[Welcome to the second installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).” It’s a continuation of my account of the search for information on Agnon’s 1935 novella and the 1979 play adapted from it. This part includes a detailed synopsis of the play’s plot and a review of its première at Habima in Tel Aviv. I also cover the play’s 1981 North American début and the press reception of that appearance at a theater festival in Toronto.
[Readers who have just joined this post should go back to 2 May and read Part 1 first. You will understand what follows much better if you know the rationale for this search and have the explanations of many of the details that recur in Parts 2 and 3 (coming up on 8 May.)]
The next steps in my search for the stage adaptation of S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale seemed to be to check out the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to see if it had a manuscript of the play, contact the Israeli Consulate for whatever help it might offer, and track down a library specializing in Jewish/Hebrew culture (Hebrew Union College?).
There was also the possibility of contacting Habima directly, but that would probably be a lengthy process. I did have an actress friend who lives in Tel Aviv (the late Helen Eleasari; see my memorial post on 22 April), and I told Cynthia that I could easily ask her to check on the availability of the story or the play in English from Israeli sources. Since I owed her a letter anyway, I said I’d go ahead and ask her to look around.
I suggested that there’d probably be copyright problems to deal with, but a last resort could be to translate the German version of the novella (I didn’t know anyone who could translate Hebrew) and work from that. I said I could probably handle the German myself with a little work. (I said that before I learned how tricky Agnon’s prose is.)
The original Habima production of A Simple Tale in Tel Aviv opened on 1 January 1979 and was held over through the rest of the year. The novella had been adapted for the stage by Shlomo Nitzan and Itzhak Goren, and staged by Yossi Yizraeli, whom the Jerusalem Post said, “has made Agnon’s work his own province.” The cast numbered 25 with a backstage crew of 16.
Habima (which literally means ‘the stage’ in Hebrew) began as a Hebrew-language theater in 1912 in Bialystock, Russia, a small city of about 56,000, of which 40,000, or 72%, were Jews. After World War I, Bialystock reverted to Polish control (as it had been before the turn of the 19th century) and Habima decamped for Moscow.
The company’s founders invited the great theater pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), founder of the Moscow Art Theater, to lead the nascent troupe, and he arranged for Yevgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a pupil of his who was also influenced by experimentalist Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) and became a friend of innovative actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov (1891-1955; see my post on 2, 5, and 8 November 2019) to train the company.
Considering the small size of the Hebrew-speaking audience in Moscow and the rise of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the company found the going rough and decided to emigrate. In 1926 Habima toured Eastern Europe, Germany and Western Europe, and the United States.
The troupe split, with one contingent of the acting company choosing to stay in the U.S. After a well-received visit to Palestine and a return to Europe, the rest resettled in Palestine, then under the British Mandate of the League of Nations, in 1931. Habima built a permanent home in Tel Aviv and since 1958 has been the National Theater of Israel.
In the words of Washington Post review-writer James Lardner, the company “still shows its original influences—the intense flamboyance of the Yiddish Theatre and the realistic emotional texture of the Moscow Art Theatre,” though there’d been no contact since Habima left Moscow in 1926.
Mendel Kohansky’s review in the Jerusalem Post included a comprehensive synopsis of the plot of the 1979 Habima hour-and-45-minute stage adaptation of A Simple Tale:
We are in Agnon country—a small town in Galicia, where the Jews live their lives in a partially imposed, partially self-imposed, ghetto. They are devoted to religion, to learning, to earning a living. It is the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th, some of the Jews there are already glancing across the wall, attracted to non-Jewish Europe, its different style of living, its liberal thinking and sophistication.
The hero of the story, Hirshel, belongs to the old world. His parents own a prosperous wholesale chicken feather business [for stuffing pillows, mattresses, and cushions]; his mother always has a thick wad of money in one hand, an abacus in the other; his father just takes orders.
Hirshel wants to study the Tora [sic; the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses], a greatly respected pursuit in his environment, but not for sons of prosperous merchants. His parents believe he would be much better off in the family business.
Hirshel is also in love, with Bluma, a pure dove of a girl, but a penniless orphan. His mother approved of the girl, but she thinks that a boy like Hirshel should marry well—into a family at least as prosperous as his own. Her choice for him is Mina, the daughter of Berta and Gedalia Tzimlich [ziemlich is German for ‘almost’]. Mina has received an education befitting her station in life, in a boarding school for girls run by a lady who eventually converted to Christianity. Consequently, Mina is a worldly, sophisticated girl who wears elegant dresses and nightgowns, douses herself with perfume, and calls Hirshel “Heinrich” [German for ‘Henry’].
