I went to see the
current production of A SPLINTERED SOUL by Alan Lester Brooks at Stage 773 at the end of its run (closing May 29). It
has already been reviewed so I won't cover that terrain. What I'd like to think
about is what are the uses of the Holocaust, and when does it become just
another way to provide entertainment or even be misappropriated for other agendas?
Saul Friedlander, the
Holocaust historian and survivor, talks about Holocaust regarding popular
culture and the thrust of his point is - when is the catastrophe of the
Holocaust relegated to bumper sticker slogans? When do stories and
performances that use the Holocaust just become a meme that can be used to
define and explain seemingly anything? Recent misappropriate comparisons
include Brazil's President Dilma Roussef who said that attempts to impeach
her over corruption scandals are similar to the Nazi persecution of Jews. The
Chief Justice of Alabama, Roy Moore, defied the legalization of gay marriage in
the United States and compared it to the Nuremberg Laws of Germany that made
Jews and their full citizenship illegal. His point (I find this reasoning
convoluted) is that those (often fundamentalist Christians) who don't agree
with the legalization are an oppressed minority. Ben Carson, the
Republican candidate, made a remark while on the campaign trail that "if Jews
had owned guns, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened." This was meant to
endear him to gun rights advocates who feel themselves to be an oppressed
people like the Jews, and who, in his opinion, may have to take up arms against
the United States government.
There seems to be a
pattern that Jews are a symbol for all minorities to compare themselves
themselves to, and that the Holocaust is transferable to any kind of perceived
and or even real threat of oppression. I am under no illusions that many Jews and
the Jewish community partake in feeding this idea, rightly or wrongly. The
proliferation of Holocaust museums built due to Jewish philanthropic dollars as
well as other foundations and donors not only are a testament to "Never
Again" but also to the effort to stop other atrocities and catastrophes
that utilize hate, fear, racism, and other means to create prejudice
(governmental or from others) towards an oppressed group.
This can be seen in
performances and appropriately so, as well. For example the newest version of Cabaret, by
Fred Ebb and John Kander, augmented the ending and made a point to emphasize
homophobia under the Nazis. The recent version of Fiddler on the Roof by
Harnick, Bock and Stein (all Jews) on Broadway takes the beginning and end of the
play to point towards the destruction that was to come to the Jews after Tevye
and the inhabitants leave Anatevka. These changes and layering Holocaust
foreshadowing make sense in these cases as they show the extension of
anti-Semitism and exile, that with the knowledge of history, links it to the
Holocaust.
So when Alan Lester
Brooks repurposes the Holocaust narrative to write a tense and psychological
drama about a rabbi who is a Holocaust survivor, and uses it to try to
understand the conflictual attitudes within the Jewish community towards Jewish
immigrants to America from the Holocaust, many critics and audiences drew
comparisons to the refugees from Syria and other lands who are in exile right now
looking for safe haven. As one of the Jewish characters who is sponsoring one
of the refugees says, "You are safe now."
Yet the story isn't just
about the Jewish immigrants after the Holocaust getting take care of in a new
land, but shows the PTSD that is still to be dealt with by survivors. We see it
in a story about one of the woman survivors who is placed as a domestic worker
in the home of a well-off Jewish couple in San Francisco. She falls in love
with the husband and she sees it as a way to overcome her fears and anxieties
and take her life back.
But the main plotline
develops through group sessions that the survivors regularly attend with the
rabbi, who is the protagonist. They feel the need to have this meeting as an
insider "tribe" and to give each other advice, peer counseling, and
solace. Yet they remain outsiders to the Jewish community and the rabbi realizes
that he must be a redeemer for them to get acclimated to America and to run
interference for them with their Jewish sponsors. But then as a result of the
group of survivors that regularly meets, the rabbi is asked to help in a situation
of abuse and illegal activity which ultimately leads to the murder a of German
man in their city of San Francisco. The rest of the play is about solving this
murder.
By setting the time
period to immediately after the war, Brooks backshadows the controversies of
today. On a certain level he seems to want Jews to get over the Holocaust since
it can lead to tribalness, outsiderness, murder, and sociopathology; and on the
other hand he blames Jews for not treating Jewish survivors with dignity.
He also seems to be
saying that the memories of the Holocaust are used by Jews to justify
themselves in all that they do. He references Jews going to Palestine
after the war and thereby makes the worst in an inappropriate political
comparison. These references conjure the Holocaust in a simple minded way, as a
bogus justification for why Israel was created through the feelings of sorrow
for Jews after the Holocaust and demanding reparations for Jewish claims. When
a con game is revealed in the play, this con in the playwright's mind is a symbol
for Jews who trust in Jewish claims over others. The reality and more
complex story is that Jews have always lived in the land now called Israel,
since ancient times, and after resettlement from other lands that oppressed
them, started the process of creating the modern country of Israel even while
some Arabs accepted them and some rejected their return, all happening about
fifty years before the Holocaust which wiped out a third of the world's Jewish
population.
In the early 1960s the
film The Pawnbroker told a story about a concentration
camp survivor who can't live as an emotionally healthy man. The film's
narrative takes many twists and turns to understand prejudice, outsiders in
society, oppressed minorities, racism, and the drug and prostitution world in
Harlem in New York City. Yet the film lives on as a searing testimony of the
Holocaust due to the performance of Rod Steiger, who combats his inner torment.
The story and performance by Steiger transcends the facile comparisons to the
inner city and goes deeply into the psychological core of this one Jewish man
wrestling with his pain and loss and the meaning of being a Jew and a human
being.
Another
excellent example of portraying the Holocaust is Son of Saul the
recent Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language film. It tells
a story of the inner dimensions of a Jewish sonderkommando who is reduced to a
non-human being. Yet his awakening is revealed to us throughout the film and
all the side stories in it, though necessary to the plot, are in service to and
do not intrude on what is important -- that the Holocaust is both inexplicable
and must continue to explained.
