The Book of Ruth

On the stage of the State Jewish Theatre, the play retraces the story of Ruth, a Polish Jewish woman who emigrated to Argentina on the eve of the Second World War, leaving behind a family later exterminated in the concentration camps. For forty years Ruth has lived in Argentina, far from Poland, the country of her birth. She left her family and her homeland at her mother's insistence: her mother wanted her away from the threat of war and foresaw a brilliant future for her alongside Boris, the husband chosen by her parents, who had emigrated before her. None of her dreams came true, and she found fulfilment neither as a wife, nor as a lover, nor as a mother. Now, after forty years of exile, Ruth looks back over her life, calling up the figures who were dear to her: her mother and her sister (who died in a Nazi camp) and her husband, at different moments of their lives. At the same time she sees herself again as a child, as a young girl and as a grown woman, reliving passages from her own life. For Ruth this is a moment of reckoning, of clear-eyed reflection on her whole life. In conversation with her son - the only exchange in the play with a real character - Ruth understands that her entire life has been foreign to her, outside her, because in truth she, her soul, never left Poland. With Mario Diament's play, our theatre pays tribute both to those who perished and to those who carry their memory in their hearts.