FSB: Field Station Berlin

 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will know that I was a Military Intelligence Special Agent in the army and was stationed in Berlin from July 1971 to February 1974.  I was a nine-triple-six (my Military Occupation Specialty was 9666, Counterintelligence Officer; the enlisted agents were 97B’s), and assigned to Berlin Station of the 66th Military Intelligence Group, a unit of the U.S. Army, Europe.  

[Our offices were in the main Berlin Brigade compound on Clayallee in Zehlendorf, the same compound where the U.S. Commander, Berlin, a two-star general, and the Commanding Officer of the Berlin Brigade, a one-star general, both had their headquarters.  Also in the former Luftwaffe headquarters complex was the U.S. Mission to Berlin, the post of the highest-ranking American diplomat in the occupied city.

[On the first day I reported to Berlin Station, I noticed two black Russian sedans, Volgas or Moskviches, parked, one by each exit from the compound.  Aside from being black, the Soviet vehicles were very recognizable because they looked like stylistic throw-backs to the early ’50s. 

[I asked about them, and the agent who was assigned to help me get acclimated told me that the cars with their GRU-agent occupants (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye – Главное Разведывательное Управление; Main Intelligence Directorate, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency) were almost always there, just watching, taking notes, and probably photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, the Soviets knew my name, rank, and assignment.   

[Berlin Station’s offices, low profile but not covert, were right at the front of the main building.  Next to us, in an unmarked office, was the positive intelligence unit, the agents who ran intelligence-gathering operations.  It was staffed by officers with the MOS of 9668, Area Intelligence Officer, and the enlisted counterpart, 97C.  They were covert; we could communicate, when we had to talk face-to-face, via a locked iron gate between the two 66 MI sections located in the basement.

[We were both spooks, trip-sixes and six-eights.  That’s what we and others called those of us in the intelligence racket.

[Berlin was also home to another facility of the military intelligence field.  This post is about that strange and super-spooky place.  It was not a facility about which much was known, even to other intel personnel like me, but pretty much everyone knew of its existence because . . . well, it was impossible not to.  I’ll let you read why that was so.

[And remember: everything you’re about to read is the emes, the truth—to the best of my knowledge.  I’m not joking and I’m not trying to spoof you.

[Now, a quick précis of pertinent history.  World War II in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe, or VE, Day).  Combat changed to occupation and the three wartime allies, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, became the administrators of what had been the Third Reich.

[Agreements made among the three national leaders at the Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945), attended by Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and General Secretary Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), and at the Potsdam Conference (17 July-2 August 1945), with Churchill, Stalin, and President Harry Truman (1884-1972), who succeeded Roosevelt upon the latter’s sudden death in April, divided Germany into three occupation zones and made special provisions for Berlin (geographically inside the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany) to be administered separately by the three victors.

[At the conferences, the Soviets had rejected an equal share in the Occupation for France, so the U.S. and Britain agreed that French zones of Germany and Berlin would be ceded from their zones.  Berlin was therefore divided into four occupation sectors: the Soviet Sector, commonly known as East Berlin, was approximately one-third of the former German capital city, with about a million inhabitants, and the British, U.S., and French Sectors, consolidated as West Berlin, together were about two-thirds of the city with approximately 2½ million people. 

[Because there hadn’t been a peace treaty to end World War II, Berlin was still under occupation until 1990, when a formal peace was finally negotiated.  While the Western Allies had relinquished political responsibility for what became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in 1949, Berlin remained occupied territory. 

[The Federal Republic was declared on 23 May 1949 and the Soviets followed with the declaration of the German Democratic Republic on 7 October.  The East Germans established East Berlin as their capital (West Germany made Bonn its provisional capital, pending the return of Berlin to freedom), but the city remained occupied territory for 45 years. 

[The British, American, and French forces turned the civil administration of the city over to the Berliners and there was a functioning elected municipal government, but the three sector commanders—a major general in the case of the U.S. Commander, Berlin (USCOB)—still had almost unchecked authority of not only the military and official civilian personnel under their control, but the ordinary civilians who lived in or visited Berlin.  When push came to shove, what the generals wanted, they got.

[The Berlin Wall that divided the city for 28 years appeared early on 13 August 1961 when the GDR threw up a temporary barrier of barbed wire and trenches along the boundary between the Soviet Sector and the three Western sectors and around the western border with East Germany.  For about a year from 18 August, the GDR constructed a permanent wall of concrete blocks, topped with barbed wire.  The Wall was pulled down by energized Berliners starting on 9 November 1989 (see “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009).

[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War.  Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009, “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018, “‘Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” reported by Jon Wertheim, 19 May 2021, and “Open source intelligence combats disinformation on Russia’s war against Ukraine” by Miles O'Brien and Will Toubman, 17 April 2022.]

In the 1950 Twentieth Century-Fox movie The Big Lift (see my post on Rick On Theater, 31 August 2017), there are several scenes of Berliners shoveling debris into wheelbarrows.  The movie was made on location in Berlin starting in May 1949, just after the end of the Soviet blockade (June 1948 to May 1949) and only five years after the end of World War II in Europe. 

The wartime destruction had to be cleared by hand because the deprivations of Germany after the war, especially in Berlin due to the blockade, made gasoline-powered machinery unavailable.  In addition, the post-war unemployment was so great that hiring out-of-work Berliners to clear the rubble served a benefit.  

