Helen Katz Kaye Eleasari (1934-2020)

 

[On the night of Saturday, 16 April 2022, I discovered some very sad and upsetting news.  My Tel Avivian friend, Helen Eleasari, who wrote for the Jerusalem Post as Helen Kaye—I’ve posted many of her pieces, including theater reviews as “Dispatches from Israel”—died nearly two years ago and I never knew.  Apparently, no one in her family had me on a list of people to notify. 

[I had written or e-mailed her a few times over the pandemic period and just afterwards, but the messages weren’t answered, even though they didn’t come back.  I knew she’d been unwell; she wrote me that on 22 September 2016, she “fell over a bollard on the sidewalk (don’t ask how—I don’t know) and broke my hip.”  

[She had a partial hip replacement and had been in the hospital for 24 days.  She was doing rehab and physical therapy, she told me, and after six weeks as of 4 November, when she wrote me about all this, she was looking at six more before she expected to be “completely healed.”  Meanwhile, her mobility—she had just graduated from a walker to a cane—was severely curtailed.

[On 23 May 2020, Helen e-mailed me from the hospital again.  She’d gone to the ER at 4 in the morning of the 22nd because she woke up an hour earlier with intense pressure on her chest and was afraid she’d thrown another pulmonary embolism.  (She’d thrown one in September 2018, but had recovered completely, she reported.)  “But no,” she wrote at almost noon on the 23rd. “Thank heaven.”

[She’d been given a CT scan and was taken to the chest surgery ward at 5 that evening “because [the] docs did not like what they saw on [the] CT.”  She explained in a later message that evening that she was now awaiting a bronchoscopy, but she hadn’t said what diagnosis was anticipated.

[Indeed, Helen had signed off in the first e-mail with the line: “As Lady Bracknell says ‘a life crowded with incident’!”  (It’s a line from Act 3 of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.)  The word ‘cancer’ was never used in any of the messages Helen sent me, so I just assumed the best.

[As it turned out, that was the last message thread I got from Helen—though I didn’t actually realize it.  I knew she was fighting some illness she didn’t specify, but she appeared to be healing, however slowly, from the busted hip.  She’d seemed otherwise fine—Helen was a little over 10 years older than I—from her attitude in the last e-mails.

[When I continued not to hear from her, I started to get worried, but I was actually afraid to look into the situation.  I wrote to her about posting my 1982 Israel/Egypt travel journal on Rick On Theater, which I was sure would interest her, but I got no response.  (I turns out, she’d died a year earlier!)

[Late yesterday, while I was doing some research on a Habima stage production for an upcoming post, I hit on a review of Helen’s (it was a passing mention; one of the actors in whatever show she was reviewing had been in the earlier Habima production), so I was finally prompted to look online for news.

[The first hit on the Google list was Helen’s JP obituary (posted below).  What a shock!

[Well, I guess not really.  I was already convinced that something dire had happened.  I just hadn’t wanted to confirm it.  Now I had.

[As ROTters will remember, I’d known Helen since I directed her in a showcase of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan back in 1978.  Helen played the Duchess of Berwick and she did the costumes for our no-budget, non-union showcase production.  After rehearsals at the theater’s West 20th Street storefront, members of the cast often gathered in my living room at 15th Street and 5th Avenue, just five blocks south of the theater, and worked on Helen’s costumes. 

[For practical reasons, I’d reset the 1892 play in the 1920s.  Helen designed a gorgeous kimono dressing gown (worn by Mrs. Erlynne) from an embroidered tablecloth.  After the production ended, one of the actresses kept the robe—I don’t remember now if it was Helen or our Mrs. Erlynne. 

[Though she was born in the U.K, (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey), Helen lived in the States for years and became a dual citizen before making her aliyah to Israel in 1983 (a year after I visited the country; see “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” 11-23 July 2022).  We kept in touch regularly and she visited New York several times after she made her aliyah.

[(Aliyah is the Hebrew word meaning ‘ascent’ or ‘the act of going up.’ It’s the word Zionists use for immigration to the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael, which today means the State of Israel); ‘making aliyah’ is the term for immigrating from the Jewish diaspora to Israel and is one of the most basic tenets of Zionism.)

[The articles Helen’s sent me for ROT included “Berlin” (posted on ROT on 22 July 2013), her account of a trip she made with her daughter Rava, and coverage of the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival (9 November 2012), summer theater for children (“Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010), and “A Trip to Poland” (7 August 2015).

[The 20 installments of “Dispatches” ran randomly from 23 January 2013 to 25 February 2020, five months before her death.  Her reviews, for which she was allowed a very small amount of space, were always concise yet complete.  I always admired how well she conveyed her estimation of the shows in such few words.  (I’m terrible at concision, but Helen did it excellently and I was very jealous!)  Over the years, Helen also covered the cultural beat for JP.

[Aside from her writing, Helen directed local productions in English, both musicals and straight plays, classics, standards, and originals.  She spent two years teaching English at a provincial university in China in 2003 and ’04.] 

“VETERAN CULTURE WRITER HELEN KAYE DIES 2 WEEKS SHORT OF HER 86TH BIRTHDAY”
by Greer Fay Cashman

[Cashman’s obituary for her colleague, Hellen Kaye, the pen name of my friend Helen Eleasari, ran in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, 26 July 2020.]

Critic and journalist began working for the ‘Post’ in 1987

                               photo credit: Courtesy

 

If there was a single phrase to sum up Helen Kaye, the veteran arts and culture reporter whose byline in The Jerusalem Post publications first appeared in July 1987, it would be mistress of the metaphor.

Kaye had a unique gift for allegory. She also wrote succinctly, and invariably succeeded in packing a lot of information and drama into a small amount of text.

For instance, a theater review would include not only her impressions of the performance, but also the reactions of the audience, a brief history of the play, and the future plans of the theater group, the director, or the main actors.

Kaye, who died on Sunday [26 July 2020], after a short-lived battle with an aggressive form of lung cancer, would have turned 86 in early August [3 August].

She did not originally set out to be a theater critic when at age 18 she first made aliyah from her native London. All in all, she made aliyah three times: the first time from England, the second time from the United States and the third time from China.

When she first came in the early 1950s, her ambition was to be a nurse, and she trained under the late Dr. Chaim Sheba, the founder of the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

She worked for several years in her profession until 1963 when her husband, Jacob Eleasari, decided to go to America to study filmmaking at UCLA, because at that time there was no film school in Israel.

