The Book of Ruth

"THE BOOK OF RUTH was inspired by my mother's story. My mother was a Polish immigrant who came to Argentina in 1934 to marry my father. Like the Ruth of the Bible, she ended up living among strangers. Apart from a younger sister who also managed to emigrate to Argentina before the war, my mother lost her whole family in the Holocaust: her parents, an older sister and a brother. She very rarely told us about her life in Warsaw or spoke of her family. The past was too painful to speak of. As often happens with fiction drawn from real events, some things in the play are true and others invented. More than a biographical sketch of my mother's life, what I was trying to convey was the guilt that overwhelms those who escaped the war but left their families behind. In the play, Ruth has Alzheimer's, and so sees her own memories from a distance. That includes the three other versions of herself, whom she does not recognise. The only one who can see them all is the Mother. The play was originally written in Spanish, but the voices that came into my head spoke Yiddish. That is why I am so grateful to Maia Morgenstern and to the State Jewish Theatre for bringing THE BOOK OF RUTH back to the stage in that strange and wonderful mother tongue - mameloshn." (Mario Diament)