With the male population decimated by the war, it was Berlin’s women (such as the war widow in The Big Lift played by Cornell Borchers with whom Montgomery Clift’s character falls in love) who cleaned up the rubble.  These debris-collectors were called Trümmerfrauen or ‘rubble women.’

What the movie doesn’t show is that most of that debris was taken to a site in the borough of Wilmersdorf in the southwest of the city, near the Grunewald (‘greenwood’), Berlin’s forested “Central Park.”  The debris was piled into a mountain named Teufelsberg (‘devil’s mountain’), the highest spot in the city at about 365 feet above sea level (and 265 feet above the surrounding terrain).              

Undated photograph (ca. 1950s) of trucks dumping wartime rubble on 

the growing Teufelsberg in Wilmersdorf, West Berlin. Ullstein Bild

Teufelsberg—the name was taken from the mound’s proximity (about a half mile south) to a small lake in the Grunewald called Teufelssee (‘devil’s lake’), a place of legend and folklore since ancient times—was used as a dump site for debris through the 1950s and was finally landscaped in 1972.  Some 98 million cubic yards of debris from West Berlin—the Soviets disposed of the rubble in their sector in their own way, much of it deposited outside the city—was collected to create the artificial mountain.  That’s the approximate equivalent of the remains of 400,000 bombed buildings. 

In February 1955, a 79-foot-long ski jump opened on the mound, then a larger one opened in March 1962, with room for 5,000 spectators.  Ski jumping stopped in 1969 because the civilian recreation was incompatible with the super-secret military activities going on above.  The jumps fell into decay from lack of maintenance and were removed in 1999 because they allegedly interfered with that activity (discussion of which is coming up).

For a brief time in the ’70s and ’80s, the district of Wilmersdorf produced wine on the southern slope of mountain.  Up to 120 liters (a little less than 32 gallons) of Wilmersdorfer Teufelströpfchen (Wilmersdorf devil’s droplets) were bottled per year.

It wasn’t just what the mountain was made of or how it was created that’s a curiosity. however; there were many such artificial mounds in bomb-damaged cities all over Germany and much of Europe after the war.  It was what was under the mountain.

Buried beneath Teufelsberg are the remains of a uncompleted Nazi military-technical college designed by Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer (1905-81).  Only the shell of the compound was finished, but the construction was so sturdy that all the Allies’ attempts to demolish it, even with aid of explosives, failed.  

The Occupation forces decided, therefore, to entomb it under war debris instead.  The Wehrtechnische Fakultät (faculty of defense technology), planned as a department of the reconceived Technical University in Berlin, is down there still today, buried under about 63 million tons of rubble.

 

Teufelsberg Cross-Section (2013) by Brendan Jamison, coloured plastic blocks, 50 x 67 x 2 cms. The grey structure at the bottom represents the buried Faculty of Defense Technology. Photography: © Tony Corey for Jamison Sculpture Studio.

At the peak of Teufelsberg, the U.S. Army Security Agency, the military counterpart to the National Security Agency formed in 1945, built an elaborate “listening station” called Field Station Berlin, the most secret place in Berlin.  FSB was one of the West’s largest spy stations, arguably the most important of the Cold War era. 

The military unit of the ASA to which personnel who staffed FSB were assigned changed designations a few times over the lifetime of the listening station.  (The NSA had some of its own analysts, researchers, and linguists based at Teufelsberg.)  In 1976, two years after I left Berlin, USASA was folded into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Branch, the combat support branch in which I was commissioned, to form the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).

Construction of FSB was begun in 1963 (a mobile listening station was installed on Teufelsberg in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up, restricting access to East Berlin), so it didn’t exist when The Big Lift was filmed.  Even if it did, the filmmakers probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mention that that’s where all the rubble was heading.  Now, of course, Teufelsberg’s all over the ’Net—a sci-fi ghost town!

Usually just called Teufelsberg by Berliners, the listening facility, known to insiders simply as “The Hill” (and as “America’s Big Ear” to the East Germans and Soviets) was located in the occupied city’s British Sector even though it was a U.S. site.  The Brits had one building on the spy site, but essentially we just shared whatever poop we got with them and the French.

Everyone knew FSB was there—you could see the bulbous towers and antennas, resembling some futuristic city, from many parts of Berlin; with the facility’s large and distinctive structures, and the huge antenna field, low visibility was just not possible or practical.  

The listening station had three immense globes, two radomes (radar domes) perched on top of three-story-high towers and another soaring six stories higher.  Each radome globe contained huge, 40-foot satellite antennas and the most up-to-date listening technology, allowing the U.S. and its allies to intercept satellite signals, radio waves, microwave links, and other transmissions before translating, interpreting, and analyzing the findings.

                    Teufelsberg Field Station Berlin, ca 1985. Photograph courtesy of John Evans.

The radomes, which look like gigantic, teed-up golf balls, had no radar equipment despite their name.  The Allied forces already had radar surveillance covered with installations at Berlin’s airports: Tempelhof in the American sector, Tegel in the French sector, and Gatow in the British sector.  (Teufelsberg was used briefly for air traffic control on civilian flights in 1994.)

The people who worked at The Hill had a saying, very popular apparently—a sort of unofficial motto: “In God we trust, all others we monitor.”