There’s an old Hebrew saying that a change of location means a change of luck, but for Kaye, it meant a change in calling.

She enrolled at a theater course at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater arts.

When she returned to Israel in 1983, she opted for yet another career – journalism, working initially as a freelancer.

When she began writing for The Jerusalem Post in July 1987, it was for the now-defunct Metro weekend supplement that was distributed throughout the Coastal Plain.

It did not take long for her to begin writing for the Arts and Entertainment section of the daily paper and to eventually become the editor of that section.

When Barry Davis, who is today the key writer for the Arts and Entertainment section, first encountered Kaye some 20 years ago, their work relationship did not exactly get off to a flying start.

Perhaps, because of her nursing background, she was a stickler for detail and accuracy.

“On more than one occasion I was subjected to a bit of a ticking off over some professional matter or other which, Helen felt, dipped below her requisite high standards of editorial and literary excellence,” recalls Davis. “Once – feeling miffed one time too many – I fired back that she was being dogmatic. She suggested that, in fact, I meant didactic and I replied that I meant what I said. She went very quiet for a while and I became aware that, behind the stern, professional and, seemingly, unforgiving exterior lay a sensitive and warm soul.

“Once Helen recovered her poise, our relationship changed – for the better. I learned to appreciate her attention to detail and, after reading some of her reviews of theatrical and dance performances, I realized she had earned the right to be critical of anything she considered not quite up to scratch.

“I also learned to appreciate her warmth and generosity, and it became clear to me, over the years, that she had taken her fair share of knocks in life and managed to stay true to her principles and to veer to the sunny side of the street. She will be missed, professionally and personally.”

Following her retirement, Kaye was far from ready to just sit and ruminate. Instead, with boldness and courage which were typical of her, she shot off to China to teach English, and stayed there for several years.

She thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and long before cars gave way to bicycles in the West, Kaye was traveling by bike wherever she had to go in China.

On her return to Israel, she once again began writing critiques of theater, ballet and opera performances, and of various special events connected with the performing arts. One of her last news items, written as recently as late April of this year, was about the Israel Festival, which she had long written about annually.

This time, her opening paragraphs were completely different to anything she had written in the past.

“No other event – not the 1967 Six Day War or the 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 1991 Gulf War – has in 59 years done what COVID-19 did this year: scupper the Israel Festival.

“Festival general manager Eyal Sher announced Sunday that due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 59th Israel Festival in Jerusalem, slated to take place from June 4-20, would be indefinitely postponed.”

Given the rapid deterioration of her health, it is doubtful that Kaye would have been able to attend the festival even if it had taken place as originally scheduled.

She is survived by her two daughters: Rava who lives in Israel and Eylat who lives in Los Angeles.

Despite travel restrictions, Eylat was miraculously able to catch a flight to Israel, undergo isolation, and still spend a few days with her mother during Kaye’s final days.

The family will hold a private funeral on Monday [27 July 2020].

[Helen was survived not only by her daughters, but also three grandchildren; Rava gave her two, a boy and a girl, and Eylat another granddaughter.  I only met Helen’s daughters once, when she was still living here in New York.  I did a small Thanksgiving dinner in my apartment one year and invited Helen; she brought her daughters, then both still little girls. 

[I said above that Helen came to New York City several times after she moved back to Israel.  One evening during one of those visits, I was home, but Helen was out seeing other friends when a phone call came.  Eylat, who was pregnant with her daughter—the reason for Helen’s visit to the States that time—and a complication had occurred. 

[This was years before cell phones were available, and I had no way to reach Helen.  I had to wait until she came back and after Helen called L.A. to find out what had happened, we spent the rest of the night getting her on a flight west, repacked, and to the airport. 

[Helen got to L.A. in time to see the crisis resolved and Eylat delivered the baby, not without difficulty and, I daresay, a lot of anxious prayer, and all ended well.]

*  *  *  *
MANIFESTO
by Helen Eleasari 

[Helen sent this to me on 17 March 2019.  She had submitted the manifesto—the word she used to characterize the piece, to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper published in both Hebrew and English and known for its left-wing and liberal stances.  The paper, considered Israel’s newspaper of record, didn’t publish the manifesto, which didn’t surprise Helen.  She also posted it on her Facebook page (no longer on line). 

[I didn’t know what to do with Helen’s manifesto, with respect to Rick On Theater.  It seemed too tied to Israeli politics to be of general interest, and too personal to Helen to fit on a blog belonging to someone else (that is, me).  I never did figure it out, so it never appeared on the blog.  I felt now would be a good time to unveil it

[According to Wikipedia:

Early legislative elections were held in Israel on 9 April 2019 to elect the 120 members of the 21st Knesset. Elections had been due in November 2019, but were brought forward following a dispute between members of the current government over a bill on national service for the ultra-Orthodox population, as well as impending corruption charges against incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's Likud [Israel’s principal rightist political party] tied with Blue and White alliance of Benny Gantz [a centrist and liberal political alliance], both winning 35 seats.  The balance of power was held by smaller parties, with a majority being right-wing and religious parties that had previously sat in coalition with Likud, which would have allowed Netanyahu to form the next government.

Due to continuation of the disagreements over the national service of the ultra-Orthodox, a snap election was called, and was held on 17 September 2019.  (April 2019 Israeli legislative election - Wikipedia)

[Then:

Snap legislative elections were held in Israel on 17 September 2019 to elect the 120 members of the 22nd Knesset.  Following the previous elections in April, incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition for a second consecutive time.  On 30 May, the Knesset voted to dissolve itself and trigger new elections, in order to prevent Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz from being appointed Prime Minister-designate.  This election marked the first time the Knesset voted to dissolve itself before a government had been formed.  (September 2019 Israeli legislative election - Wikipedia)

[And:

Legislative elections were held in Israel on 2 March 2020 to elect members of the twenty-third Knesset.

The election result showed a political stalemate, which was resolved when Likud and Blue & White reached a coalition agreement.  Under the terms of the agreement, the premiership would rotate between Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, with Gantz given the new position of Alternate Prime Minister until November 2021.  These elections followed continued political deadlock after the April and September 2019 Knesset elections.  (2020 Israeli legislative election - Wikipedia)

[Finally:

Legislative elections were held in Israel on 23 March 2021 to elect the 120 members of the 24th Knesset.  It was the fourth election in two years.  Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett announced they formed a rotation government on 2 June 2021, which was approved on 13 June 2021.  (2021 Israeli legislative election - Wikipedia)

[Since December 2016, Netanyahu, the prime minister to whom Helen refers below, had been under investigation for corruption by Israeli police and prosecutors.  On 21 November 2019, he was indicted on charges of breach of trust, bribery, and fraud.  Due to the indictment, Netanyahu was legally required to relinquish all of his ministry posts other than the prime minister position prior to his ouster.  Helen had died before the final resolution.]

