss who had thrown a few crumbs his way: “Gellburg: For a Jewish boy, West Point is an honor. Without Mr. Case’s connections, he’d never would have gotten in. He could be the first Jewish General in the United States Army." 

However, the Jewish Uriah Heep, ever so “’umble" with his cloying humility when facing authority figures—like Dickens’ infamous character in David Copperfield—Gellburg can also get outright nasty and anything but humble when he talks about German Jewish immigrants whom he considers arrogant, or Orthodox Jews who both attract and disgust him: 

“Gellburg: But there are some days I feel like going and sitting in the Schul with the old men and pulling the tallis over my head and be a full-time Jew the rest of my life. With the side locks and the black hat and settle it once and for all. And at other times . . . yes I could almost kill them. They infuriate me I am ashamed of them and that I look like them (Gasping again.)—Why must we be different? Why is it? What is it for? 
Hyman: And supposing it turns out that we are not different, who are you going to blame then? [. . .] I’m talking about all this grinding and screaming that’s going on inside you—you’re wearing yourself out for nothing Phillip absolutely nothing!" 

Miller does not present his main characters as caricatures. Rather, he presents them as people with strength and flaws, and does not shy away from showing both husband and wife playing dangerous stereotyping games. For example, Sylvia, meaning well by trying to comfort her husband, uses an old stereotype, “A Jew can have a Jewish face." Similarly, her husband asserts, “I wouldn’t know you were Jewish except for your name," only to have that glib stereotype followed by a deeper question, “Why is it so hard to be a Jew?" Even when Dr. Hyman explains that “It’s hard to be anything," Gellburg insists that being Jewish is different: “Being a Jew is a full-time job." 

In several flashbacks to his earlier life, Gellburg, who fights anyone who dares calling him Goldberg, because of the strong Jewish association that some non-Jews seem to have with gold-related names and the subtle jealousy and latent anti-Semitism that it tends to bring up, gets confronted by both his wife and Dr. Hyman whom he fights, but from whom he eventually learns to reflect on his life as a very unhappy person. 

“Gellburg: God, it’s almost twenty-five years ago [. . .] It’s funny, I felt so at home and happy there that day a street full of Jews, one Moses after another. [. . .] I wish we could talk about the Jews. [. . .] I don’t know where I am." 

“Hyman: [. . .] these remarks you’re always making about Jews [. . .] like not wanting to be mistaken for Goldberg. 
Gellburg: So I’m a Nazi? Is Gellburg Goldberg? [. . .] 
Hyman: No but continually making the point is kind of . . . [. . .] All right you want the truth? Look in the mirror sometime! [. . .] You hate yourself that’s what scaring her to death [. . .] I think you helped paralyze her with this “Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew," coming out of your mouth [. . .] and at the same time [. . .] it’s coming out of the radio day and night?" 

Jewish canary in an apolitical America 

Against the background of a predominantly unresponsive U.S. public in 1938, Sylvia acted, however subconsciously, as an American-Jewish canary in a coal mine of rapidly deteriorating humanity, caring deeply and alerting her environment about the atrocities committed against the Jewish community overseas—long before the public became aware of toxic gases that killed millions of those who were forced to wear the Star of David. 

Although not trained as a psychiatrist, Dr. Hyman believes that Sylvia’s physical paralysis is connected to something that could go beyond her over-identification with the victims of Nazi Germany. He therefore encourages her to share with him any possible reasons. Simultaneously, he becomes very physical with her to help her regain her strength in her lower extremities to such an extent that we witness several erotic scenes as both physician and patient develop strong feelings for each other: 

“Hyman: I want you to send your thoughts into your hips. [. . .] you still have tremendous power there. 
[. . .] Now tense your thighs. [. . .] Come on, raise your knees. [. . .] Do it for me. (With an exhaled gasp she gives up.) [. . .] Sylvia, I know you know more than you’re saying, why can’t you open up to me?" 

Sylvia, after decades of having been neglected and berated by her impotent husband, responds to Dr. Hyman—willing to probe into her inner-most being, willing to follow her physician’s seductive, deeply erotic lead to discover the reason for her physical and emotional paralysis: 

“Hyman: I want you to imagine that we’ve made love [. . .] I’ve made love to you. And now it’s over and we are lying together. And you begin to tell me some secret things. Things that are way down deep in your heart. (Hyman comes around the bed bends and kisses her on the cheek.) [. . .] Sylvia lays there inert for a moment. Then she tenses with effort, trying to raise her knee. It doesn’t work. [. . .] Then she lets her knees spread apart . . ." 

