Dona dona holocaust
Together they are the web the Jews are caught in, stifling their hopes. Some of these places are public, some are private, and in some the two must collide. Stage direction was read in voice-over in English-not only a help for visually-impaired audiences, but in this case a necessity since the specific places in the ghetto (the bath-house that Wittenberg uses as a cover for political activity, the room Wittenberg’s lover lives in, Gens’ apartment) create meaning in themselves. The performances were memorable (Avi Hoffman’s Gens and Lea Kalisch’s Thea were a particularly arresting pair). The play was produced as a reading, but it is clear the actors rehearsed and fully inhabited their roles. (Is this image a response to Zeitlin’s “Dona, dona”? The bird flies off-the humans cannot). As the ghetto returns to stasis, the bird flies off. Wittenberg eventually has to give himself up, not to the Nazis but to a Jewish mob that is willing to sacrifice him if it saves themselves. Even the most optimistic character considers buying cyanide when the German Army enters the ghetto. Every instinct toward kindness and caring becomes twisted in the ghetto. As starvation become more desperate they consider eating it. At the start of the play group of children find an injured bird and nurse it to health. The bird of the title is of course allegorical as well as real. Gens has fooled himself into believing he is taking the pragmatic route as a collaborator, for example by complying with Nazi deportation orders for some Jews in the hopes it will buy time for the liberation of the rest. But she at least is both cynical and honest enough to see her own moral failings. Thea is compromised too: she serves as a policewoman in the ghetto and personally profits from the misery of others. In the second act, Yacov Gens and his lover Thea fight-and he threatens her physically-over her refusal to show him the deference he believes he deserves. Women smuggle arms for the resistance, children carry news through the Ghetto: everybody has a role to play in fighting fascism. We hear from Wittenberg’s wife, furious and heartbroken over his abandonment of their family at the very moment when the family most needs him (he has taken up with a younger woman). While men take these leadership roles, Rosenfarb fully explores all the ways in which women’s labor and sacrifice make it possible.
Dona dona holocaust full#
(For a full plot synopsis, see the play’s entry in Plotting Yiddish Drama). Although she also wrote stories and poetry, Rosenfarb was primarily a novelist, and the play retains a novelistic feel.ĭer foygl fun geto takes place in the Vilna Ghetto, based on real events surrounding the historical figure Isaac Wittenberg, the leader of the resistance, and his nemesis Yacov Gens, the Nazi-appointed head of the Judenrat. Like previous readings in Hebrew and English, this production was greatly edited to make it suitable for stage performance.
Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the director (Suzanne Toren) and much of the production team were also women. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene presented it as the first in a multi-season festival of plays by women playwrights, all of which will receive readings (and some, perhaps, eventually, full productions). With its furious examination of hope and despair, humanity and cruelty, gender politics and the destruction of the family, this play should have found an audience long ago. That this monumental play by a major author got its first production in its own language during COVID using online technology tells us a lot about the position of women playwrights in Yiddish culture even today. Chava Rosenfarb’s 1958 drama Der foygl fun geto (The Bird of the Ghetto) had its Yiddish-language premiere April 18 to 22, on the Folksbiene’s video channel.