Not since November 29, 1947 has there been so critical a date for the state of Israel. On that day the United Nations passed Resolution 181 that divided Mandatory Palestine into two states, one for the Arabs, one for the Jews. On April 9, 2019 we shall vote in a general election that will either confirm us as a democracy or denigrate us to the state of a third rate banana republic mired in the sludge of corruption and toxic nationalism that have here become the norm.

Politics are frequently murky, but over the last few years our politics and politicians have attained an unparalleled level of indecency. It began with the assassination on November 4, 1995 of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, continued with the enactment of laws and statutes curtailing civil rights, such as the recently passed Nation State Law, interfering with due process, such as the law attempting to curtail the activities of the High Court of Justice, and most recently readmitting the outlawed Jewish supremacy party, hitherto Kach, now Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) to the electoral rolls.

Over the last decade our Prime Minister, in word and deed, has denigrated and insulted the Arab citizens of Israel. He and his government label as traitors any person or institution that dares to suggest that promoting discrimination, lawlessness and extremism is not the way to go. Israeli citizens have been detained at the border for presuming to question government policy, and the list goes on.

Many years ago, and however much it’s quoted, it’s still relevant, German pastor Martin Niemöller wrote his famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Is that who we want to be?

[Kach was a radical Orthodox Jewish, ultranationalist political party in Israel, existing from 1971 to 1994.  The party was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-90) based on his Orthodox Jewish-nationalist ideology (subsequently dubbed Kahanism).  

[Kach was barred, however, from participating in elections after 1988 under the revised Knesset Elections Law banning parties that incited racism, and banned outright in 1994. 

[Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor.  He was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, but he became best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem “First they came . . .,” the verse that Helen quotes above.

[Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in English.  The best-known versions of the poem in English are the edited versions in poetic form that began circulating by the 1950s.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., quotes a version of the poem.]

A Trip to Poland

by Helen Eleasari

[I imagine by now, dedicated ROTters know who Helen Eleasari is and how I know her.  I’ve published many of her reviews of theater in Israel, written for the Jerusalem Post, and other posts she’s written expressly for ROT.  I’ve also run some of her reports and journal entries on her travels, and now she’s sent me a description of the short trip she and her daughter Rava took to Warsaw and Krakow, Poland.  I’m delighted that Helen’s permitted me to share her account with readers of ROT, and I hope it sparks interest in many of you—whether you’ve ever been to Poland, plan to some day,  or not.

[I, as it happens, have visited the east European country, but it was only once for a few days in Warsaw back in 1965, then I was an 18-year-old high schooler in Switzerland.  I was on a school trip to the Soviet Union (which was an adventure in itself I may some day recount).  Unlike, Helen and Rava, I’ve never been to Auschwitz or any of the camps.  We did see the monument at Mila 18 to the Ghetto uprising and the Jewish underground, made famous by the 1961 Leon Uris novel.]

July 15, 2015

Rava and I are just back from 6 days in Poland: 3 in Warsaw, 3 in Krakow. We had a fine time . . . even the obligatory and dreaded visit to Auschwitz was less traumatic (for me) than I’d anticipated. I lit candles for those of my mother’s family who’d perished (we only know where for 2 of them) and because it was windy, I placed them in the lee of the execution wall beside the infamous barracks 11 in Auschwitz 1. 

It appears now that I did well to light my candles there because my cousin Arnold told me that his mother, my mother’s elder sister, Katje, died at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 – the very day the Russians liberated the camp. . . .

As I wrote in my travel journal, What is beyond irony?

We’d booked a tour, which was the most sensible way of doing it because we got ferried there and back from hotel, from Auschwitz to mind- and soul-numbing Birkenau with an excellent guide in both places.

In Warsaw we stayed at the 5* Hilton (if there’d been a 6* it would surely have qualified) – very pampering and built, as we discovered, a stone’s throw from the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the 2 or three remaining bits of the wall was about 200 yards away. We did not see memorial as Rava balked, but I did manage to convince her to go to the former site of the Umschlagplatz [German for ‘collection point’ or ‘reloading point’; the Warsaw square on Stawki Street, where Jews were gathered under German occupation for deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp] – now a wee, walled space with info thereunto written in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English.

There it is, surrounded by apartment buildings just as in Berlin, the site of the Fuhrerbunker is now  a parking lots backed by apartment buildings.

Do you remember Carl Sandburg’s poem Grass?

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.

                                          Let me work.

The thing about the Sandburg poem is that if you substitute the names of the death camps . . . it works horrifically!!   I have been busily looking him up. Grass was first published in 1918 – so it was a response to WWI. But Sandburg lived until 1967 (b. 1878) – so he’d definitely have been aware of the camps.

At Auschwitz now, the grass covers the ground between the paths, around and among the railroad tracks, so green and laced with its summer bounty of clover, vetch, horsetails and other wildflowers. I was very conscious of the poem, and not only there.

And there’s another supreme irony, that one of the most anti-Semitic nations in Europe (though perhaps now less so), is raking in millions from Holocaust tourism, itself an oxymoron.

In Warsaw we went to the Museum of the Uprising (opposite the Hilton), a small but very dramatic museum that tells the story of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising via posters, artifacts, pictures, movies, slide shows. The Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion also figured there . . . . We didn’t go to the Jewish Museum. 

On the lighter side we went to concerts, an organ recital with an awesome Toccata and Fugue in D minor [attributed to J. S. Bach] that left us totally limp, an equally awesome recital of early Polish music by the Ensemble Peregrina that makes this music its life work, and a lighthearted, utterly excellent production of La finta giardiniera [“The Pretend Garden-Girl,” W. A. Mozart]. . . it’s Mozart month in Poland, so a lot of what we heard was by him.

Poland has very thoroughly discarded its Soviet satellite past. Both Warsaw and Krakow are thoroughly cosmopolitan and capitalist with soviet architectural remnants here and there, especially the supernally ugly architectural abomination in Warsaw that’s called The Palace of Culture & Science, visible from everywhere in the city. Stalin’s ‘gift’ to the Polish people. It’s so ugly that I love it!!!