Slowly, the physician discovers the connection between Sylvia’s obsessive concentration on Nazi atrocities which she projects, however, subconsciously, onto her self-loathing, almost self-hating Jewish husband who, in her mind, becomes a Nazi who is destroying her: 

“Hyman: I’m beginning to wonder if this whole fear of the Nazis isn’t because she feels . . . extremely vulnerable; [. . .] a woman who doesn’t feel loved can get very disoriented, you know?—lost." 

“Sylvia: I could tell you a dream [. . .] there’s a crowd of people. [. . .] they’re Germans [. . .] I begin to run away. And the whole crowd is chasing me [. . .] Then just as I’m escaping around the corner a man catches me and pushes me down . . . [. . .] He gets on top of me. And begins kissing me [. . .] and then he starts to cut off my breasts [. . .] (discovering.) I think it’s Phillip. [. . .] but how could Phillip be like . . . he was almost like one of the others? [. . .] Would it be possible . . . because Phillip . . . ( A little laugh.) he sounds sometimes like he doesn’t like Jews? (Correcting.) Of course he doesn’t mean it, but maybe in my mind [. . .]." 

Eventually, Sylvia is coming into her own by recognizing her dysfunctional and destructive priorities, her dangerous, self-effacing behavior throughout her marriage. As a result of her awareness, she begins to take control of her life, becoming a strong Jewish woman in her own right, openly defying her authoritarian husband: 

“Sylvia: [. . .] How stupid it all is; you keep putting everything off like you’re going to live a thousand years. But we’re like those little flies—born in the morning, fly around for a day till it gets dark—and bye-bye." 

“Gellburg: What’s this tone of voice? 
Sylvia: (Trembling out of control.) It’s a Jewish woman’s tone of voice. 
Gellburg: A Jewish woman . . .! What are you talking about, are you crazy? [. . .] 
Sylvia: Nevermind. Don’t sleep with me again [. . .] I can’t bear it. You give me terrible dreams. 
Gellburg: Sylvia you will kill me if we can’t be together . . . [. . .] Stop that! Don’t say anymore. 
Sylvia: I’m going to say anything I want to [. . .] what I did with my life! Out of ignorance [. . .] a whole life. Gave it away like a couple of pennies—I took better care of my shoes [. . .] You want to talk to me about it now? Take me seriously, Phillip." 

Multi-faceted, liberated, Jewish physician 

Miller has created a strong balance of his play by making Dr. Hyman the voice of reason, the bridge-builder between husband and wife, the peace-maker between Jews and non-Jews, even though Hyman’s suggestive name and behavior show him to be anything but a grown-up choir boy. 

“Hyman: If you’re alive you’re afraid; we are born afraid [. . .] but how you deal with fear, that’s what counts. [. . .] I think you tried to disappear into the Goyim. 
Gellburg: . . . You believe in God? 
Hyman: I’m a socialist. I think we’re at the end of religion. [. . .] 
Gellburg: God forbid. But how can there be Jews if there’s no God? 
Hyman: Oh, they’ll find something to worship. The Christians will too—maybe different brands of ketchup. Some day we’re all going to look like a lot of monkeys trying to figure out a coconut." 

Given the oppressive quota system in U.S. universities which discriminated badly against bright Jewish students who were not allowed to study, Hyman completed his MD in Germany before he returned to the United States—pro-German and somewhat doubtful that the people from the land of Goethe, Bach, and Beethoven could do damage to their minorities. 

“Hyman: I simply can’t imagine those people marching into Austria, and now they say Czechoslovakia’s next, and Poland . . . . But fanatics have taken Germany, I guess and they can be brutal." 

“Sylvia: But you say they were such nice people how could they change like this! 
Hyman: This will all pass Sylvia! German music and literature is some of the greatest in the world: it’s impossible for those people to suddenly change into thugs like this. So you ought to have more confidence, you see?" 

Hyman, whom Miller imbued with a great deal of wisdom, in spite of the physician’s short-comings, makes some remarkable observations: “Everybody’s persecuted. The poor by the rich, the rich by the poor [. . .] and of course all of them by the Jews," concluding that “what’s really amazing is that you can’t find anybody who’s persecuting anybody else." 

Hyman shows extraordinary awareness about the frailty of human life: blaming others, especially Jews, instead of looking into the mirror to become aware of one’s own short-comings and, as a result, no longer blaming Jews for one’s own evil. 

“Gellburg: So you mean there’s no Hitler? 
Hyman: [. . .] Hitler is the perfect example of the persecuted man! [. . .] They’ve turned that whole beautiful country into one gigantic kvetch! [. . .]" 

Asked for the solution of such human frailty, Miller turns Hyman into a kind of sage who answers the vital question, “So what’s the solution?" with a plea for forgiveness of Sylvia, adding, “But that’s the easy part." In answer to Gellburg’s question, “What’s the hard part?" Miller gives us his testament through Dr. Hyman’s voice: “To forgive yourself, I guess, and the Jews. And while you’re at it you can throw in the Goyim. Best thing for the heart you know." 

