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Quotes from ida fink8/8/2023 There is no dramatic arc nor any attempt to create catharsis-which, as it turns out, is as it should be: the survivors themselves have no opportunity for closure or resolution, but rather only very limited access to an institution engaged in an absurd attempt to deliver “justice” by indicting only those Gestapo officers who were seen committing direct murders with their own hands by a “convincing” array of eyewitnesses, despite the fact that each of the officers was widely known to have played a leading role in the deportation and murder of hundreds of the town’s Jews. The play is deceptively simple in structure, with an understated, bureaucratic tone that lasts throughout, apart from moments of emotion when the witnesses are asked to reminisce, or at certain points asked to restrain their reminiscences, about difficult events. A very few Jews managed to avoid the selection by hiding or by being “legitimately” occupied elsewhere, including the fourth witness, played by Laurence Aptekier Fisbein, who had a job as a cleaner in the Gestapo headquarters. As we discover over the course of the prosecutor’s interrogations of the first three “witnesses,” played by Michel Fisbein, Jeannette Kohn, and Lionel Miller, Jews who did not come out into the market square when summoned were searched out, dragged out of their houses, and shot, and those who did not follow the Gestapo’s orders during the selection were shot on the spot. During the action, and more specifically during the selection, the Jews of the town who had “good” jobs were sent “ rechts” (one of the witnesses quotes the word in German), meaning that they would be allowed to stay alive for the time being, and those who did not have jobs or had jobs that were deemed “unnecessary” were sent “ links,” to be shot in the Jewish cemetery and later buried by the survivors. Above the stage, a narrow, gray expanse for the purpose of projecting French subtitles.Ī sort of one-act in four scenes (the Polish original is subtitled “Piece for four voices and basso ostinato”), the play is organized around a series of interrogations, in which a prosecutor (played by Annick Prime Margules) attempts to pin down details of events that occurred many years earlier during an “action” in an unidentified Polish town. The set was spare: as the backdrop, a map marked with Polish street names, with the market square and a Jewish cemetery visible in the foreground, the prosecutor’s chair and table, the latter piled high with papers, and bare floorspace stage left for the witness stand. The hall was full-sold out, in fact, as was the second and final performance on the following day-with about sixty attendees of various ages, from twenties (the daughters of two of the actors) to eighties (an age closer to the audience’s overall average). Earlier productions, including for radio and television, took place in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Sweden, and elsewhere. The play has been previously produced in English by the Black Hole Theatre, University of Manitoba, Canada, 2008 and as a staged reading by the UC Santa Barbara Department of History, March 3, 2009. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 139-165. English translation available in eadem, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, transl. It is possible that the Polish text of the play (or a translation, perhaps into German) was published earlier than 1988 (considering that the 1988 printing mentions multiple productions that had already taken place by then), but I have not been able to find any clues as to where. On April 13, 2019, five actors, a director, and a one-man stage-crew-and-subtitles-operator (also the translator of the play) convened “ hinter di kulisn,” behind the scenes in the Groyser Zal (the Great Hall) of the Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library (Maison de la culture yiddish - Bibliothèque Medem) to make their final preparations for the world premiere of the Yiddish version of Ida Fink’s play The Table ( Der tish in Yiddish, and Stół in the original Polish
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