We ate good food – very international these days with every cuisine known to man, and delectable pastries. The most delicious meal we had was in Krakow, an unpretentious little place called Introligatornia – duck salad with raspberry vinaigrette, goose-stuffed pierogi and roast duck leg with red cabbage and ginger-infused stewed apples.

Rather than travel to Krakow by bus, we opted to fly. It was cheaper – $45 – than an express bus – $50+ – and took 35 minutes vs. 4½ hours on the road. Even with the security checks, etc., the whole trip took about 2½ hours. Rava had done her usual, i.e. seeking advice on the Trip Advisor forum. TA has become our bible!!

In Krakow, which the Nazis left untouched [except for looting], I did not feel oppressed as I had in Warsaw. Probably my imagination, but to me Warsaw was resonant with pain.

Krakow Old Town is a delight – a friend of Rava’s lives right off the Market Square – and we wandered happily. We went to the Jewish Quarter which is still full of synagogues, but there are no Jews to fill them – Amon Goth and Gov. Frank took care of that.  [Göth (b. 1908), or Goeth, was an SS captain who commanded the Krakow-Płaszow concentration camp during the Nazi occupation of Poland; he was tried in Poland for war crimes and executed in 1946. Hans Frank (b. 1900) became Governor-General of the Nazi puppet General Government of Krakow; he was also tried, in Nuremberg, for war crimes and executed in 1946.] Habad [also known as Chabad: the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Judaism] has taken over one of the oldest as its HQ and we saw a few Habadniks. . . The quarter has also (according to Rava’s friend) the best pastry shop in Poland, so thither we went for pastries and coffee. Yes, truly delicious. We also had a cup of hot chocolate at Wedel’s – Poland’s premier chocolatier. It was, as Rava said, like drinking a bar of chocolate – incredibly, impossibly, wonderfully velvety, smooth and rich rich rich!!!

Sorry about the rhapsodies but Rava and I are unreconstructed foodies.

Krakow also has a great castle [Wawel Castle]. We didn’t go inside, but wandered the grounds, and heard a concert in one of the courtyards – a lovely space that pampered the very good voices singing.

We spent some time in Wawel Cathedral, a huge, ornate and elegant European Gothic church with some impressive tombs, including one entirely of silver for St. Stanislaus, Poland’s patron saint. There’s another church – St. Francis – with some amazing art nouveau stained glass windows.

As you can see, we took it easy. No rushing from museum to museum, gallery to gallery.

We came home at 3 a.m. Monday on a ⅔-empty plane. I stretched across 3 seats and managed to nap a bit!!

[Helen’s past ROT contributions are: “Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010; “Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 9 November 2012; “Dispatches from Israel,” 23 January 2013; “Berlin,” 22 July 2013; “Dispatches from Israel 2,” 6 August 2013; “Dispatches from Israel 3,” 20 November 2013; and “Dispatches from Israel 4,” 2 June 2015.  I also posted another of Helen’s JP reviews on 2 November 2014 as a Comment to “Dispatches 3.”  Helen’s just sent me more reviews of plays she declares are “icons for our times”; come back to ROT later (I haven’t chosen a date for publication yet) to see if you think she’s right.  (My bet, considering how astute I think Helen’s analyses are, is that you will.)  ~Rick

Dispatches from Israel 2

by Helen Kaye

[When Helen Eleasari offered to send me the journal of her trip to Berlin (see ROT, 22 July), she also offered some recent reviews from her job at the Jerusalem Post.  (Helen, as readers of ROT may have discerned, writes for JP as Helen Kaye; her other work, including “Berlin,” is by-lined Helen Eleasari.)  Needless to add, I jumped at the opportunity to run Helen’s reviews, both as a way to continue to broaden the selection of voices that appear on ROT and to keep posting items about cultural events from other part of the country and the world, distant from my East Coast beat.   

[Two of the reviews below, originally published in May and July this year, are of plays by 63-year-old Israeli playwright and screenwriter Motti Lerner.  “To put into context the reviews,” when Helen sent me the copy, she remarked: “Motti Lerner is an intensely political playwright whose work is controversial here as it pulls no punches, especially vis a vis the messianic religious right.”  The third notice is of a Hebrew translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which Helen said was very hard to write).  “Omri Nitzan [the Macbeth director] is the artistic director of the Cameri,” Helen explained, “and has been for the last 15 years or so.  He's our Peter Brook, sort of.”]

Hastening the End

By Motti Lerner

Directed by Ron Ninio

Khan Theater, Jerusalem

22/5/13

The observant friends who have watched Motti Lerner’s Hastening the End are stiff with outrage. The situation, says one “is more complex. You can’t make a black or white poster out of everything.”

“Lerner is as fanatical as those he calls fanatics,” observes another. “[The play] is manipulative, things are taken out of context.”

And although this is a polemic rather than a play, and preaches to the converted, there is in it a discussion on the nature of religion, on the content of the relationship between man and the deity.

But it’s the polemic that is out front. Its attack is two-pronged. It pillories what is perceived as Jewish national religious fanaticism; the kind of fanaticism, maintains Lerner, that justifies cold-blooded murder of the ‘other’ or ‘the goy’ in the name of and sanctioned by Jewish Law, or Halacha. It also charges us with moral cowardice in that we back off, refusing to see a threat that, if permitted to rampage on, will destroy us.

The vehicle is a sort-of play within a play of a father/son relationship that goes terminally bad because religion opens a chasm between them.

Religious high-school student Yuval Rosenfeld, played with fiery conviction by Itay Zvulun, has dressed up for Purim as Baruch Goldstein, the New-York born physician who in 1994 opened fire on Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125, was in his turn slaughtered by the enraged Muslims, and thereby became a hero-martyr to the extreme religious right.

Horrified that his son could identify with a killer, playwright Hagai Rosenfeld (Nir Ron), and formerly a yeshiva teacher himself, goes in search of the truth behind the massacre, proposing to write a play on Goldstein. Ron’s style of acting always conveys much with little, and here he beautifully shows us Hagai’s mounting emotional turbulence.

Director Ninio has the actors on stage throughout on Kineret Kisch’s yeshiva-classroom set, as if they’re participating in a ‘shi-ur’, a lesson in its biblical sense. Arye Tcherner invests his two rabbinical characters with a smug sanctimony whereas Jonathan Miller’s pair of settler rabbis shows fiery certitude. As Hagai’s former yeshiva colleague, Yossi Eini creates an uneasy Rabbi Amiel astride an abyss.

Not an easy play to see but if it provokes discourse, then it has done its job.