Very few who didn’t work there, however, knew what went on.  I knew about FSB, of course, but even as an intel officer, I was never on the site in my 2½ years in West Berlin.  I was my unit’s resident Russian linguist, so I got info copies of transcripts of telephone conversations from the Soviet military headquarters in Potsdam; they came from FSB.  The “Big Ear” was a major target of Soviet espionage both because of its extreme sensitivity and because it was aimed at them.

As a Military Intelligence Special Agent, I had security clearances for which you’d need clearances just to know what the initials stood for.  (That’s not a joke or hyperbole.)  One of my former classmates from the Russian language program was assigned to FSB’s sister listening station in Helmstedt, on the border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. 

I took the Duty Train over from Berlin one weekend to visit him, and despite my clearances, he couldn’t tell me what he did, aside from the obvious: listening in on (and, should hostilities break out, disrupting) Russian, East German, and Warsaw Pact communications. 

Even today, 20 years after FSB ceased operations, many of its operations are still classified and former staffers are prohibited from talking about what they did there.  Documents pertaining to the spy site that are still secret are due for declassification soon; some, in fact, may have been released in the past couple of years.

I was a counterintelligence officer, engaged in “human intelligence,” or HUMINT—that’s spies and counterspies, “sources,” and “subjects”—and “electronic intelligence,” or ELINT, more familiar as bugs, taps, and electronic eavesdropping.  

Since I was in counterintelligence, my responsibility was the defense against these things, rather than gathering actionable intelligence to use against our opponents.  FSB had a positive intelligence mission—as did our sister unit whose covert base was next door to our “low profile” offices.  We trip-sixes had a brass sign at the front door and a number—just one, though (it was 9666, the same number as our CO’s staff car license plate)—listed in the Berlin Brigade phone book. 

We got “phone-ins” and “walk-ins”—people, mostly Germans, who presented themselves to the German Labor Force guards at the compound’s front gate and asked for the OSS or CIC (Office of Strategic Services, World War II forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the Counter Intelligence Corps, WWII predecessor of the army’s MI Branch) if they were old enough, or the CIA, if they were younger. 

The guards would call us and we’d send an agent out to escort them to our interview room and hear their stories (some of which I recount in “Berlin Station, Part 2,” posted on 22 July 2009, “Berlin Memoir, Part 3,” 20 January 2017, and “Berlin Memoir, Part 4,” 9 February 2017).

The six-eights next door had none of that; you wouldn’t know they were there unless you were supposed to.

ELINT and SIGINT, or “signals intelligence,” intercepting over-air communications like radio, microwave, and now wifi, was the bailiwick of the ASA and, therefore, FSB.  As you might imagine, Berlin was an especially important location for a listening post during the Cold War, situated, as it was, 110 miles east of the Iron Curtain inside Warsaw Pact territory.

Being up on Teufelsberg gave the listening station clear reception for a large swath of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe.  The State of Brandenburg, which includes Berlin, is extremely flat terrain so there are few obstructions to interfere with radio and microwave transmissions.

Bristling with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos, The Hill looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek (or Raumschiff Enterprise, as it was entitled on German TV).  There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the complex to zap all the “Grunie pigs,” the wild boar that roamed the Grunewald, into roast pork!

The power of the tech at FSB convinced most Berliners and many East Germans that all the microwave communications inside the GDR were probably recorded.  Satellite transmissions and radio communications were all intercepted and analyzed.  Wireless communication systems in West Berlin were also monitored, and the wire-based communication were tapped by other installations.  

Everyone believed that even small radio-transmitted bugs installed in any room in the city were picked up by FSB’s state-of-the-art antenna systems.  Some of this was true—probably unbeknownst to the rumor-mongers—but much of it was just uninformed scuttlebutt.

There were always rumors about this super-secret place.  Most of them were ridiculous, but sometimes, odd things did occur.  A couple of the false rumors concerned a tunnel Berliners believed the ASA GI’s dug into the mound and all the way down to the Wehrtechnische Fakultät.  Two reasons for the tunnel were proposed: one was that it was an escape route in case of emergency; the other was that it was a means of access to a secret subterranean submarine base beneath the mountain.

No tunnel has ever been found, but there’s one story that was actually true: every year in late July and early August, the reception of radio signals from stations far to the east were stronger than during the rest of the year.  No one could figure out why at first, until someone noticed that the heightened reception coincided with the annual German-American Folk Festival in Zehlendorf, the district where the U.S. Army headquarters was (and, incidentally, where my quarters were).  

Every year at the end of July and the beginning of August, the American forces sponsored the German-American Volksfest on a vacant plot behind the main PX on Clayallee (which was right across the street from my Berlin Station).  Each year, the festival spotlighted some aspect of American culture; in the three Volksfests I attended, it was The Wild West, Hawaii, and Las Vegas.

The Volksfest had entertainment drawn from the talents of GI’s from all over USAREUR, street-fair food and games, a beer tent (natch), and carnival rides.  (We had a Hawaiian noncom in the unit when I arrived, and when the 1972 Volksfest came around, he taught us some Hawaiian words and expressions.  One was “Suck ’em up!” which isn’t actually Hawaiian, but it’s the island version of “Down the hatch!”  Another was the Hawaiian word for ice cream, which was being sold all over the fairgrounds: aikalima.)  

