South African theatre has a specific Jewish history. Our writers look at productions both past and present
Claudia Braude
POPULAR theatrical representations of Holocaust history are the rage in Johannesburg. Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport, running to critical acclaim at the Market Theatre, explores the return of memory of one survivor of Nazism.
Evelyn is a composite character drawn from recent testimonies of several hundred German-Jewish children who, 50 years ago, had entry visas into England and escaped Germany on the Kindertransport. Like many of them, Evelyn concealed her earlier life from her daughter Faith, to ward off the painful memories. Faith discovers and forces Evelyn to confront the continued vitality of this traumatised past in their surburban London lives.
Kindertransport considers the long-term consequences of survival and silence. Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides, at the Alhambra Theatre, explores the fate in Nuremberg, Germany, of conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler, banned from public performances, as he appears before the Denazification Committee which seeks clarity on his relationship with the Nazi Party.
The timing and simultaneity of both productions is hardly accidental as South Africans try to know and understand the history, and continued impact, of apartheid. Together they deal, metaphorically and one comfortable step removed, with a range of issues represented daily around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
“We asked (director) Barbara Rubin why people from Soweto would want to see Kindertransport,” says John Kani, director of the Market Theatre. To Rubin, it’s clear. “It raises issues of memory, identity, knowing the past – essential stuff for all South Africans at the moment,” she says. One imagines, also, that ex-South African Harwood had the South African situation in mind when writing Taking Sides.
Samuels’s description of Kindertransport reads like a blurb for the anticipated TRC report: “What future grows out of a traumatised past? Past and present are wound around each other. They are not distinct but inextricably connected,” she says. Talking about the play, Rubin could as easily be talking about the amnesty hearings of the TRC, of the difficulties of establishing what happened when evidence has gone the way of overstuffed shredding machines: “Evelyn tears up the documents proving her history. But Faith, her daughter, had already been through them,” says Rubin.
“After the documents are torn up, Evelyn decides to tell what she remembers. This is possibly more important than the letters because it comes from a space of memory in her head. It’s through oral history, in spite of the torn-up historical documents, that Faith finds background and context, because of what comes out and has not been told before. Destroyed documents are not the same as the destruction of memory. It’s possible to reclaim history through oral testimony.”
Harwood would disagree with Rubin that oral history can cover ground of destroyed documents, silenced victims and verbally conveyed orders. Audiences leave Taking Sides with a different, far more cynical message.
Like FW de Klerk in his submission to the TRC on behalf of the National Party, Harwood denies the possibility of a truth: “Whose truth [are you looking for]? The victims, the vanquished, the absent, the dead? There is no truth,” says Tamara Sachs in the play. Media manipulation takes the place of truth: “I don’t know if we have a case [against Furtwngler] that will stand up but we can sure as hell give him a hard time. We’ve got a journalist who’ll write what we tell him,” says Arnold, his interrogator.
Taking Sides deals with the complexities of reintegrating perpetrators of crimes against humanity into a new society. Set around the time of the Nuremberg trials, it considers thorny issues of justice. “You’re a liberal piece of shit. You don’t know right from wrong,” says Arnold to a colleague who differentiates between Furtwngler’s art and politics.
By considering the case of a musician, rather than a military or security official, Harwood demonstrates the extent to which Nazism operated throughout German society, including in the seemingly detached arenas of culture and music. The play explores the naivety of belief in the separation between art and politics, highlighting slippery issues of loyalty and acquiesence in the cultural arena: “An orchestra is a symbol. He was the piper who played their tune,” says Arnold.
While the plays explore locally meaningful themes without representing associated events, they also carry a more direct relation to South African history. Shortly before his death, Market Theatre founder member and artistic director Barney Simon had discussed directing Kindertransport at the Market. “Barney had wanted to do the play very badly,” says Rubin.
He had approached the Jewish Board of Deputies to incorporate Kindertransport into the programme of the Anne Frank exhibition which they organised, the first popular attempt to interpret the histories of Nazism and apartheid simultaneously. Simon knew the play’s treatment of memory was as applicable to South Africans dealing with apartheid as to Jews dealing with Nazism. He knew also these histories had strong points of convergence.
The Kindertransport programme carries a cryptic quote from Simon: ” … as a kid I always knew the bush that I would hide under when Hitler came”.
The idea of Simon hiding from Hitler under a bush is comical, until you consider the fears to which the childish consciousness refers. Born in 1932, Simon’s formative years were precisely those when National Party and more extreme right-wing pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic agitation hit the streets of Johannesburg. “I was very aware of being Jewish,” said Simon in an interview.
“There was being aware of the fact that somebody was after your life, and knowing very young that Hitler threatened your life. I remember planning the bush I’d hide in in our garden when Hitler invaded South Africa. I remember walking with my parents in Troyeville where there were a lot of Afrikaners, and asking them to talk softly so people wouldn’t know we were Jewish.”
The pro-Nazism that Simon refers to resulted in restrictions on Jewish immigration. His mother had brought out several nieces and nephews to South Africa from Lithuania. “The South African government closed immigration while my mother was still negotiating to bring out another niece,” said Simon. “She died, my cousin Leah, with the rest of her family, in the gas chambers.”
Kindertransport must have evoked memories of that period of Simon’s life, of the cousins who didn’t escape Nazi occupation by joining, as did some, the Kindertransport, or others who earlier obtained entry into South Africa. Simon’s interest in the play was perhaps informed by the pro-Nazi anti-Jewish immigration policy then central to Afrikaans nationalist sentiment and political organisation.
It is not surprising Rubin found her directorial debut in a space that could have been occupied by Simon. At 14, she saw Simon’s production of The Dybbuk, well- known in Jewish theatrical history. “I went into The Dybbuk wanting to be an actress, and came out wanting to be a director,” she told me. “Who knew about Yiddish theatre? There was such freedom about the play. It was a reclamation of Jewishness,” she says.
Like Simon, Rubin is not interested in representing aspects of Jewish culture for an exclusively Jewish audience. Kindertransport is about a public showing of something that is part of Jewish history, in a place like the Market Theatre where there’s a plaque in memory of Barney which says he “gave us the space for our voices to be heard”. “That means our Jewish voices as well,” says Rubin.