*  *  *  *

Pangs of the Messiah

By Motti Lerner

Directed by Kfir Azulai

Beersheva Theater, Beersheva (Be’er Sheva)

8/7/13

If this Pangs of the Messiah does one thing, it gives the settlers a human face, makes us realize they’re people, not just, as many perceive them, a symbol of intransigent and messianic religious nationalism.

The play itself may center on what takes place in a family home in Samaria, but its implications are national and grim. Unless we get our own house in order, very soon we won’t have one. Is this the pang? Is the title one of grim irony? Or do we take the title literally? As birth pangs produce a child, do these pangs produce Redemption?

Rabbi Shmuel Basson (Jonathan Tcherchi), a religious and political leader in his community, is desperately working to prevent the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and not just because his community will become part of the new Palestine. He genuinely believes such a treaty will be disastrous for the Jewish people, but intends to work within the law to get what he wants. Not so some of his household.

His son-in-law Benny (Nimrod Bergman) has already served time for murdering Arabs and will contemplate whatever it takes to effect that perceived Redemption. Lerner’s recent Hastening the End (Jerusalem Khan, May ’13) that deals with the Goldstein massacre in Hebron may be seen as the inevitable outcome of this ideology.

Basson’s son Avner (Oren Cohen), whom he had sent to the US to drum up support against the treaty among American Jews, returns home with his wife Tirtza (Noa Baron), and becomes radicalized, to her horror and disgust. As the negotiations move inexorably toward the signing of a treaty, events spiral out of control and more than lives are shattered.

Violence lurks throughout: Shmuel’s youngest, Nadav (Tom Hagi) is brain-damaged. His mother Amalia (Orna Rothberg) was beaten by a soldier during the pregnancy. She gets hit again now. Nadav’s dog is injured and on and on.

These are people whom history takes and shakes as they scrabble to control events. Azulai’s direction encompasses this as does the acting. Tcherchi soars as Shmuel, a principled man whose belief and faith in what he does are genuine. As Amalia, Rothberg is focused, intent on keeping their lives together. From his first moment on stage, Hagi quietly conveys that Nadav isn’t quite all there and as Tirtza, Baron lets us feel her growing despair.

As George Santayana said: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

*  *  *  *

Macbeth     

By William Shakespeare
Hebrew by Dori Parnes
Directed by Omri Nitzan
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv

12/7/13

 

A production must reflect its place and time says Omri Nitzan, be “here and now”. Our world is visual, immediate. Everybody knows everything all the time. The social media see to that. Hence Macbeth. It’s ironic, vulgar, cynical, violent, gaudy, paranoid, brash, and overflows its bounds, into the aisles, the wings, anywhere there’s space.

 

That’s why the report to Duncan (Eli Gornstein) of Macbeth’s (Gil Frank) prowess at the beginning of the play is almost parody; that’s why, from the beginning we realize that Macbeth is essentially a little man who gets too big for his boots – even his “throne” dwarfs him; that’s why low comedy is juxtaposed with terror; why the scenes that Shakespeare keeps offstage we see close up and personal, and why the blood motif inundates not only events but the lighting, set and clothes.

 

Nitzan’s Macbeth is true to Shakespeare’s, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, according to Polish scholar Jan Kott posits a nightmare world that is ‘steeped in blood . . . it floods the stage.’ Macbeth is about lust, about toxic ambition, about power turned to megalomania, about slaughter, about pointlessness, and for us ‘here and now’, about the nightmare world we’ve lived in since 9/11.

 

After the murder of Duncan, after the murder of Banquo (Ohad Shahar), Macbeth can say callously (and famously) “. . . I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

 

He has made the choice. He made it when he killed Duncan. The greatness of Frank’s performance as Macbeth is that he makes us bear horrified witness to his trajectory from good to evil. He shows us how he chooses, lets us into the mind of an evolving monster, compelling our attention.

 

Ohad Shahar also grabs us. His Banquo is no shining moral light. No less opportunist than his colleague, he’s more cautious, willing to wait and see. Then Macbeth orders his murder. Outraged at the treachery, Banquo/Shahar bestows a gleeful and witty savagery on his ghost. There are some superb scenes in this Macbeth and the Banquet is one.

 

But the tipping point to all is Lady Macbeth (Ruthie Asarsai). She it is who goads him into the initial killing, she who reassures her panicked spouse that water will “wash this filthy witness from your hand”, she who is so intent upon the immediate goal that she does not think of consequence. She cannot bend, and so she breaks. Ruthie Asarsai reaches for the stars in this hugely demanding role and nearly gets there. What she cannot suppress is her own imagination, an attribute lacking in Shakespeare’s very literal Lady M, so that Asarsai’s Lady M becomes too vulnerable.

 

From the beginning Dudu Niv’s fine Macduff is a watcher; he’s wary, keeps his head down so he can keep it on. We watch him change as the visceral shock when he hears his family has been murdered, hits home. For the time it needs, he’ll become as vicious as his former boss.

 

Eli Gornstein shines as Duncan and the gentle Doctor.  Alon Dahan’s ‘drunken’ pseudo-gravity adds irony to the Porter’s speech and Witches Edna Balilius, Yarden Bracha and Rona Lee Shimon fling themselves gustily into their roles.

 

Travesty or triumph? This Macbeth is some of both yet more than either. Its blood-soaked darkness sheds some light on who and what we may be. And isn’t that the point?

 

[As ROTters will remember, I’ve known Helen since I directed her in a showcase of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan back in the ‘1976.  Though she was born in the U.K, Helen lived in the States for years before making her aliyah to Israel.  Aside from her writing, Helen directs plays and musicals in English.  The articles Helen’s sent me for ROT include her most recent, “Berlin,” and coverage of the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival (posted on ROT on 9 November 2012), summer theater for children (“Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010), and other productions like an adaptation/interpretation of The Trojan Women by Yukio Ninagawa,;The Tired Hero by Eldar Galor, and Not By Bread Alone by Nalagaat (all posted as “Dispatches from Israel,” 23 January 2013).  Helen’s JP review of Harper Regan in Tel Aviv is attached to my own report of 20 October 2012 as a comment dated 28 October.  With any luck at all, Helen will keep sending me interesting stuff to post on ROT for the benefit of its readers.] 