The signal-booster, it turned out, was the Ferris wheel.  So, every year after determining that, the Berlin Brigade commander held the wheel over for a few extra weeks after the Volksfest closed.

No escape tunnel was ever found after the FSB site was vacated by the ASA and explored by urban explorers and the construction workers of the new private owners.  Something else wasn’t found on the grounds of the listening station: a protective bunker for the GI’s and civilian spooks assigned there. 

It’s curious that at a place in the sights of all the missile-guidance systems of the Soviet Union, there was no bunker.  The spooks on The Hill had all the materiel needed to destroy classified documents and tech, plus some small arms, but no place to take refuge.  Explanation: they were expendable—and they knew it.

No bunker could withstand the type of targeted attack the Soviets would have launched at FSB, something they’d have been planning for since the place was built.  It would have been a waste of time and money to build one, the FSB analysts understood.  The Soviet tanks would overrun the city within hours of a conventional attack, and The Hill would have been a priority target.

This was something the spooks at Berlin Station also contemplated.  Think about this: West Berlin, with an American military force amounting to an oversized brigade with maybe a score of tanks (an enhanced company), a smaller contingent of British and French soldiers, no German troops (except for the police, who received infantry training), was surrounded by a Soviet tank army.  That’s about 300,000 soldiers and anywhere from 500 to 1,000 tanks.  

And that doesn’t count the East German forces, or any other Warsaw Pact troops stationed in the GDR. What the hell were we going to do if the Soviets decided to launch the balloon?  Fight?  Whom?  All the Russians would have to do, we reminded ourselves, was roll up to Checkpoints Charlie and Bravo, post a few guards—we were already surrounded by a wall—and put up a sign, “Berlin POW Camp,” and then go around the city without firing a shot—though they’d probably want to lob a few rounds at The Hill. 

The ASA soldiers on The Hill knew this, too.  They had another saying: “First to know, first to glow.”  (They anticipated a nuclear attack, we didn’t.)

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent reunification of Germany, FSB became obsolete; it was decommissioned in 1992 and stripped of its sensitive equipment.  There didn’t seem to be anyone to listen to anymore—though I suspect that since Vladimir Putin and his kleptocrats and oligarchs came to power in Russia, some in the Pentagon and at Fort Meade wish they’d had the foresight to hold onto it against that eventuality. 

The 11½-acre site was turned over to the city of Berlin, then sold to private developers in 1996.  The firm, which paid 5.2 million Deutschmarks (about $350,000 then, about $640,000 today) for the former FSB, wanted to build luxury apartments, a hotel and restaurant, and a spy museum on the grounds.  Costs soared beyond profitability, however, and the plans were abandoned.

Struggles over what to do with it stalled other development plans, and then a building boom after the reunification made the plans redundant and unprofitable.  The site’s now covered with graffiti (among the most popular words scrawled on the buildings are, unsurprisingly, ‘ALIEN’ or ‘ALIENS’) and street art, and is disintegrating into ruin, but it’s still a draw for lookie-loos, urban explorers, graffiti artists, and adrenalin junkies even though it’s under 24-hour guard. 

     2018 photos showing current state of the former FSB at Teufelsberg.  

        Photo by Michael Hodgson.

                         

The spy complex was an immediate attraction for tourists looking for an off-beat place to explore as soon as it closed and the ASA left the building.  At first it was by surreptitious entry—there weren’t any security guards at first, just a fence—but then the new owners hired sentries and started charging for tours (or, for a lower fee, simple admission if you just wanted to wander around on your own).  This isn’t officially available anymore, but people still come to see the weirdest ghost town on Earth.

There’s no electricity or running water; at least one multi-story elevator shaft is open and empty, a real safety hazard; there’s little light in some locations; the whole place is littered with construction debris, broken glass, rusty metal, spent spray cans, abandoned (and heavily graffitied) cars, and garbage.  And yet the urban spelunkers come.

It’s “spooky” in two ways now: one, because it’s where spooks—intel agents like me—used to work: and two, because it’s silent, empty, and decaying, like a non-lethal Chernobyl.

The site’s prospects are in limbo; no one seems to know what to do with it.  Plans have been proposed, including the repurchase of the former spy station by the city of Berlin, but none have gone beyond the talking stage, often due to cost. 

One proposed deal in 2008, involving filmmaker David Lynch, was for building something called a “Vedic Peace University,” focusing on yoga and transcendental meditation and featuring a 12-story, 164-foot-high “Tower of Invincibility” to house 1,000 students. The city turned down the proposal.

Over the years since The Hill closed as a USASA station, Teufelsberg has been a location for several movies and television programs, including one espionage cable series, Berlin Station, that aired on Epix from 2016 to 2019.  Berlin Station was the name of my actual CI unit of the 66th MI Group (part of U.S. Army, Europe) from 1971 to 1974.

FSB had also been the subject or setting for many books, both memoirs and novels.  Two of the latter are Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2008) and Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).  Both books are by T. H. E. Hill, which is a pseudonym (get it?) for a 74-year-old retired ASA linguist who served at FSB in the mid-‘70s.  (A “Monterey Mary” is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.  I went there in 1970 and ’71 and, curiously, I never heard the term before.)

