Memory: Palestine, the Holocaust, and Wales

by Miriam (Egypt/Israel/USA)

At 59th East 59th Street in New York, a Welsh theater company called Clywd Theater Cymru is performing the play Memory by Jonathan Lichtenstein, a play that flits between Germany at the beginning of WWII and Bethlehem in 2006.

I’m still parsing how I feel about the choice the writer made in weaving these stories together, because it can be interpreted on the one hand as privileging one narrative of the State of Israel and can outrage on the other in its drawing of direct connections between Palestinians and Jews in Germany, and therefore between the Israeli military and the German forces; however, the juxtaposition does call into question the frequent Holocaust/WWII referencing used in mainstream Zionist discourse to justify the current situation in the Occupied Territories and in doing so echoes a current internal critique going on in Israel and also within the Jewish Diaspora.

The modern-day characters, a Palestinian living in Bethlehem named “Bashar” who is having part of his house demolished by the Israeli army to make way for the Wall, and “Isaac”, a young soldier whose parents are from Germany and Odessa charged with moving Bashar out of his home, are drawn with brushstrokes that seem very broad and verging on stereotypical in comparison to the nuanced characters of German Eva, Felix, Aron and Eva’s British-born grandson Peter. This might be because the playwright has more personal experience with the latter- his own father was one of the children transferred out of Germany before the war on the kindertransport.

There are details that didn’t seem to ring true for me, like the soldier having long hair and refusing to cut it, and Bashar offering him lemon with his tea and calling his own son “Abdel” which to my knowledge (correct me if I am wrong) is an Anglicization of part of a name (like Abd El-Qader). But this might be the point- perhaps we are meant to see a version of the conflict as filtered through the news, as filtered through the playwright’s own perceptions.

The audience was very tense, especially during the most dramatic scene in Bethlehem after an Israeli army strike on a school in Bethlehem on the same day as a suicide bombing.

Isaac: Yours was deliberate. Ours was an accident.
Bashar: Accident? You drop leaflets, you broadcast an you call it an accident?!
Isaac: We were trying to save civilians.
Bashar: And you failed.
Isaac: You sacrifice your own and call them heroes and martyrs and plaster the walls with their pictures.
Bashar: And you trap us behind these walls with nothing to do and nowhere to go. No wonder we blow up.
Isaac: Last night a rocket hit my street. Now I don’t have an upstairs either.
Bashar: You make ghettos. Where did you learn that?

The play is very heavy; even the interjection of humor is dark:

Isaac: Do you really believe seventy-two virgins will be there for them when they die?
Bashar: What?
Isaac: It doesn’t say their ages, does it?
Bashar: Their ages?
Isaac: You know how old those virgins are?
Bashar: What are you talking about?
Isaac: You blow yourself up, you go straight to heaven, you walk into a room lined with silk…and there they are – seventy-two eighty-five-year-old virgins, with no teeth, staring at you.

I found myself moved to tears for a final time during the curtain call, when I looked around full of apprehension about how the audience took the play, if they were offended, overwhelmed, angry. That theater was packed with middle-aged to elderly Jewish New Yorkers…and they were all clapping fervently, many of them crying. I was the youngest person in the audience by twenty-odd years; I think more young people might want to see this play and weigh in. It is running through May 27th.

You can look at the New York Times Review of Memory here.