Berlin

by Helen Eleasari

[Helen’s been a friend for a great number of years now, as readers of ROT will already know.  A few weeks ago, she wrote me that she and her daughter had just gotten back from a five-day visit to Berlin between Sunday, 16 June, and Friday, 21 June.  She commented off-handedly, “I remember your telling me that you were stationed in Berlin – isn't that right?”  It is, in fact—also as ROTters might recall (I’ve written about some of my experiences there often enough!).  I spent 2½ years between 1971 and 1974 in West Berlin—it was a divided city then—as a U.S. Army intelligence officer.  Needless to say, Cold War Berlin was vastly different from the 21st-century reunified city Helen and her daughter saw.  (For a comparison of “my” city with the one Helen and Rava visited, see “The Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009, and “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009.) 

[Helen originally composed this journal in note form after her return to Tel Aviv, with truncated syntax and abbreviations which she asked me to expand and adjust.  (I checked with her whenever I had questions, so her intent was never altered.)  I also took the opportunity now and then to insert remarks for clarification, translation (both to and from German as well as Helen’s British usage), or just personal asides.  Those insertions are all enclosed in brackets so readers can distinguish my prose from Helen’s own.  (The dates in the headings below are when Helen composed each section of her journal.)  ~Rick]

*  *  *  *

Berlin today is 'just a big city' that tries not to be burdened by its past, a remark that might well be hindsight, because while we were in Berlin, My daughter Rava and I were too busy soaking up impressions and looking at things. We neither of us spoke to a single echt [it means ‘real’ ~Rick] Berliner. We neither of us spoke more than 3½ words of German . . . and I don't know why. Nor did anybody speak to us.

There are thousands of Israelis living and working in Berlin. We didn't meet a one of them, or any Israeli tourists, except for one time in a subway station poring over a map, and then, strange coincidence, the same family appeared at Corroborree in Sony Center. I said nothing to Rava, who'd not noticed.

Our hotel was in a Muslim area, or apparently a largely Muslim area. Whether these were descendants of former gastarbeiter [‘guest workers’—immigrant laborers] or not, I couldn't say because they all spoke German.

By the way – at no time was public transportation crowded, nor were the streets traffic-clogged, not even at rush-hour. Alex explained to us that a lot of people had already gone on vacation – once the kids were out of school, the families take off. Out in the country, like on the way to Treptow and Potsdam, we saw enclaves of little vacation homes, each with its own patch of garden to which families come for a 'pastoral' summer. [These are sometimes called Grünstücke, “patches of green,” and often contain little more than a hut or lean-to surrounded by a large vegetable or flower garden where Germans spend a sunny afternoon or warm evening with a snack and a glass of tea, beer, or wine while they garden or just relax.  Some more substantial Grünstücke include houses in which the owners can spend a weekend or longer. ~Rick]

BERLIN PART I

23/6/2013

Here I am, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after the best night’s sleep I’ve had since we left for Berlin last Sunday [16 June].

Naturally (for me), I did not sleep a wink before leaving for airport at 0245 [that’s 2:45 a.m. in American—what we’d have called “oh dark thirty” in the army ~Rick]. Rava, who can sleep anywhere, immediately dove into a deep sleep on the plane for a couple of hours, so that by the time we got to our hotel I was quite literally reeling with exhaustion.

The Pension Galerie is on Hedemannstrasse, a quiet street . . . if you type in “pension galerie berlin” in a search engine, you’ll get to the site . . . then go to pix 58 & 59 on the photo gallery and you’ll see our room.

It was on the ground floor in the back of the building overlooking a courtyard into which the sun never penetrated. Given that it was blisteringly hot every day we were there – this was a very good deal as the room stayed cool and comfortable. Indeed, we were snug there and enough drawer space for five times as much luggage as we brought. Rava and I travel light.

Anyway, on arrival we were offered breakfast which we gratefully accepted . . . and then both of us fell into bed. I managed to sleep for a couple of hours, and then it was off exploring. We didn’t do much that first day – walked up to the Potsdamer Platz, a huge space dominated by the glass cupola of the Sony Center.

Deciding that a cup of coffee and a piece of cake were called for we trotted over the Artscafe down the block where sitting in a window alcove with delicious coffee and a piece of rhubarb (sorry!) streuselkuche [crumb cake in American] we looked down (or up) the Pariser Platz toward the Brandenburger Tor [the Brandenburg Gate] – Berlin’s indisputable signature landmark – gleaming goldenly in the sunlight.

We didn’t actually get there. I was too tired, and beside we had The Marriage of Figaro at the Komische Oper in the evening. We went back to the hotel, rested, then Rava went out in search of food, coming back with crispy duck, rice and Thai rolls.

Then off to the opera, a modern conception of Figaro with an incredibly inventive and saucily irreverent direction – Mozart would probably have loved it, but I found it a bit cluttered. The second half wasn’t quite so busy. The set was dominated by a huge square pillar which rose to reveal at least a cwt. of apples [that’s a hundredweight, equivalent to 112 lbs.]. Yes. Real ones. Why??? Original temptation of Eve??? And nobody related to them, except Susannah in passing. Never mind. All the really lovely bel canto arias are in the second half anyway so we just sat there and melted even more because musically and vocally it had sparkled from the first notes of the overture.

I woke up with a headache because of the down pillow – later changed to fiberfill – but it quickly cleared. Then off to the Berlin landmarks – the gate, the lovely Marienkirche [St. Mary’s Church] that miraculously escaped the World War II bombing that flattened most of Berlin, the Nikolaiviertel [Nicholas Quarter] which is now the only remnant of medieval Berlin – though most houses were 18th-and 19th-century.

Speaking of destruction, what characterizes Berlin is construction. Everywhere, but everywhere those huge cranes loom like a swarm of mantises – do they swarm? The whole center of the famed Unter den Linden is fenced off while they do something with the subway system.

From the Brandenburger Tor we walked to the Holocaust Memorial, but I didn't remember that until I looked at our pictures. That happened after I'd written this “Berlin diary.” I saw the series of shots I took, and realized I'd blocked it from memory.  The Holocaust Memorial is overwhelming, huge, obtrusive, ugly and shocking as it's meant to be. A huge oblong of nameless concrete 'tombstones' of different heights and thickness. You notice the first one of 2 cm. [a little over ¾ of an inch] thick, laid in the pavement, by chance. The narrow, uneven alleyways between the stones are claustrophobic. The associations come thick and fast, of ghettos, of the paths to the gas chambers, of depersonalization, of despoiled cemeteries, of despair, oppression. Not many people were there. We noticed young people dancing on top of one of the tombs. Children play on them, and that too is intentional.

Rava said, “Imagine all the people in those fancy apartments looking out of their windows at this. Bet they didn't anticipate the memorial when they bought them.”