Under his mother’s gentle but firm persuasion, Hirshel eventually marries Mina. And he abandons his studies to devote himself to the wholesale chicken feather business. But his heart is with Bluma, and with the volumes of the Talmud [a collection of Jewish writings on the practical application of Judaic law and tradition]. The conflict leads to fearful suffering [on the part of Hirshel] which culminates in [his] madness.
Cured of his illness, Hirshel returns to his family, to his wife who has borne him a child, to the business, and to a clearly laid out future.
There are faint echoes of The Dybbuk in the story, but instead of the tragic grandeur with which the heroine’s life ends there, we have here an ending full of gently ironic, poignant wisdom.
[The Dybbuk (pronounced DIB-uhk) is a play by S. (for Shloyme; Yiddish for Solomon) Ansky (1863-1920), written originally in Russian between 1913 and 1916. Later, Ansky himself translated it into Yiddish. A Hebrew version was staged in Moscow at Habima in 1922, the troupe’s first great success. A new production was staged at Habima in Tel Aviv by Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003) in June 1979, starring Moshe Becker (b. 1954), the young actor who débuted as Hirschel in A Simple Tale.
[The play depicts the possession of a young woman by the dybbuk, or malicious spirit, of her dead beloved. Her father had forbidden their marriage. The dybbuk, which can be expelled only by exorcism, at first refuses to leave the possessed woman’s body but is eventually persuaded to do so. In the end, the woman dies and her soul is united forever with that of her beloved.]
A young man in the business, constantly running up and down ladders, occasionally stops to speak to the audience in the author’s voice.
When the story comes to its resolution, with Hirshel on his way to becoming a respected merchant and family man, the narrator tells us: The Lord, may His Name be blessed, created the first man with two faces and two backs, and all the future generations have two faces and two backs, and they can move in either direction.
Hirshel, he tells us, cast his eyes on a girl, and in his ignorance assumed that he was commanded to do so, until others came and showed him that he was not so commanded. It made him very sad, but in the end he consoled himself, like one who suffered a loss but was rewarded with a find.
In his Jerusalem Post evaluation of the adaptation on stage, a “difficult task” which he declared “could hardly have been done better,” Kohansky asserted that director Yizraeli “has achieved remarkable results.”
The play, Kohansky added, “is anything but simple.”
On the surface the story is about a young man whose spiritual and intellectual cravings are stymied by a coldly materialistic environment, but it hides a wealth of Agnonite meanings. The adaptation and staging, with its baroque richness, successfully bring them all to light.
Labeling the production “poignantly sad, tragic and humorous” and “rich in directorial invention,” the JP reviewer reported, “There is never a dull moment” in the show, which “proceeds from climax to climax until it reaches a frightening Walpurgisnacht in the scene of the hero’s madness.”
(Walpurgisnacht, or Walpurgis Night, the night from 30 April to 1 May, is the night when witches are believed to hold satanic revels. Hence, it can refer to any episode or situation having the quality of nightmarish wildness.)
The review-writer found Ziona Shemesh’s set, lit by Nathan Pantorin, “an astonishing farrago of thousands of objects, big and small.”
At first sight it appears to have been thrown together with no rhyme or reason, but there is method in the madness and as the show progresses it emerges as virtually another cast of characters, supplementing the human cast.
It is by far the most complex stage design I have ever seen, a set constantly in motion, reaching a frenzy in the mad scene when the stage becomes a thick storm of chicken feathers.
Kohansky had praise for several performances. He singled out Moshe Becker “in the extremely difficult part of the hero, a part which could easily lead an actor . . . into excess.” He also lauded Lia Koenig’s Ziril, Eliezer Jung’s Baruch Meir, Sandra Sade as Mina, Ruth Geller and Pesach Gottmark as her parents, Yael Perl as Bluma, and Eli Gorenstein as the narrator.
The reviewer described Yossi Mar Haim’s score as “crashing chords like messengers of destiny contrasted with gentle interludes on the violin and cello.”
The 1981 Habima presentation of A Simple Tale in North America was in Hebrew with a prologue in English. The narrator, representing Agnon, was part of the original concept of the production (and the novella) and the prologue was translated into English.
