Reflections on a destroyed civilization

From ‘The Book of Questions’ by Edmond Jabès, Egyptian Jewish writer and poet. Jabès was expelled from Egypt along with most of the Jewish population in 1957 during the Suez crisis and fled to Paris. (d. 1991)

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I spent almost a quarter century excavating the shards of a destroyed civilization through the  creation of original performance works that drew on the streams of Jewish thought and culture that run sometimes underground.

Here are a few snapshots from that time:

In the early 1980s—yes, that long ago—our theatre had a performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall. When we arrived for our pre-show setup, we were confronted by two guys in blue jump suits. One of them was sweeping the auditorium with a metal detector while the other was being led around by a bomb-sniffing dog.  (There had been a bomb threat).

There was no bomb. But it was an act of terror. We were a Jewish theatre. More specifically—A Traveling Jewish Theatre.

We thought we were as politically correct as was humanly possible. We hung our own lights, built our own sets…we figured that if Allen Ginsberg could use an Indian harmonium, we could.

We were also a founding company of The American Festival Project–a touring consortium that included Roadside Theater from Appalachia, the African American playwright/performer, John O’Neal of Junebug Productions from New Orleans, and El Teatro del la Esperanza from San Francisco.

But apparently, our name was like flashing a red cape in front of a bull. Although one could speculate as to which end of the rage spectrum this particular bovine was grazing—given that we were on a college campus…the more things change…etc. & so forth.

Not long after, I was at the home of a couple of ‘progressive’ friends in one of the ancestral habitats of the ‘Woke”–Venice, California.

I told them about our brush with becoming historical footnotes when the woman—who was Jewish—said, in a cold, off-handed way, “You called yourself a Jewish theatre. What did you expect?”

What I didn’t expect was:

Armed police at the door of the theatre in Vienna during the ‘Waldheim Affair’; A swastika with the words ‘Juden Raus’ scrawled in the foyer of the former slave labor factory where I was performing in Hamburg, Germany; A smashed light box and another swastika decorating the sidewalk outside of our theatre in San Francisco.

Snapshot Number 2

During a theatre run in San Francisco’s North Beach, we decided to make our escape from Los Angeles to the Boho Paradise—which it was.  Poetry and theatre actually seemed to matter in those halcyon days. There were even still jazz clubs in North Beach.

(Jews in the ‘City of Angels’ could part the Red Sea. They didn’t really need a small Jewish theatre exploring mythical tales of a Jewish mystic who “walked through the back door of his own mind.”)

It was at this time that Baker Roshi, the abbot of San Francisco’s Zen Center, learned about us from the Beat poet, Michael McClure. After seeing a performance, Baker offered to hold a fundraiser to help us make the move north.

Baker and I were walking together through Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm, nestled in a magnificent valley, just a few horse pastures from Muir Beach in Marin County, when he explained that he had all these Jews but had no idea who they were. We helped open a crack into the opaque consciousness of these silent ciphers.

The irony of our theatre was that it was often non-Jews who ‘got us’. Aesthetically, we were closer to European theatre. The work was nonlinear and non-naturalistic, moving across space and time through the use of light and shadow, sound and movement. We explored everything from the death of Walter Benjamin on the Spanish border to the assassination of Trotsky to the false Messiah, Abraham Abulafia to images of the Shekhinah to…Zionism.

It’s ironic that Jews who would actually resonate with our work were often too ideologically driven to disappearing into the mythos of the ‘Universal Bedlam’.

Snapshot 3

Long after I had left the theatre, I was with a music producer—who was Jewish—nominally. Out of the blue, he blurted out, “I hate Yiddish”.

Imagine someone hating Finnish. They might mock it. But hate is of another order of magnitude. But I knew this hate. It’s something I had also internalized, along with all the other Jewish kids I grew up with on the South Side of Chicago under the yellow skies of the steel mills.

As a child, it was humiliating watching Yiddish comics debasing themselves on national television, while Jimmy Stewart crossed the Atlantic in the ‘Spirit of St. Louis’. (Never mind that he was playing the Nazi sympathizer, Charles Lindbergh, and was a ‘friendly witness’ at the McCarthy hearings, he was very cool.)

It was during the writing of our first play that I encountered Yiddish poetry for the first time and was overwhelmed with a deep sense of shame. It was a collective shame. What had we done to ourselves? Why did we let the world get away with this?

In vlkhn yor?

                           in what year

Mit vemen?

                           with whom?

Di sibes?

                          the causes?

Der resultat?

                       the outcome?

di geshikte

                       the history

fun der milkhome

                       of the war

fun dem sholem

                       of the peace

fun di lebn geblibene

                    of the survivors

tvishn fremde

                          among strangers

oyf der zayt

                          on this side

tsvishn meysim

                          among ghosts

oyf der zayt

                           on this side.

 ‘KASHES / QUESTIONS’ by Irena Klepfisz, Yiddish /English. Performed by A Traveling Jewish Theatre as part of the play, “Diamonds on the Dark’: An Exploration of Yiddish Poetry” (1998).