Even the obstinate, at times self-hating Jewish Everyman Gellburg reaches a powerful epiphany in this confession to his wife: “I wasn’t telling you the truth. I’ve always tried to seem otherwise, but I’ve been more afraid than I looked. [. . .] I think I was more afraid than you are, a hundred times more [. . .] I tell you if I live I have to try to change myself." 

Thumbs up, thumbs down: Wide-ranging responses by critics to Broken Glass 

Considered to be one of the greatest and most widely performed American dramatists of the twentieth century, Miller has received many divergent reviews. For example, John Lahr, senior drama critic for The New Yorker, summarized Miller’s Broken Glass as “a brave, bighearted attempt by one of the pathfinders of postwar drama to look at the tangle of evasions and hostilities by which the soul contrives to hide its emptiness from itself." 

However, not everyone took to Miller’s reflection in the latter part of his life. For example, Rhoda Koenig, a New Yorker, now resident in London, a former night-club singer, travel writer, literary editor, and theatre critic for Punch and The Independent, more famous for her biting wit than for her philosophical depth, wrote this clever condemnation of Miller’s Broken Glass, perhaps ingratiating herself to her British audience: “Why do the English love Arthur Miller? Or, at least, why does he keep getting major productions and respectful, even reverent, reviews? English audiences usually admire wit, charm, cleverness, and eccentricity—with which Miller has not even a nodding acquaintance. Or they look to foreign authors for the moral or emotional force often lacking in the local product. Yet Miller doesn't exhibit either of these: instead of passion, he gives us hand-wringing." 

Howard Shapiro, usually a very kind and thoughtful theatre critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, apparently disliked Miller’s play so much that he wrote: “the script feels like it came from a freshman playwriting major. [. . .] Moreover, Miller gives [Sylvia] a tightly coiled, sexually unwilling husband who never rants about being Jewish in the script, although in the end, we're supposed to accept that he's done so all along." (Oy vey! Howard, would you like my copy of the script?) 

Having seen the Isis production of Broken Glass, I concur with Vincent Canby, who in his New York Times article—“Arthur Miller Still Holds to His Moral Vision"—concluded that the famous playwright is “still remarkable for the acuity and scope of his moral vision. It's this vision, as well as the Miller voice, which remains as strong and unrelenting as a prophet's, that distinguish Broken Glass and give it a poignance so rare these days that it's almost new-fashioned." 

Credits 

Directed by Neill Hartley (actor, QVC spokesperson, director of Acting Without Boundaries, a theatre company for young adults with physical disabilities, who has also directed at many theatres in the area), shared with me some of the challenges with the direction: 

“The first was trying to not let this become a ‘museum’ piece. I have heard of productions where the director projected images of the Holocaust and of Kristallnacht. I really was interested in the human experience and the mystery surrounding the series of events in the play—both in the Gellburg home and in Germany, and how they are related. The second challenge was working in a small space such as the Walnut Street Studio 5. Creating several locales in a black box can be difficult. I decided that the tight, claustrophobic spacing worked well for these scenes, as the characters are all trapped in their own way. I also wanted to give the audience a sense of all of these worlds being linked together, as we are to the world around us." 

The Isis production of Broken Glass is supported by Bill McKinlay’s lighting design, Alex Hartley’s sound design, and Brian Strachan’s costume design. 
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The production runs through April 4, 2010. For Tickets call: 877-260-1116 or purchase online. 
Contact: http://www.isisperforms.com  

​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2011. Available via the Wayback Machine.

"Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart." 

These hauntingly beautiful instructions are the beginning lines of Metronome Ticking, a powerful docudrama that I had the fortune to take in last week at Temple University, sponsored by the Dialogue Institute  . The play, which takes place in Nazi occupied Europe during the rise of the Third Reich, is based on the real life letters of two individuals divided by the war—one, a Third Reich Correspondent and Propaganda Officer, the other an Austrian Holocaust survivor fleeing persecution with her family. The disparate story lines are woven together by the actors who narrate them, each the son of the author from whose letters they read, both born the same year, the same month, during World War II.
In a powerful creative decision, the audience listens as Henrik Eger, the writer and director of the docudrama, gives voice to letters that his father wrote to his mother while he traveled with the German army as a journalist. They are juxtaposed by Bob Spitz, who reads from the memoirs of his mother, which detail her family's harrowing experiences as Jewish refugees, including time her husband spent in two concentration camps: Dachau and Buchenwald. 

Alf Eger and Lily Spitz are brought to life not only through their letters, but become visually real as old photographs and historical images are projected on screens to each side of the stage. With these images, the docudrama transforms into a multimedia experience that gives life to these two contemporaries and the war-torn period they lived in. 

