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ABSTRACT
This article discusses performances of a pageant called Mother Rachel and her children written by Helsinki-born Jac Weinstein in 1948 as a work of Holocaust commemoration and the radically different ways in which three audiences in the US, UK, and the Czech Republic that viewed the play in 2016 interacted with it during post-performance discussions. Using filmed performances and talkback sessions, the article analyzes the changing subject positions of the performers and audiences, as ‘primary’, ‘secondary’, and ‘tertiary’ witnesses and focuses on how various factors can make performances and reactions of the same piece so profoundly different.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Simo Muir is Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, University College London. Muir received his Ph.D. in Yiddish linguistics at the University of Helsinki in 2004, and has published widely on Jewish history in Finland, Jewish–Finnish relations, and latent antisemitism in Finland in the 1930s. Between 2015 and 2017 he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in a project called ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ at the University of Leeds. Muir is a contributing co-editor of Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History (2013).
Notes
1 Muir, “Weinstein, Jac”; Muir, “Jac Weinstein”; Muir, Yiddish in Helsinki, 72–75.
2 Performing the Jewish Archive, “Research,” http://ptja.leeds.ac.uk/research/ (visited 22 January 2019).
3 See ‘Audience response testing,’ http://ptja.leeds.ac.uk/research/audience-response-testing/ (visited 22 January 2019).
4 Trezise, Performing Feeling, 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid, 14.
8 Rokem, Performing History, 9.
9 Wake, “The Accident and the Account,” 43.
10 Ibid., 50.
11 Roskies and Diamant, Holocaust Literature, 74.
12 Ibid, 30–31; Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry,” 235–245.
13 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, 90–92.
14 The lyrics of Hatikvah are based on Naftali Herz Imber’s poem Tikvatenu (Our hope) from 1878 and the melody is Samuel Cohen’s adaptation of a Rumanian folksong.
15 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, 93.
16 Ibid.
17 The treatment of Jewish refugees differed considerably of the indigenous Jewish population in Finland. After the outburst of the so-called Continuation War (1941–1944), when Finland became a belligerent of Nazi Germany in the war against the Soviet Union, Jewish refugees were interned to central parts of the country and men were subject to forced labor. On 6 November 1942, eight Jewish refugees were deported and though there were no further deportations the refugees and the Jewish community lived under excruciating fear, especially in spring-summer 1944, of being deported to death camps in the Third Reich. See Muir and Worthen, Finland’s Holocaust.
18 Muir, “Mother Rachel”.
19 Jac Weinstein, Muter Rokhl.
20 On Ivan Bukovský, see http://www.ivanbukovsky.cz/ (visited 22 January 2019).
21 Sniegon, Vanished History, 13–14.
22 The video of the performance with the introduction is available at https://vimeo.com/172722462 (visited 22 January 2019).
23 Owing to his adverse reaction to the content during the rehearsals, the end of the pageant was staged in Madison so that the narrator left the stage before the singing of Hatikvah began.
24 Rokem, Performing History, 8.
25 Ibid, 9.
26 About Leivick and DP camps, see Roskies and Diamant, Holocaust Literature, 83; Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope, 196–197, 207–209.
27 Performing the Jewish Archive, “Out of the Shadows, Leeds”.
28 About events commemorating the Holocaust in UK see, The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, http://hmd.org.uk/; Moore, “Britain’s Holocaust”.
29 Sniegon, Vanished History, 15.
30 The video of the performance with the introduction is available at https://vimeo.com/180875301 (visited 22 January 2019).
31 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, 187–188; 191–193.
32 Roskies and Diamant, Holocaust Literature, 31.
33 LaCapra, History and Memory, 45.
34 On postmemory, see Hirsch, Family Frames, 10–11.
35 Feinstein, “Re-Imagining the Un-Imaginable”, 52.
36 One man in his 70s explained how the strangeness of the former Christian space made the experience special: It’s very unique, and for a member of the audience sitting here who is Jewish, sitting and hearing this history, this oratorio, in a church, an oratorio that contains many and many of the Jewish melodies, but … behind the screen, there is the stained glass window and the emblem of the Christian religion leaning out and facing us.
37 Ahlquist, Introduction, 2
38 Sniegon, Vanished History, 215.
39 Weinstein, Matka Ráchel.
40 The video of the performance is available at https://vimeo.com/188007629 (visited 22 January 2019).
41 All extracts from the Prague talkback are translated from Czech by Lisa Peschel.
42 Wake, “The Accident and the Account,” 45.
43 The original script indicates a considerable amount of movement, which Weinstein describes in parentheses. However, observing all of these stage directions would have been too time consuming and not possible within the tight timetable of the productions. Whilst in most of the scenes of the Madison production the choir was either standing, sitting or leaning, in the pre-gas chamber scene the director wanted to have them walk around ‘to give a sense of the moment of history’, to embody the moment in which Jews were walking to their certain death. This was followed by the tableau of a mother and child at the door of the gas chamber performed by a member of the choir and a five/six-year-old girl.
44 Patraka, Spectacular Suffering, 5–7. Patraka explains that ‘a reiteration of the Holocaust in performance reveals itself as a reconstruction, fractured from the “real” by the reiteration’s historical fixity in its present moment. Theatre reiterates the Holocaust, then, by announcing itself as performative.’
45 Ibid., 8.
46 Glancová also made a comparison to the Czech national anthem Kde domov můj (Where is my home) that was originally an operetta song.