Variety reported that the mountings in Toronto and Baltimore would have a cast of 13 with 20 stagehands backstage. The troupe traveled with “two tons of scenery, props and electric gear.” Feelers mentioned in Variety for a Broadway run never came to fruition.
(On the way home from its North American performances, Habima played two performances in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Schauspielhaus for the Zürich Festival in June. It was a sort of reciprocal visit, as the Schauspielhaus ensemble had been in Israel recently before.)
According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, A Simple Tale was presented at the Toronto Theatre Festival, the city’s first international theater fest, 25-31 May 1981 at the St. Lawrence Centre.
In the Globe and Mail, Ray Conlogue opened his review of Habima’s A Simple Tale by wondering “whether it is possible to review a play performed in a language not known by the reviewer.” The question, he explained, was “painfully immediate” because this was a production he “did not enjoy.”
Conlogue listed several issues that affected his enjoyment of the production, including his “non-comprehension of Hebrew and the company’s failure to provide a scene-by-scene breakdown . . ., either in the program or onstage.”
“But beyond that,” he explained, “is my lurking suspicion that S. Y. Agnon’s novel really is a simple tale, and that the Habimah has tried to project onto it a density of expressionist staging and melodramatic performance that it cannot support.”
The reviewer acknowledged that “Siona Shimshi’s set is a marvellous [sic] abstraction of the family’s poultry business, with a floor-to-ceiling pile of feather bags suspended magically to one side and an equally improbable pile of wicker boxes on the other.” The Globe and Mail writer continued:
A small scrim in the middle hides an unnamed person who occasionally makes an ear-splitting din: a foreshadowing of Hirshel’s madness. When he is finally committed to the asylum . . ., the scrim lifts and reveals a lunatic who on one level is the inmates of the asylum; on another, a reflection of Hirshel himself.
But Hirshel needs no reflection in this grotesque and overwrought mad scene. A bloody bandage on his foot, the result of accidentally smashing a glass on it during his marriage ceremony, is placed on his head and transformed into a surreal cockscomb.
(A word of explanation for readers who’ve never attended a traditional Jewish wedding under a chuppa [wedding canopy]: usually at the end of the ceremony [depending on local custom], the groom breaks a glass wrapped in a napkin, crushing it with his right foot. The explanations for this gesture differ, and modern weddings have varied the practice, but the tradition continues.)
Conlogue objected: “I just do not believe that an unhappy marriage will convince a man that he is a rooster—not even if being a rooster is a symbolic rejection of his family’s business and of the entire culture it represents. An overloaded symbol quickly becomes ludicrous.”
He found the mad scene “melodramatic and overlong, which cannot be forgiven by any allowance for an unfamiliar esthetic.” The review-writer went on to list some of the “many directorial errors,” such as “the failure to give Bluma a scene in which she could establish the relationship between herself and Hirshel.”
“For every awkward or misplaced expressionist image, however, there was one that worked,” Conlogue found.
One recalls the wedding ceremony, where Hirshel’s mouth stops moving in the middle of the groom’s speech (while a recording of his voice continues, he looks about in terror and bewilderment); or his mother embracing him on his return from the asylum, grabbing his midriff while he leans backward like a Chagall angel.
He also acknowledged the “strong” performances, invoking renowned director Harold Clurman (1901-80), who directed at Habima often even though he didn’t speak Hebrew. Conlogue affirmed that Clurman had “insisted that one could tell an actor was doing a speech well even if one didn’t understand the language,” and called upon the director’s ghost to back him up when he stated that Moshe Becker “seems a remarkable young actor [26 at the time of the Toronto performances] and that Lia Koenig and Eliezer Jung as his parents spoke with warmth, credibility and a wealth of nuance.”
(I can’t be sure to what statement by Clurman Conlogue is referring here. In On Directing (1972), however, the renowned director, theater critic, and Group Theatre co-founder responded to a question about directing plays in languages “of which you are totally ignorant”: “After several readings and the repetitions of scenes for a week or two, I begin to associate the foreign sounds with the script in English . . . . I am able to detect errors in readings and even . . . faults in diction.”)
On the other hand, the Globe and Mail reviewer felt that “Sandra Sadeh as Mina did not seem particularly deeply felt, however, and Yael Pearl as Bluma had nothing to go on but some not-very-inspiring choreography.”
