Jozejina Komporaly is a Hungarian/Romanian to English literary translator and Reader in the School of Performance, University of the Arts London.
‘With all due respect, you don’t speak Yiddish’ is a line uttered by one immigrant Jewish character to another in Rude pierdute / Lost Relatives, a production I witnessed at the State Jewish Theatre of Bucharest in March 2023: a specially commissioned stage version based on the work of a celebrated Israeli author, adapted from a successful TV drama, and translated from Hebrew into Romanian, with snippets of Yiddish, Spanish, and English.
As a multilingual person hailing from Romania myself, I have long been preoccupied with the diverse theatre tradition of my country of birth, and I grew up regularly attending performances in different languages. More recently, I tried to offer a flavor of this diversity for English-speaking readers through a drama collection for Bloomsbury, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, in which I strove to illustrate the variety of writing for the stage and to celebrate the fact that theatres put on performances in multiple genres and languages – in addition to Romanian, in Hungarian, German, Serbian, and Yiddish – also embracing the experience of the Roma community.
In fact, Romania has one of the most robust networks of minority theatres in Europe, and most importantly, most theatres staging work in languages other than Romanian have a “state theatre” status, which implies the existence of a permanent company and the financial conditions for producing a certain number of shows per year that will then be performed in repertory.
The State Jewish Theatre of Bucharest not only occupies this privileged position but is also the oldest professional Jewish theatre with uninterrupted activity in the world. The beginnings of Jewish theatre in Romania go back to The Green Tree summer garden founded in 1876 by the artist and writer Avram Goldfaden (1840–1908), in the northeastern city of Iași/Jassy. Over time, Goldfaden moved his company to the capital, Bucharest, where the theatre carved out a niche for itself by exploring Jewish cultural traditions and themes.
Following the fascist dictatorship during World War II, when Jewish artists were neither allowed to perform in their own language nor to appear on Romanian stages, Jewish theatre-making was offered a new lease of life in 1948 with the establishment of the institution that is still in operation today. This organization has since presented over 200 productions, including adaptations of Yiddish literature, plays by Jewish dramatists from Romania (Mihail Sebastian, Aurel Baranga, Alexandru Sever, Dumitru Solomon) and from the rest of the world (Arthur Miller, Israel Horovitz).
Until recently led by internationally acclaimed actress Maia Morgenstern, the theatre is the most prominent secular Jewish institution in Romania, continuing what the theatre’s former literary secretary Israil Bercovici called “a tradition of humanist theatre.” Bercovici is the author of One Hundred Years of Jewish Theatre in Romania, a landmark study that remains the most authoritative source on the history of this tradition.
Historically, Jewish theatre has been predominantly Yiddish-speaking in Romania, and this connection has been painstakingly defended even as the number of native speakers has gradually declined. For decades, the theatre has provided an optional interpreting service into Romanian, and these days Yiddish-language productions are performed with Romanian – and occasionally English – surtitles. This approach has been instrumental in making the theatre’s productions accessible to the majority population, whilst also undertaking an invaluable act of cultural preservation and continuing the uninterrupted work of the only minority building-based theatre in Bucharest.
That said, the current repertoire of the theatre has shifted significantly towards productions performed entirely or partially in the Romanian language, to a great extent owing to the dearth of acting talent able to perform in Yiddish. There is also a notable absence of contemporary writing in the field, be it in terms of playwriting, historiography, or dramaturgy. The arguably most widely known Romanian-Jewish drama – The Star With No Name by Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) – dates to 1944, while the first Holocaust play in Romanian culture (The Night-Shift by Ludovic Bruckstein) was written in 1947. In these conditions, programming becomes an additionally complex issue that will no doubt demand a re-evaluation of the theatre’s remit and its potential for reinvention.
Until such times, there are strong arguments for using Romanian as a means of expression and yet producing shows with a strong focus on Jewish identity, in the vein of Rude pierdute / Whereabouts Unknown (Lost Relatives) by award-winning Israeli author Nava Semel (1954–2017), best known for the novel And the Rat Laughed. Being a translation from Hebrew, it makes sense for this production to be performed in Romanian so that the use of Yiddish and other languages can be retained as separate linguistic registers, with a view to signaling the nuances of identity among the Israeli population.
As a more intimate mode of communication that also has the potential to exclude others, the characters with Eastern European origin can thus have access to Yiddish and those from Southern Europe to Spanish, whereas the conversations in Romanian (originally in Hebrew) remain available to all. What is more, the multilingual composition of this adaptation also brings in occasional uses of (American) English, added by the adaptor, to signal the newfound identity of a long-lost relative, absent for decades, who has since carved out a new personality in the US and distanced himself from the values of his family.
In this way, the production is an excellent platform for exploring origins on multiple levels, not in the least because this is a work by an Israeli author of Romanian parentage. Set in Israel in 1949, the play evokes the beginnings of the new state and addresses the potential assimilation of immigrants, most of them Holocaust survivors who had lost everything: the Ashkenazi Anuta Baim and her son Nisan, survivors of the ghetto in Transnistria at the border between Romania and Ukraine, and their Sephardic neighbors Rebecca and her daughter Sarika, two Auschwitz survivors from the Greek island of Rhodes.