There’s a movement, especially among the Teufelsberg veterans, to preserve FSB as a memorial.  In 2006, the area was legally declared woodland, ending any development plans, and in 2018, it was given Denkmalschutz (‘monument protection’), a designation similar to landmark status in the U.S., for its historical importance as a Cold War site.  This designation eliminated the possibility of new building on the site.

Today, guided tours and paid admission to the late FSB or not, Teufelsberg is popular with mountain bikers, hikers, and paragliders.  In the summer, visitors can enjoy 360-degree panoramic views of the whole city and beautiful sunsets there, and in the winter, the mountain’s small ski slope and the cross-country ski trail are popular.

But what to do with the abandoned FSB is still a conundrum.

S. Y. Agnon's 'A Simple Tale' ('Sipur Pashut') – Part 3

 

[This is the final installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).”  I finish up my search for information about an English translation of Agnon’s novella and report on the play’s presentation in Baltimore, the production that initiated the search in the first place. 

[That little fact is explained in Part 1, posted on 2 May, and I strongly recommend that readers just starting this account go back and read Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 5 May).  Aside from that initiating incident, there are several more details about this chronicle that are explained in the earlier installments and Part 3 will make much more sense if you read them first.

[Part 3 covers the end of my search, including a report on the Baltimore performances of the Habima adaptation with many of the reviews of the production published in local papers and some more distant outlets.  I’ve even reported on the publication of the English translation of the novella and the New York Times book review upon its release.]

I continued the report on the availability of A Simple Tale on 11 February:  An hour and a half spent in the NYPL Main Branch (42nd Street and 5th Avenue) revealed that apparently no English translation of the story had ever been published here or in England, or any other English-speaking country. 

I checked the Index Translationum, published by UNESCO as a list of all literature translated, and several bibliographies of Hebrew literature translated into English.  The only recorded translation of A Simple Tale was the German translation noted in the 9 February memo.  As far as I could tell, I’d exhausted all reasonable resources for locating a translation of the story. 

The script version wasn’t mentioned in any index or bibliography, and probably had never been published.  The only likely source for the adaptation was Habima in Tel Aviv.  It was problematical whether they’d release their version if it had never been published.

I’d asked Helen in Tel Aviv to check on the availability of either the script (in any language) or an English translation of the story in Israel on the chance that a version of either may have been published there and not imported.  I expect it to take a while to get the answer.

Further checking also revealed that the only available copy of the German translation (from which an English version might be adapted) was the non-circulating one at the NYPL Main Branch.  I planned to check a little further to be sure; I had the numbers of Columbia University’s and Hebrew Union College’s libraries, and Goethe Haus.  Bobst only had the original Hebrew version of the story as I indicated in the 9 February memo. 

(It’s interesting to note that Agnon’s works had been translated into nearly every European language, including Swedish, Danish, and Portuguese.  There were also versions of several of his stories in Korean, Vietnamese, and Turkish.  No one seemed to have translated Sipur pashut into any language other than German.  I hadn’t even located a Yiddish translation of it—which seemed counterintuitive since that would have been the common language of northern European Jews in pre-World War II Galicia.

([In fact, there was a Yiddish translation of Sipur pashut, published in 1958 (A Posheṭe mayse, New York: Der Kval).  Translated from the Hebrew by Agnon’s good friend Eliezer Rubinstein (1926-89), of whose rendering, which the author felt preserved his writing style, Agnon said: “Anyone reading it would have thought that I had written it in Yiddish myself.”

([I didn’t find this translation until I used the then non-existent resource of the Internet.  It’s doubtful, though, that a Yiddish version of the story would have been any more use in our quest than the German version was.

([In 2002, A Posheṭe mayse was adapted for the stage by Shmuel Atzmon and produced by Yiddishpiel, a Yiddish theater company in Tel Aviv.]

The German version was relatively recent, 1967, and is in modern German.  This is distinguished from pre-WWII German documents and publications, which were written in Frakturschrift, a Gothic alphabet that’s very hard to read if you didn’t grow up with it.  It is, however, 276 pages long, militating against either working on it in the library or photocopying it at $42 a copy at 1985 library prices.

On 13 February, I reported that calls to the libraries of the Goethe Haus and Hebrew Union Col­lege revealed that neither had a copy of any translation of the Agnon story.  (Goethe Haus doesn’t handle translations into German, only German literature.)  I subsequently visited Hebrew Union College library (1 W. 4th Street), but that just confirmed that they didn’t have either an English or German version of the story.

A call to the Israeli Consulate provided the name of an Israeli-based bookstore that just opened a branch in New York City: Steimatzky, 56 E. 11th Street (now closed).  This was the best help the consulate could give me. 

Steimatzky didn’t have any translations of Agnon, but they called another dealer, who didn’t have A Simple Tale, but provided the Israeli publisher of Agnon’s works, Schocken Books.  Steimatzky  said they’d contact Schocken’s New York office and let me know the availability (and cost) of ordering a translation of the story.  I said I’d report the information they passed on to me.

I took out The Fiction of S. Y. Agnon by Baruch Hochman (Cornell University Press, 1970) from Bobst.  (I was still an NYU grad student at this time—my work with Cynthia was an internship for her class—so I had access not only to Bobst, the NYU bookstore, and other NYU facilities, but also the Downtown Consortium, which included, among other schools, Hebrew Union College.)   

