Busy-ness

These past Daniel-less weeks have been a whirlwind of activity - goodbye dinners, spending time with friends, writing papers, etc.
Tonight I said goodbye to some of our closest friends of our Year in Israel by going with to see a community theater production (in English) of Oklahoma. It was a pretty good show - the singing was terrific although the dancing left much to be desired. Ultimately I was left with a strong sense of pride for America, a kind of nostalgia for good-old-American patriotism as represented by Rogers and Hammerstein. Although the play did not end in the singing of Hatikvah, as did 1776 (see my post on the Zionistic ending to that play), the notes in the program answer the question "Why Oklahoma in Israel?" in an interesting way:

"It strikes me that makes the show particume that there are many similarities between the fledgling state (Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907) and our own country. Both reflect a microcosm of conflicting interests, loyalties, sectors, and traditions joining together to form a new polity. Bit it is another, subtler, common theme that makes the show particularly appropriate for the Israeli stage. Bridging the often conflcting interests of the formers and the cowmen is Oklahoma's peddler, Ali Hakim. Despite being labeled as a Syrian (in Lynn Riggs' play, Green Grow the Lilacs, which served as the basis for Oklahoma!) or Persian (as adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II), Hakim is ostensibly Jewish, as were most ofthe peddlers in the western territories at the time. In fact, the role was created by Joseph Buloff, a star of the Yiddish stage, and his Jewish inflection was the subject of considerable critical discusion at the time. Does that make Oklahoma! a Jewish play? Not really, but iot does reflect the overwhelming influence that Jewish immigrants and their descendants had on the American musical theater."

I'm not sure that the most important point is that the 'Jewish' peddler represents Jewish influence on the American stage, as the character, a hypersexualized, irresponsible, money/business focused outsider is a conglomeration of negative stereotypes, likeable though he may be as a comic character. His Jewish character, not unlike the women who are treated as objects to be bought and sold, won and owned, are the creations of the 1943 American imagination of Jews, and performing the play in Israel, with Jews performing all of the roles and sitting in the audience, truly changes the meaning of the play and places Jews as the insiders, the active characters, and the athletic, macho heroes - truly a feit suiting the Zionist spirit.


As today was my last day of Yiddish class, and as we've been reading some poetry in class lately, I decided to end this post by translating a Manni Leib poem for you:

To the Non-Jewish Poet

An heir of Shakespeare, of shepherds and knights,
So good and fine for you, non-Jewish poet!
The earth is yours, where your uncle pig trots:
She gives him feed and gives your muse sustenance.

You sit like a bird on your branch and twitter,
And all the wild space answers you:
From you see the satieatedness, the breadth of the cities,
The complete serenity of satiated spirits.

And here am I, unwanted, a poet of the Jews,
Growing with weeds upon not-our world
Of grandfathers - tired wanderers with dusty beards -

That nourish themselves from books and markets;
And melodically I sing in a strange world the tears
Of wandering in a desert under foreign stars.



And one more for good measure (sorry about my poor translation skills, but at least this gives you the rough idea, though you are missing the patterns of the sounds). Here is one by David Hofstein:

In a Winter Evening

In a winder evening in Russian fields...
Where can one be lonlier, where can one be lonlier?

An old horse, a creaking sled,
A snowcovered dirt road - and I am in the middle

Behind, in the only corner of the paleness,
Smouldering stripes of sun's light still extinguish themselves sadly.

Ahead, a white desert spreads out
And far ahead a few houses are scattered -

There sleeps a hamlet, sunk down in the snow...
A few paths lead to the Jewish home.

A house, like all the others, but with larger windows,
And among the children there I am the oldest.

And narrow is my little world, and small is my circle:
Once in two weeks I go from the hamlet to the village.

And longing in silence for fields an for the vast wideness,
For many roads and paths, covered by snowdrifts...

And I cary in my heart the hidden pain
Of seeds that wait and wait to be sewn...

In winter evenings in Russian fields...
Where can one be lonlier, where can one be lonlier?...

1776 - or 1948

Last night Daniel and I went with a group of HUC students to see a production of 1776 by a Jerusalem English-speaking amateur theater company. The production was pretty decent for community theater and of course the HUC cantors who took part in it were terrific, but one of the most interesting moments of the whole show happened at the very end, after the bows and the applause, when John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamen Franklin, and a host of others stood lined up on the stage and the director stepped forward to address the audience. She explained that while 1776 is a story about America, the sacrifices made in the name of democracy and freedom are close to the hearts of us all because of the sacrifices made in the establishment of our own country, Israel. She recognized an audience member who had been an Israeli spy in Lebanon and had been improsoned for years as a result of her work. Then, a tearful John Adams continued in making the connections betwene the pursuit of liberty in colonial America and Jews in Israel fighting for their own land and an escape to anti-Semitism. He asked the audience to rise, and a group of people with American accents were led by English-speakers in American colonial garb in the singing of HaTikvah. The sentimental nationalism was a bit much for me, but afterwards, several of us exclaimed about that moment and how we'd like to write term papers on American Jewish Israeli immigrant identity - how they expressed their American-ness as Jews living in Israel, and how they expressed their Jewishness and Israeliness through and by connecting it to American mythology surrounding the founding fathers. It was all very... interesting.

A Night at the Theater

Last night, Daniel and I went to see a show called Ahavat HaDracon (the love of the dragon) at the Khan Theater.
The Khan Theater performs in a building that dates back to the Ottoman period (19th C) built on the ruins of an ancient building, and it once served as an inn for travelers to the city. It is spacious and antique - looking, full of arches, old stone, etc.
The performance was terrific, and Daniel and I were pleased to understand so much of it. The basic gist of the plot was that a man is pulled out of the audience and asked to tell the performers about his life, so that they can perform it. He insists that they are not accurately representing his life, but he comes to discover the truth in their performance, in which they represent his fear of death and time, and his rejection of his wife because her growing old reminds him that he, too, one day will die. Tehy made use of Greek mythology and a kind of Greek chorus that sang songs that were comical interludes and interesting devices. On the way home, Daniel and I discussed how much we enjoyed the acting, thought the play was very well woven together, and appreciated the metatheatricality of the production. I was a bit concerned by the representation of women as sex objects and the blatant homophobia of the play, but I did think the production was terrific. If you speak Hebrew and are in town, the show is definately worth seeing. We have a student subscription to the theater, and are thinking of going to see the show a second time!

Give me liberty!

!תנו לי חופש

Well, I'm currently on break between ulpan and regular classes - that's why I've had so much time to write in the blog recently! Unfortunately, after updating about the Wexner Institute, I don't have too much to say!

I will include the update that Jessica and I are planning a trip to Tel Aviv for the weekend. We've already bought tickets for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (in Hebrew!). We're thinking about going to a Reform synagogue called Beit Daniel for Friday night services, but aside from that, we don't really have any plans yet! Should be a good exercise in spontaneity.

I've been thinking a lot about various topics recently, but nothing major has come to mind to share on the blog. Maybe tomorrow (during my free hours that coincide with Jessica's ulpan) I'll put some considerable thought to the blog. For now, I think I'm going to go back to attending to a small fiction side project I've been kicking around for a few days. I'll post if anything significant happens with that.