No. But I couldn't feel for them.

In the afternoon Alex, a colleague of Rava’s who lives in Berlin, picked us up in his car and off we went to the Russian War Memorial at Treptow, the site of the former chancellery of the “1000-Year Reich” and other places most tourists don’t get to. He also fed us all kinds of info, for instance that while Berlin has a central mayor, the city is actually divided into several small towns, each with its own council and mayor!

Of all the things I saw in Berlin that memorial was the most moving. it’s a place of pilgrimage for Russians on May 9 [Victory Day in Russia and the former Soviet republics, celebrating the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945] to this day.

It’s huge, little h, an epic place where in four mass graves in the center of an immense green lawn are buried the 7,000 Russian soldiers who fell in the battle for Berlin [called the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation by the Soviet Union, 16 April-2 May 1945]. It’s anchored at each end by an immense and very fine granite statue: a grieving Mother Russia at one end and her son at the other – about a kilometer [a little over 1000 yards] away at the opposite end of the lawn.

The entrance is two immense triangular cenotaphs [an empty tomb, a monument in honor of people whose remains lie somewhere else], each with its own grieving soldier. There’s nothing abstract here, just naked sorrow and – as I saw it – the sculptor also snuck in reverence.

The red marble cladding (is that proper name for it?) on the cenotaphs was taken from the ruins of Hitler’s chancellery (according to rumor) – the site of which Alex also took us to. Today it’s an apartment house and where the Führerbunker stood is a parking lot. There’s a diagram of the bunker at the site. The Soviets filled the place with concrete so nothing grows there and nothing can be built. It’s small, shabby, insignificant . . . so marvelously ignominious.

After the memorial we drove to the river bank for a beer on a barge – Rava loves beer and she drank it every day with our main meal!!! It was so pretty there. The Spree River meandering beneath us, the forest of Treptow Park at our backs.

We finished the evening with liver, apples and onions [for the culinarily challenged, this is known as Leber und Zwiebel Berliner art—“liver and onions Berlin style” ~Rick] at a ‘typical’ Berlin resto/bar.

Must say though that Rava did her usual thing with maps and got us unerringly where we wanted to be. She loves it. A typical Rava pose on vacation is her poring over the map which, by the end of the holiday, is falling apart!!

BERLIN PART II

25/6/2013

Day 3 was Museum Island [Museumsinsel] where we visited the Neues and Pergamon Museums for, respectively, In Light the of Amarna:100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery and Uruk: 5000 Years of the Megacity.

The Neues houses the busts of Nefertiti and Akhnaton. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether the busts on view are the originals, but seeing the actual Nefertiti in the flesh, as it were, was glorious. The Amarna exhibition itself was a disappointment, being a record of 100 years of excavations at the Amarna site where Nefertiti was discovered. The only thing that really stuck in the mind were the wall paintings on the tombs.

At the Pergamon – named for the Altar of Pergamon in Asia Minor [now part of Bergama, Turkey] – we were gobstruck by the 2nd-century BCE altar. The main hall of the Pergamon is a kind of reconstruction of the altar with the frieze running around the side and a huge flight of steps. The gates of Ishtar from ancient Babylon are also there. These latter were shipped to Germany in pieces in 4000 crates prior to WWI – and then, after the war, reassembled. They are beautiful.

The Uruk exhibition was as similarly disappointing as Amarna – we both had the feeling that it wasn’t really geared to the lay public.

Our tenderest memory of the Pergamon (Philistines that we are!) is the piece of mango and blackcurrant torte we shared in the cafe.

We’d already visited Checkpoint Charlie [the official crossing point, located in the former American Sector of the occupied city, between West (Allied-occupied) and East (Soviet-controlled) Berlin during the Cold War era] to take the inevitable pix by the noticeboard – “You are leaving the American Sector” – and sandbags of the little guard post. But that evening we went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum which was the life work of human rights activist Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt . . . everything I’m telling you about is extensively documented on the web, of course!!! My point is – we were there.

In a way, the Wall defines Berlin, a huge scar. There’s bits and pieces of it all through the city. Alex took us to the longest still-standing section of it, about 1.6 km. [just under a mile] running alongside one of the broad boulevards the Soviets built. There’s more of it at a place called The Museum of Terror, which we didn’t get to, and which documents the activities of the Third Reich’s infamous Gestapo and SS [on the former site of whose headquarters the Topographie des Terrors is located,]. Western artists were invited to paint panels of it and there are four painted Wall panels on a sidewalk, one by an American artist. It’s just one more instance of how the Wall remains part of Berlin consciousness.. These stand on (I think) Alexanderplatz . . . .  [There is also an exhibition of 105 paintings on Wall panels by artists from all over the world, painted in 1990 on the east side of the Berlin Wall, at the East Side Gallery located on Mühlenstrasse in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. ~Rick]

Anyway – the museum that provides pictures, records, videos, artifacts, etc., of everything and anything to do with the Wall from the fall of Berlin in 1945 to the fall of the Wall in 1989. We spent a couple of hours there and tottered out, heads reeling. TMI. Oh, but fascinating in every way – especially the methods of escape. One daring chap actually constructed a kind of helicopter from all sorts of cannibalized parts. Took real courage. Close to 1000 people were killed trying to escape from East Berlin. There were Wall Helpers, brave souls who organized escapes and assisted people to escape . . . and so on.

The following morning after breakfast – we were bumped from “our” table for a more favored guest – we went to a market. This was Wednesday [19 June] and the market was ⅞ empty with very few stalls. Oh well. One of them was selling hand-painted pottery from Poland. I bought a wee dish – I have a weakness for ceramics and china – which I ended up giving as a gift to my upstairs neighbor who’d faithfully watered my plants while we were away and whom I’d forgotten to buy a present for.

Another stall sold Italian pastries. There we bought a hefty slice of almond bread to have with coffee later. 

A bonus was the Catholic church nearby that had splendid contemporary black, white and shades thereof stained glass windows. Beautiful. Naturally we had to walk all the way around it to find the entrance – our feet certainly had a workout in Berlin!!

The largest store in the city is KaDeWe. Like Macy’s in New York, it occupies an entire city block and is considered a tourist Must See. [It’s more like Bloomingdale’s than Macy’s in my opinion. ~Rick] So we went. We wanted to get Yoav, Rava’s son and my grandson, a gift and possibly some clothes for Rava, but German women are not built in Rava’s size, so no joy there. The entire 6th floor is the Deli.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” says my daughter, and disappears. After more than 20 minutes I have been to the bathroom twice – no Rava – and am getting frantic, envisioning disaster. I am just about to summon the cavalry when she hoves into sight.