The Hochman book includes an extensive discussion of A Simple Tale (which the author calls A Simple Story; pp. 94-111).  It also indicates in the publication data that the “English translations from . . . Sipur pashut [A Simple Tale] were made by Baruch Hochman,” indicating that there were no others available in 1970.  A note on page 200 confirms this.

Hochman remarks that the story

centers, not primarily on the manners of the shtetl [a Jewish village or small town in Eastern Europe] in transition, but on the inner experience of a young man unwittingly in conflict with both himself and his envi­ronment.  It is essentially a study of repression, madness, and final adjustment within the bourgeois family, as we know it from turn-of-the-century European fiction.

Also:

A Simple Story seems to start out as a romantic tale of young lovers who are thwarted by their elders . . . .  But it moves toward neither of its predictable endings.  That is, it presses neither toward tragic devastation nor toward a comic resolution in which the will of the obstructive elders is overcome.  Rather, it moves toward an ironic reconciliation of the hero with those elders and their values.  Yet, though Hershel is treated ironically, we are somehow relieved when he “makes it” in conventional terms and “becomes a man.”  We end by partially approving a reconciliation to a milieu which has been shown to be inimical to every value of youth, life, love, or, for that matter, authentic tradition.  Still, we go on scoffing at that milieu.

I held onto the book for a while in case anyone was interested in having a look at it (since we didn’t seem to be able to lay our hands on the original story too readily.)

I planned a trip to Lincoln Center Friday, the 15th, or Saturday, the 16th (on an unrelated matter).  While I was there, I saw what that resource had to say about Agnon, the script of A Simple Tale, and the performance(s) of the Habima in the summer of ʼ81.  A report to Cynthia on that information followed on 16 February.

There was no evidence of any further performances of A Simple Tale after the Baltimore festival appearance.  According to a Variety article dated 3 June 1981, Habima’s A Simple Tale played Toronto before Baltimore. 

Variety had announced on 5 March 1980 that Habima planned a run at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre with A Simple Tale, its first visit to New York City since 1964.  The run was to start in January 1981 and then move on to one-night stands in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Montreal.  Shmuel Firstenberg, an Israeli impresario, was producing the tour and was going to offer three other attractions to compliment the Agnon adaptation. 

For the proposed Broadway production of A Simple Tale, the author-narrator was to be on stage the whole play and make introductory comments on each scene.  The producers decided that this made more sense than using a simultaneous translation through earphones, and a “prominent American actor” would appear as the narrator.

In Variety on 3 June 1981, Habima managing director Shmuel Omer explained that “a feasibility study on the back of a used envelop promptly discouraged the economics of [a Broadway] engagement.”

A Simple Tale was performed in Baltimore on 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14 June 1981.  The production was Habima’s first visit to the United States in 25 years and, according to United Press International, part of the first international theater festival in this country’s history.  The Habima show was the opening performance of the festival, débuting on 6 June.

Edwin Wilson in the Wall Street Journal reported on 19 June 1981 that the Habima performance during the International Theatre Festival was given at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon.  He described one scene which moved him particularly:

The scene in which [Hirschel] loses his mind is undoubtedly one of the most theatrical mad scenes ever staged.  As a demon stalks him, Hirschel topples over a two-story stack of boxes, swings an iron bed on wheels in a fierce arc and finally throws pillows filled with white feathers into the air.  Suddenly a shower of feathers falls from above and the stage becomes a snow storm of feathers.  Symbolically Hirschel is lost in the maelstrom of the family business [packing and selling chicken feathers].

Cynthia had extolled this same scene to me when she first broached the subject of seeking out this play.  As readers will see, it was the theatrical highlight of the production, singled out in nearly all the reviews.

The Baltimore Sun’s R. H. Gardner recounted a conversation he had with an actor who played in My Fair Lady in Russia.  The actor was explaining how “harrowing” it was playing before an audience that doesn’t understand the language of the performance. 

“You deliver a line that customarily brings down the house, and they just sit there staring at you,” the actor said.  Gardner wondered if, during his mad scene in A Simple Tale, actor Moshe Becker, “as he tore about with a shoe on his head, banging into props and scattering feathers until the stage looked as if it had been hit by a 6-inch snowfall . . . if he himself weren’t wondering, ‘Do they have the slightest idea why I’m behaving this way?’”

Gardner went on: “Such a thing can undermine an actor’s performance, but there was no indication that Moshe Becker let it affect his.  Indeed,” the Sun reviewer added, “he and the rest of the company, all of whom were superb, carried on as if they were in their own theater in Tel Aviv instead of . . . before people who for the most part could not understand them.”

Nonetheless, Gardner felt, “Despite the language barrier, the play has been so well put together . . . that it can be followed, in broad outline if not minute detail, and its power and artistry should be evident to all.”

Though a “simple” story, the adapters and director have imbued it with various expressionistic devices that considerably deepen its emotional impact.  The audience is taken inside the character’s head and allowed to experience with him strange sounds—notably cackling laughter, eerie music and, especially, a jarring chord, repeated at strategic moments to recall the insane relative, dwelling in rags somewhere in his mind.

