SHALOM ALEICHEM'S MORDANT WIT

In the established image of the shtetl, a bearded paterfamilias with a violin stands atop a little house and plays to celebrate his survival in times of trouble. The 1964 Broadway musical of “Fiddler on the Roof” and the subsequent film have long served as popular representations of Jewish life in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe.

An actor in “Iram”, a new play from Israel’s Herzliya Ensemble, strikes this roof-fiddler pose briefly, but then it disintegrates. What follows on stage is much darker than such precarious jollity implies. “Iram” (“their town” in Hebrew) subverts any related expectations of schmaltz. It’s an intense 80-minute montage of episodes from the elegiac fictions of Shalom Aleichem, the Ukraine-born Yiddish writer of shtetl-based short stories, including “Tevye the Milkman”, the inspiration for “Fiddler”.

In the invented town of Kasrilevke, a terrified woman rails against the local rabbi. A boy studying medicine loses his religion and is ostracised. A disabled girl, called “the creature”, is tormented by potential suitors and viewed as a curse. Ofira Henig, the artistic director of the Herzliya Ensemble, has created a bracing sense of shtetl life, a mix of darkness and light. The atmosphere is leavened by humour, but this too has an edge. In one case a rich Jew in search of eternal life is advised to go to Kasrilevke, where “you can never die, for no rich man has ever died there”.

Henig captures both the mordant wit and occasional cruelties of Aleichem’s vision of small-town Hasidic culture, while luring us into a vanished world. Periodically the cast of nine marches round the stage, halting as one puts up his arm and asks: “Is there much further to go?” We hear a train roar by. These people are being sent to their deaths. The community will disappear, as did thousands of similar ones, in Nazi transports.

In Israel, where “Iram” opened last August, Henig’s portrait of shtetl culture earned her accusations of anti-Semitism. For older Israelis, protective of a cosier image of Aleichem’s world, so harsh and satirical a depiction of traditional Jews is too much. By contrast in Heidelberg, where I saw a performance in early May—the first outside Israel—“Iram” entranced a local, very German audience.

Narratives touching on wartime genocide still hurt in Germany. But at a Q&A afterwards, conducted mainly in English, the discussion was open and relaxed. Asked whether Henig “needed Germans” to grasp the doomed isolation of these late 19th-century Jews, she didn’t mince her words. “We have to keep dealing with the German issue because it will help us with the Palestinian issue,” she said. Drawing an analogy, as this seemed to, between the Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s occupation (and related alleged human-rights abuses), is brazen, even glib. The attentive Heidelbergians were both too abashed and too polite to push her further on it.

Yet this play isn’t about politics. It’s not agitprop. It’s make-believe, a fiction with its feet nonetheless placed in history. In London, where “Iram” is about to run for ten nights, I’m certain audiences will readily connect with the exuberance and the laughter, and the sadness. The culture “Iram” evokes was wiped from the map but, magically, a simple piece of theatre makes it live again, like a song—maybe even a prayer—you thought you’d forgotten.

Herzliya Ensemble’s “Iram” runs at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre from May 19th through the 29th.

~ JAMES WOODALL

Picture credit: Gerar Alon