The two families come from different cultural backgrounds and have different aspirations, yet miss their respective abandoned homelands with the same intensity. Trying to integrate into a new country without losing their heritage, they are equally obsessed with the daily broadcast of the relative-seeking radio programme Whereabouts Unknown, in the hope that this might help them reunite with lost relatives they have not had contact with since the war. Thus, the radio set becomes the ultimate commodity everyone wants to possess, acting as the main visual prop of the production – on the brink of transforming into a character due to its status as a negotiation tool – that not only governs economic transactions but also marks a firm generational divide.
For Anuta, Israel is just a temporary place, where she has been hoping to seek shelter until she can be reunited with her long-lost husband, Iankel, who ended up in America. In contrast, her son Nisan, who is an ardent Zionist refusing to speak Yiddish, is feeling at home in his adopted country where he has established a family of his own. This is an attitude rooted in Semel’s own personal history, and the playwright notes that in her childhood any European or immigrant baggage was seen as insignificant compared to the potential of their Israeli present and future.
Semel also points out in the same interview that for her post-war generation, this spiritual baggage linked to the “Jews from the diaspora” had connotations of passivity, as opposed to the project of Israel as a land of active people who take their destiny in their own hands. To nuance the situation further, this stage adaptation sharpens the conflict between the somewhat native idealism of the new country and the representative of another form of emigration: the broker capitalist Iankel, who returns to visit his family from America and appears in complete denial about their shared past or the family’s current struggles. His lines peppered with snippets of American English are emblematic of his inability to relate to his son’s patriotism, though his pragmatism and relative wealth will ultimately help Nisan fulfill his dream to become a musician and thus leave his menial work behind.
Semel’s autobiographical connections to her characters are instrumental in making Lost Relatives a testimony to the necessity of keeping memory alive. Despite not having experienced first-hand the trauma of her parents, Semel is preoccupied with conducting an act of reparation by way of duty, and she also extends an open invitation to future generations to respectfully preserve this memory in turn. This agenda has also been reflected in Semel’s activities as a high-profile public intellectual, who sat on the Board of Directors of the International Institute for Holocaust Studies and served on the Board of Governors of Yad Vashem.
It is most fitting, therefore, that a preoccupation with coming to terms with painful remembrances and traumas of the past has been at the forefront of the production, too, and director Mihaela Panainte pinpoints the parallels between the art of storytelling and the art of healing, since in Lost Relatives “the tale of the two families doubles as a story that makes healing, forgiveness and coming to terms with the past possible.” I suggest that the production goes beyond this, in fact, and creates awareness as to how theatre can be utilized as a healing tool for audiences and performers alike because it invites the foregrounding of new perspectives through observation and imitation. In this sense, theatre can gain a genuinely therapeutic impact, especially when addressing real-life liminal experiences.
The adaptation by Eugen Cojocaru draws on the TV drama directed by Yali Bergman and broadcast by the Israeli Public Television in 2010, and the subsequent stage play produced by the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv. Cojocaru’s concern for the current dramatization was to create a relatively pared-down stage script that situates the universal human aspect of the story as a focal point within the context of broader political concerns, although the conflict between the dual identity of being both Jewish and Israeli remains a strong feature of the production and is mapped out in different ways by the various characters.
This relatively concise stage script was also created to operate as a blueprint for the mise-en-scène. Panainte is known for her imaginative stage adaptations of literary sources in which the rich nuances of text-based theatre are fused with the possibilities of improvisation and visual arts. In this sense, my observations on her production of Herta Müller’s Niederungen / Lowlands are valid here, too, insofar as Rude pierdute / Lost Relatives also “tests the boundaries of autobiographical writing in and for performance” as “Panainte’s production celebrates the precision of carefully chosen words and theatrical images, and highlights the universality inherent in the source material.”
Furthermore, by juxtaposing a number of heavily stylized devised scenes to the text-driven core of the production, Panainte breaks up the chronological narrative and invites flashbacks to another time and place outside the representational strand of the performance. These bold visual images that situate the world of the grandparents side by side with that of their children and grandchildren evoke both dreamscapes and the nightmare of the Holocaust and act as a powerful repository of collective memory.
They also recontextualize the mundane concerns deployed in the play’s naturalistic strand, and by celebrating the sensoriality and corporality that characterize Panainte’s work, blur the boundaries between imagination and the real. Watching this juxtaposition from the auditorium of the Jewish State Theatre – equipped with a traditional proscenium arch stage, and hence introducing a clear-cut separation between spectators and performers – one can only wonder what the impact of this directorial decision might have been like in a more intimate studio space. Crucially, though, the production succeeds in transcending the dominant acting style characteristic for this venue and hopefully paves the way for further experiments that merge preoccupations with identity politics with current trends and concerns in contemporary performance.
Sursă: Contemporary Theatre Review