The passage of time during the period his madness is developing is conveyed by the frequent crowing of a cock . . . .  The whole production—from [Ziona Shemesh’s] two-level set, with its hanging human figures and dangling pillows, to Y[ossi] Mar-Chayim’s evocative music—has been imaginatively conceived, and the performances . . . are uniformly excellent.

As for the acting, the Sun writer lauded Lia Koenig and Eliezer Jung, who “seem right on key as the parents.  [Yael Perl] has a hauntingly lovely quality as the orphan girl [Bluma] the hero loves but can’t marry, and Amiran Attis is nothing short of terrifying as the uncle [the “insane relative” mentioned above].” 

Like so many of the other reviewers, however, Gardner was especially taken by the young actor who made his début as Hirschel in Tel Aviv: “Of course it is Mr. Becker’s virtuoso performance as the son that, through its energy and variety, manages to dazzle the audience throughout.”

In conclusion, Gardner recommended, “For all who take their theater seriously, [A Simple Tale] is, I should think, a must.”

“To see the Habimah National Theatre of Israel performing S. Y. Agnon's ‘A Simple Tale’ is to see the preservation of several traditions at once,” proclaimed the Washington Post’s James Lardner.  He was invoking, first, the original Habima’s artistic guidance from Konstantin Stanislavsky, alluded to earlier from Lardner’s column (see Part 2), and, second, “the lost world of the shtetl, or Jewish ghetto . . . .”

Because the script isn’t translated, “a great deal of dialogue is spoken, and a verbally-minded theatergoer is bound to feel frustrated,” cautioned Lardner.  “Even those casually acquainted with Hebrew, I am told, could find Agnon’s poetic language . . . difficult to follow.”

“The play was presumably chosen for export,” Lardner figured, “because the storytelling approaches the flavor of pantomime at times, and the action is always richly and vividly illustrated.  (When Hirshel and [Mina] are married, for example, a net descends on them and wraps them in a stranglehold.  When Hirshel goes mad, all the neatly arranged props and furniture go haywire, and the stage is covered with feathers.)”

The WaPo review-writer reported, “The power, technical skill and total coordination of the players come across—language barrier or no language barrier.”  He concluded that “for anyone interested in modern Hebrew theater and literature, this is a rare opportunity.  Nothing like it is likely to come our way again anytime soon.”

In the Wilmington, Delaware, Evening Journal, Philip F. Crosland felt, “‘A Simple Tale’ is an appropriate title.  The plot is so simple that were it not for one electrifying scene in which the protagonist goes mad amid a blanket of falling feathers, it would hardly be noticed.”

Crosland also thought that “the play would have held this reviewer’s interest better had it been in English instead of Hebrew.”  He asserted that “it becomes tedious to watch players communicating a play of little action in a strange (to me) language.”

“The action,” reported the review-writer, “moved rather stiffly until the dramatic and visual highlight, when Herschl’s mind snaps and he slashes pillows and other containers, flinging their contents about the stage, as an overhead container showers more feathers, creating a feathery screen through which the rampaging Herschl is observed obliquely.”

The Evening Journal’s reviewer observed, “The set was intentionally cluttered.”  With “brown, black and somber tones” predominating, it set “a mood.”  Crosland characterized the performances, “like the play,” as “competent but undistinguished.” 

For UPI, Glenne Currie remarked that, though A Simple Tale “was played in Hebrew,” he found that “the story is less important than the production, which was magnificent.”  Currie noted that “Habimah still shows its debt to Stanislavky’s Moscow Art Theater . . . .  In fact Habimah probably is more representative of the common heritage than the present Moscow Arts.” 

“It really is a simple tale,” affirmed the UPI writer, “of love found and lost, of the strengths and weaknesses of tradition.  But,” he added, “the expressionistic set, the exemplary acting, and the orchestrated direction which combines with the incidental music to give the effect of a spoken opera, add up to the sort of total production which the theater aims for but seldom attains.”

In Baltimore’s Afro-American, Ida Peters complained that the presentation of Habima’s A Simple Tale in the city’s International Theatre Festival was an example that the festival “left much to be desired” because “some of the troupes who perform in Hebrew and Spanish [were] without written explanation of what is happening on stage.”

Peters cited “Baltimore critics [who] each said they couldn’t understand what was happening or told a different version from what I thought I saw.”  Reiterating what “the press release says” (the plot laid out as previously described above), Peters gave “[m]y view”:

On Hirshel’s wedding night he castrates himself and refuses to sleep with his bride.  When his bride turns up pregnant, he goes mad.

“At the show this reporter caught,” the Afro reviewer observed, “the absence of laughter and the complete silence of the audience proved that not one person in the half-filled auditorium understood what was going on.”

She felt, “For a student of theatre arts especially those studying theatre design, sets and lighting ‘A Simple Tale’ could be a must see.  For the average theatre-goer,” the review-writer warned, “it has no appeal.”

In addition to Peters’s allusion to the quality of the tech work, she acknowledged, “Most masterful scene [sic] was Hirshel’s dance of madness . . . .  He was accompanied by a half-naked maniacal figure [presumably the boy’s insane uncle] who danced his frenzied contortions with him [the “maniacal figure,” I presume] pulling him [Hirshel] deeper and deeper into his own hell.” 

Peters also complained that the Baltimore School for the Arts, “while it has a large stage is not fully renovated and is like an old barn.  The temporary seats are uncomfortable.”  She was the only reporter who mentioned this, but I looked up the school to see what the reviewer could have meant.