“Where were you?” I almost shriek at her.

“Wandering around,” she says. “Figured you would, too, and that we’d run into each other!”

“No!!!” I retort. “I’ve been waiting right here.”

Oh well.

So she takes me around, especially to the pastry counters . . . and we consume a slice of raspberry torte [Himbeertorte] with our coffee, harmony well-restored.

The guidebook we took with us told us that there are 1800 types of cheese on offer, 1400 breads and 2000 cold cuts. If I’m going to be facetious, and why not, you could eat every day for 4 years or so and never buy the same thing twice.

Wednesday and Thursday [19 and 20 June] were contemporary art days and they’re for part III

BERLIN PART III

26/6/2013

You ask whether we ate food other than pastries. Certainly we did. Berlin these days is multi-ethnic foodwise. There are dozens of Italian, Chinese, certainly Turkish eateries everywhere. Remember, I mentioned Thai food before the opera and liver and onions after our sojourn with Alex?

As for the other days . . . Berlin was at the tail end of the asparagus [Spargel] season, the fat, white asparagus that is so delicious on its own, but which gets served in a myriad ways by inventive German chefs, two varieties of which we ate Wednesday and Thursday, as you’ll read.

One detail I didn't mention is that it was HOT! as in 36º C [about 97º F, very hot for Berlin, which is farther north than Fargo, N.D., and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada ~Rick] on the Thursday, and because Germany, as the UK, isn't geared to expect heat, public transportation, restaurants, etc., aren't air-conditioned. The big KaDeWe (acronym for Kaufhaus des Westens [“the department store of the West”]) thankfully was, and so was the theater, but in the main we sweltered. Mind you, the Berliners, after the worst winter on record for some 60 years, were reveling. All the outside tables of the cafes were packed, packed, packed.

Another little nugget is the day we visited the Brandenburg Gate, workers were erecting a vast outdoor stadium which we learned later was for Obama [who addressed the city from there on Wednesday, 19 June], so it was lucky we went on the Monday [17 June]. The next morning at breakfast one of our hostesses told us that the center of Berlin was in security lockdown, so that there’d be all kinds of traffic jams, as indeed there were, but we managed to avoid them traveling underground.

Anyway.

Back to Wednesday afternoon and the Hamburger Bahnhof, a former subway station now converted to a contemporary art museum. An amazing place! Its central hall featured sculptures and installations, one of which was a bag lady whom I swore was a living statue and which Rava equally swore was a sculpture.

“I saw her blink,” said I. “It’s the one reflex you can’t control.” 

“No way,” said Rava. “You imagined it.”

And when we left a couple of hours later, there she still was. I still say she was a living person!!

Another piece that made an impression was a reclining woman made of wax into which the sculptor had placed candles, so that she was gradually melting.

The museum is huge but we managed to see most of the temporary exhibits. The Central hall was one exhibit – entitled Body Pressure: Sculptures Since the 1960s.

Have you ever heard of Martin Kippenberger [1953-97]? I hadn’t. The man was a genius who put out an extraordinary body of work including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, collaborations, books, pamphlets – you name it. He died at 44 of liver cancer.

The museum is by the river, so we garnered a table outside in the shade and ate asparagus with grilled salmon and a big mixed salad. Delicious. 

Rava took of her shoes and wiggled her toes to the breeze while the river rolled by beneath us.

Ahem.

Made a mistake. It was the Wednesday evening we went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

Thursday we skipped breakfast in order to get an early start for Potsdam, about an hour away from Berlin by subway, train and bus. We had to wait for quite a while for the bus and for some reason, many of the bus-stops have no benches, so if you have to wait, it gets tiring. The bus finally came and we were off to Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s summer palace.

What they didn’t tell us when we bought tickets – tickets to museums, etc., are costly – was that if we wanted to see the art collection, the kitchens and so on, it cost extra. So we saw only the palace, which is a wee one as palaces go. It’s built like a railroad car, with only 10 rooms. The audio guide told us that guests had to enter their rooms via the French windows. We got an excellent explanation for each room. Frederick, like so many of his contemporaries, was into Chinoiserie, so two of the bedrooms were decorated in an oriental motif. One was like an orchard with fruit, flowers and birds, especially parrots all around the walls and on the ceiling.

He’d built ruins, too, and a Chinese pagoda but we went to neither as it would have meant climbing hills  – not in that heat, thank you. If the palace was small, the grounds made up for it – some 400, or maybe it was 4000, acres of parklands, woods, avenues, fountains, pavilions and so forth.

There’s a resto there, in the park, called the Drachenhaus [Dragon House], to which we went for lunch.

We were lucky. Got there ahead of a huge expected party, so found a table in the shade and ordered carrot mousse wrapped in bacon and a mango asparagus pancake with arugula and ginger cream. Both yummy.

Then back to the hotel for a shower and a rest, and off to the New National Gallery [Neue Nationalgalerie] for cutting-edge contemporary art . . . lots of really huge, arresting canvases, many of which pack a powerful and visceral punch. I was grateful for the chance to see this work. 

Our last meal in Berlin was prosaic fish and chips at the Corroborree Australian resto in the Sony center.

And the next morning it was up at 6, breakfast, and off to the airport for our flight home – well pleased with our Berlin sojourn.

[I’ve known Helen since I directed her in an Off-Off-Broadway production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan back in the ‘70s.  Born in Britain, she lived in the States for many years before she moved to Tel Aviv, and we keep in touch regularly.  Helen directs English-language plays and musicals in Israel and writes reviews and cultural features for the Jerusalem Post.  Over the years, she’s not only covered the culture beat for JP but she’s done a fair amount of traveling for her own purposes, including two years teaching English at a provincial university in China.  Now and then, Helen sends me articles about the cultural and theater scene in Israel, including the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival (see her reviews posted on ROT on 9 November 2012), as well as other experiences she’s had (“Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010) and spot productions she’s reviewed, such as Harper Regan in Tel Aviv (attached to my own report of 20 October 2012 as a comment dated 28 October).  Her reviews of an adaptation/interpretation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women directed by Yukio Ninagawa, the Japanese experimental theater artist; a new Israeli play, The Tired Hero by Eldar Galor; and an old review of a show she saw in Tel Aviv that also played in New York City, Not By Bread Alone by Nalagaat, are posted on ROT as “Dispatches from Israel 1” (23 January 2013).]