This evening I had the honor and the privilege to see the Cameri’s new production of Yehoshua Sobol’s play “Ghetto.” The story of the Jewish theater in the Vilna Ghetto (which was just one of 1140 ghettoes in Europe)is simply riveting, and the acting, the pace, the complexity of the moral situation as well as the physical and psychological one, is outstanding. Hani Firstenberg as the marionette and Itai Tiran as the Nazi soldier were flawless, as was Natan Datner at Ganz, the head of the Judenratt. The Bundist, Herman Krook, provided the moral opposition, and my identification was in some way with him – because he kept a diary. His obsessive charting of the destruction of the jews of Vilna was similar to what I would have done. But his refusal to cooperate with the Germans would have been too hard for me. I would have grasped at any straw that would help me believe in humanity, even if it was hopeless.
In other words I was so involved in the play I could not see it from without. It was that good.
At lunch today with Debby, who works at the Hebrew Translation Institute, she told me that “Ghetto” doesn’t go over big in the U.S. It’s big in Europe, but the Americans don’t seem to go for Israeli Literature. Maybe that’s why the review in the New York Times over twenty years ago complained so much about Ghetto. But I think it is primarily a problem of how to translate the experience that works so well in Hebrew to a local audience to one that does not have the facts about the Vilna Ghetto to bounce off. I’d say it is time to retranslate, contextualize, and reproduce it.
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