It turns out that the BSA, a newly-established Baltimore public high school for preparing student artists for careers in the performing and visual arts, was in its first year of operation in 1981.  Not all the renovations to the once-elegant former Alcazar Hotel, built in 1888 and closed as a hotel in 1932, had been completed at the time of the Simple Tale presentation. 

Only the first four floors of the seven-story structure were ready for use.  The theater where Habima was working (and several other festival performances were given) had been the hotel’s first-floor grand ballroom.

Except for confirmation from Steimatzky/Schocken about the availability of the text, and an answer from Helen in Tel Aviv, this concluded the research I could think of to locate a copy of the script or an English version of the story.  I suspected the only way of getting the script would be to contact Habima directly and ask if they would let us have a copy.  I told Cynthia that if she wanted me to do any more on this, she’d have to let me know.  I said I’d run out of ideas.

On 20 February, I reported that Judy at Steimatzky called that day to say that Schocken Books, Agnon’s publishers, didn’t have a translation of A Simple Tale at that time, but that they planned to issue one in the fall.  The release, which would be part of an anthology, was slated for September ʼ85.  I saw no reason why we couldn’t wait until then to do anything about an adaptation.  

For now, I felt, all we could do is await word from my friend in Tel Aviv about a possible English version available in Israel (unlikely) and from Ellen Foreman’s (another TJ colleague of Cynthia’s) Habima contact about the availability of their dramatization.  I thought that put an end to the research in this matter for the time being.

After I sent this memo to Cynthia, she memo’d me back to “put Agnon on hold, except when that project literally falls in your path en route to another goal.”

On 1 March, she reiterated: “Good work on Agnon.  Now put it on hold pendin[g] the September publication of the story and any word we get from our feelers to Israel.”

Schocken Books indeed published A Simple Story (as the translation was entitled) in Israel in January 1985 (also Syracuse University Press in the U.S.), though it didn’t reach the United States until December.  (It was not part of an anthology.)  It was translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin, an American-born translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970.  There have been further publications since then.  (There’s even a Kindle edition available.)

In his New York Times review of the new book, Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, called Agnon’s novella an “understated masterpiece” and Halkin’s translation a “skillful (if at times rather free) rendering of Agnon’s elegantly stylized Hebrew.” 

Finding it “a mystery” that it took 50 years for A Simple Story to be released in English, Alter declared that “one must be grateful for its appearance now.”

The novella, Alter found, “conforms . . . closely to the European realistic novel of the 19th century.”  Indeed, the UCB professor asserted that “Agnon learned [the] quasimusical technique [‘of recurring motifs’] for developing themes from ‘Madame Bovary’ [(1857) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), French novelist] and, probably, also the early Thomas Mann [(1875-1955), German novelist and short story writer].” 

The book reviewer pointed out that “Agnon recalls Flaubert” in his “frequent use of an ironic free indirect style to lay bare the self-deceptions, mental evasions and hypocrisies of the principal characters.”  The actions in the story, though, are “rendered by Agnon with extraordinary subtlety and conviction.”

“In his intelligently argued afterword,” Halkin “counters the consensus of Agnon criticism,” observed Alter, “by proposing that we regard this as an ‘antimodernist’ work, since it goes beyond the usual modernist hostility to bourgeois values.  The novel’s conclusion could suggest that society, after all, provides vitally needed stability.”

In the end, Alter labeled A Simple Story a “wonderfully complex novel [that] keeps the mind restlessly alert, contemplating in shifting perspectives the human figures and social institutions it so persuasively represents.” 

[Several of the journalists who covered the North American appearances of Habima’s A Simple Tale made mention of the fact that the performances were in Hebrew without translation or a full English synopsis of the plot in the program.  While some writers applauded the clarity of the performances despite the language barrier, a few complained strongly about their inability to understand the story.

[By and large, Americans are language chauvinists.  According to a company director from India at the 1986 Theatre of Nations, Martha Coigney (1933-2016), the head of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of UNESCO and sponsor of TON, warned that “to take any non-English-speaking theater to America is next to impossible.”  

[In Passport, the newsletter of Baltimore’s Theatre Project, Philip Arnoult (now founder of the Center for International Theatre Development), admonished that our “one-and-a-half language society,” as he called it, prejudices Americans against foreign-language performances.  Unless it’s Tango Argentino, Marcel Marceau, or grand opera, Americans just won’t accept it.  

[Ray Conlogue of the Toronto Globe and Mail cited a statement by the famous American director and theater critic Harold Clurman that he could tell a good performance even in a language he didn’t comprehend (see Part 2).  I’ve seen many shows in languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them immensely. 

[I particularly recall two national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s then-director, Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952-2018), and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin (b. 1947).  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

[And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  The Square (1980), which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts, had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  This was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression.  Thirty-one years later, I still remember it. 

[Retro (1979), which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 (see my report on this international theater festival, posted on ROT on 10 November 2014), didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely sharp that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening. 

[The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible, even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue.  The truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations managed to come through. 

[Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A recording of the Retro performance would have been a perfect instructional video for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 31 and 36 years afterwards says something.]

S. Y. Agnon's 'A Simple Tale' ('Sipur Pashut') – Part 2

 

[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.]