Finally, Conlogue complained that the promised English-language narration turned out to be only one reading of a brief summary at the beginning of the performance. He suggested that the narrator could have appeared “in the blackouts between scenes” to provide more details of what was happening or, as an alternative, provide a “detailed breakdown in the program.”
Henry Mietkiewicz of the Toronto Star began his notice with a lament: “Even the thrill of finally seeing a Hebrew-language play performed in Toronto by a professional Israeli company cannot disguise the disappointment at being offered a weepy melodrama tarted up to look like respectable theatre.”
“Upon entering the St. Lawrence Centre last night,” continued Mietkiewicz, “one almost expected the heavens to part in honor of the awesome event: religious and political dignitaries from Israel and Canada had gathered at a gala Toronto Theatre Festival performance to witness the first North American appearance in 25 years of the Habimah National Theatre of Israel.”
As for the show itself, the Toronto Star reviewer reported, “When the lights dimmed, it was only a surprisingly powerful performance by leading man Moshe Beker that narrowly rescued A Simple Tale from being totally transformed into another heart-rending episode of As The Ghetto Turns.”
Referring to a plot summary, the TS writer observed, “Masterpieces have been based on flimsier plots and, indeed, it took a writer like Agnon . . . to turn A Simple Tale into a touching expression of life’s bitterest ironies.” (I assume Mietkiewicz was referring here to the source novella—which, ROTters will recall, wasn’t available in English in 1981; it was, however, published in Hebrew and German.)
Such an atmosphere “is precisely what Beker manages to convey, whether in a speechless moment of terror and confusion under the wedding canopy or as the howling madman who murderously stabs pillows and flings clouds of feathers across the stage.”
The rest of the cast, complained Mietkiewicz, played “depthless stereotypes, especially Lia Koenig, who badly overplays Hirshel’s mother Tsirel and speaks as though all her lines were underlined and in capital letters.” (Readers might contrast this assessment with those of Mendel Kohansky of the Jerusalem Post, Globe and Mail reviewer Ray Conlogue, both above, and R. H. Gardner in the Baltimore Sun, in Part 3.)
Even a misguided mother unable to comprehend her son’s distress could not possibly have been envisioned by Agnon as Koenig’s cackling, conniving glutton.
Mietkiewicz wasn’t finished, however: “A pox upon Shlomo Nitzan and Yitzhak Goren for saddling their adaptation with a Jewish Greek chorus who interrupts and debases the most poignant moments by deigning to inform us dumb yahoos what the players are feeling.” (I should point out that Agnon used a narrator in the original novella, though I don’t know what the content of his contributions was.)
In his parting remark, the Toronto Star review-writer advised “Torontonians still hungry for good Hebrew drama” that they “will have to spend 15 hours on an eastbound trans-Atlantic flight or 25 years wondering about Habimah’s next visit.”
In contrast with his northern colleagues, Terry Doran, theater reviewer for the Buffalo [New York] Evening News, publishing in the Baltimore Sun, exclaimed of Habima’s A Simple Tale: “Don’t miss it. It is brilliant theater, and this is a judgment offered in spite of the fact that not a single word was understood by this member of the audience” (because it was performed in Hebrew).
“The power of this theater is that everything is understood, short of the subtle nuances of Hebrew, and I’m not even sure that isn’t so.” (I rather suspect Doran meant his last phrase to say he wasn’t sure it is so.)
“The tale is simple,” stressed Doran; “it is also profound. It has a tough kernel.”
All the events of the play are “accomplished ingeniously and beautifully on a single set constructed of hanging things, ladders, items of commerce, that offers several focal points and deep recesses.”
From the dark recesses emerge the players, the musicians and in a stunning display fragments of [Hirschel’s] subconscious.
It is characteristic of this production that the most moving, even transcendant [sic] moments are more or less wordless. They are delivered in the ultimate theatrical language, a volatile mix of movement, gesture, sound, sight and word. It’s worth the price of a festival.
[I hope all ROTters will return on Sunday, 8 May, for the final installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).” I’ll be covering the appearance of Habima’s stage version of Agnon’s novella at Baltimore’s International Theatre Festival in June 1981 and the press reception of the performances. I also bring the story of the search to its conclusion, with a coda covering the release of the English translation of the story in 1985, including a book review.]
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