Eger's inspiration for the docudrama came from the loss of his father's journals, documenting the entire Third Reich, which Alf kept religiously throughout most of his adult life. Decades later, when Henrik asked his mother for the journals so that he might publish them, she burned them all, likely an act of shame or fear intended to prevent Alf's bigoted ideologies from being broadcast to the world. 

The devastating loss of important historical documents—a detailed daily account of the entire Third Reich—caused Eger much anger and pain, but ultimately inspired him to create a play based on the burning of the journals and his parents' lives. While searching through old photo albums, he found his material—upwards of 500 letters that his father had written to his mother from Occupied France in the early 1940's. 

A chance meeting with Bob Spitz brought the drama's other half to life. Along with the discovery of their contrasting backgrounds, they found that they shared a common desire to tell their parents' stories, and both men happened to possess extensive first person accounts. Out of this unlikely union came Metronome Ticking, which was performed for the first time in 2006 and now in a new translation of the Hamburg version where both Spitz and Eger performed the docudrama to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. It was the hope of the creators that their stories, told together, could begin a healing process, and that the current generation might learn from the mistakes made by entire societies in the past. 

Their stories are real—so real that at times one feels invasive being privy to the raw emotion that pours from the letters.
In one particularly heart wrenching passage, Lily describes the crippling guilt she felt at leaving her mother behind to flee to Italy, when she discovered, hours after arriving with her husband, that the border had been closed to refugees. The audience cannot help but feel pangs of anguish at the news. It also feels her panic, and subsequent relief when a German soldier knocks loudly at the door of the little house where they are in hiding, sure that their cover has been blown, only to present her with sweets for young Roby (Bob): "You might need these for your child,” he said, then turned and left. 

The audience also experiences a range of emotions toward Alf, who writes lovingly to his wife, "My Dear Gritt, You are my bride, my equal, my comrade who should never allow herself to get lowered. You are original in your whole being." Yet, the same man is poisoned by prejudice, evident in his writing when he explains, "Gradually, it seeped into our brains which beasts and which poor crazy folks had damaged our youth. With every change of the moon, we will exterminate the evil around us." His sentiments are made all the more painful to swallow by the skilled literary beauty with which he articulates them. It makes the audience wonder what he could have accomplished had he used his pen for good instead of evil. 

Halfway through the performance, the actors switch roles in a symbolic maneuver that forces the audience to think, and perhaps, to reflect. On the one hand, there is an acute discomfort in listening to the son of the persecutor read the voice of the Jewish woman whose very existence was at stake because of writers like Alf; and it evokes bitterness as Lily's Jewish son reads the words of Henrik's father, the enthusiastic supporter of Nazi ideology who, through his many articles, contributed to the poison of racism and anti-Semitism during World War II. Yet, there is a strange catharsis in this push of the envelope: 

Progress is made by breaking down the walls of comfort zones, which are often burdened by fear of the unknown. Alf was blindly prejudiced against Jews and people of color, though he did not know them. In the spring of 1944, he ultimately despaired by the atrocities of war and especially by a mass execution he had witnessed in Russia. A few months later, he got killed by Russian partisans—a troubled, conflicted man at 31, a victim of the war he so zealously believed in at the start. The Spitz family immigrated to America some years later. 

Metronome Ticking shows us the destruction that our fear is capable of, and encourages acceptance of each other so that the past does not repeat itself. Though the events in the play took place several decades ago, this docudrama possesses an appeal that is ageless, drawing universal empathy from its audience, teaching them lessons they will not soon forget. 

The switch of roles also speaks to the arbitrary coincidence of birth. One has no control over the family that one is born into. That Henrik was born into a German family who trusted the Führer and all he stood for, and Bob to an Austria Jewish family, was simply fate at work. The circumstances of our birth and the environment we are raised in shape us as individuals and provide us with the values we live by, but they are a matter of coincidence. It is important to remember this arbitrary aspect of life when we think and talk about others and ourselves as we move through life. 

The purpose of the metronome, which ticks steadily throughout the course of the play—is to remind us of our ticking conscience, always present, but often drowned out by the noise of daily life. It asks, “Are you listening?” 

The drama concludes as chillingly as it began, leaving the audience to ponder this question as the actors slowly exit the room. Lead by Juliet Spitzer, the composer and performing artist of Jewish music , the two sons, born on the opposite side of the terrible divide during the Nazi era, sing a Hebrew song reserved for joyous occasions, but their tone is subdued, almost mournful. The audience sits, stunned for several silent moments, before they begin a thunderous applause. 

“Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” Peace be upon you. “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” 

​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2011. Available via the Wayback Machine.