This play is a political and social reflection

Photo by: Izabella Górska | Górscy Fotografia

So my spotting of cinema influence in your theatre work is not unjustified?

Indeed, I have this tendency. My master’s thesis was about Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I believe that in American theatre plays we can see a lot of cinema influence. Even Broadway musicals show some elements of film script. I also value the rules of Hollywood scripts and that is why the narratives in my plays may indeed give the impression of them being cinematic. The association with the 1990s is also correct. In one of the blurbs there is even a reference to Quentin Tarantino. I guess it’s because I grew up on this cinema, that’s one thing. Tarantino is an absolute idol for me, his dialogues are quick and instantly answered. The opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, with the eight crooks sitting around the table at a coffee shop, is brilliantly done. It’s hard to say that I follow his example, but certainly he was very inspiring for me.

You might be inspired by American cinema, but your story originates in Central Europe…

This is absolutely a story from Central Europe. The origin of this play is such that the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw announced a call for a script. At first I did not want to write plays that would deal with Jewish issues. This is because of my work and activism in Jewish organisations. I was scared that I would be pigeonholed. However, after the call had been announced I got a phone call from my friend from the Jewish community who said: “Isha, you have to write this play because if not you, then who?” And he convinced me. At the same time, I got in touch with the Polish publisher, “Wydawnictwo Cyranka”, which expressed interest in the text. I had to choose between the theatre’s call and the publisher and I opted for the latter, also because it promotes minority writers.

Your art is also in different ways a minority manifesto. First of all, it is a Jewish diaspora manifesto. This is how I interpret it: “stop treating us as somebody foreign to this society, as kind of a historical artefact used for example on the theatre stage.” Your presentation of the story of a Jew in Łódź is done in such a way that we can all see ourselves there. This makes it a universal story and as such it goes beyond the minority discourse.

First, I wanted to show that those of us who represent minorities do not want to be treated in stereotypical ways. This is very important for us. Second, I wanted to somehow expand the presentation of Jews in Polish culture so it is not played over and over again in the same way. And here I am not only talking about theatre. I am thinking about all areas of Polish culture. Maybe not only Polish. Stereotypes about Jews can be found also in other European cultures, and also in American culture. To some extent I play with these stereotypes and I put my protagonists in situations that are relevant for the Jewish diaspora. Among them is McCarthyism, but also the establishment of the state of Israel, or the so-called “Judeo-Communism”. Nobody wants to be seen through the prism of stereotypes, regardless of whether we are Poles, Jews, Germans or Ukrainians.

Is this play about Jewishness? Or is it about emigration? I can see that it also includes a manifesto about contemporary times, as if it was taken from your Facebook wall…

Indeed, this play is a bit about everything. To put it very directly and not spoil the plot for the readers I can say that there is a very distinct trace which appears in the text two or three times – it is the name of Yom Kippur. I use it not only to place my protagonists in a specific cultural context, but because in ancient Israel, until the fall of the Jerusalem temple, there was a ritual performed by the rabbi which was not entirely Jewish and which probably had originated in Babylon and had older polytheistic roots, which are older than Judaism itself. This ritual remains unclear until today. It entailed the lottery of two goats; one was selected “for the Lord” and one “for Azazel”, meaning one goat was released into the wilderness, taking with it all sins and impurities, while the other was sacrificed. After this ritual we have the term “scapegoat”. And here we are back to my play. In the last scene, during the encounter with the Native American chief, who says that the best moment in the Torah is when the Israelis are looking at the Promised Land, but they do not enter it, can also be treated as some kind of a manifesto and interpreted in different ways. An anarchist would say that as long as there is a state, there is always violence and there will always be a scapegoat. A realist or pragmatist would say that there is no such thing as an ideal state and that is why we have to do whatever we can to make the one we have more inclusive, non-repressive, adequate to our needs and just.

I have to admit that the key to the interpretation that you have presented surprised me a bit.

Maybe because it is both clear and not so clear. You do not need to have large knowledge of Judaism to understand it. In every dictionary when you look up the term Yom Kippur, you will find references to the scapegoat ritual. But what made me think was that it was not performed after the fall of the state of ancient Israel. And this is symbolic indeed. This ritual disappeared. After the fall of the temple the statehood also collapsed into pieces. For me this was important food for thought. As long as there was a state, this ritual existed, even if performed in its most abridged (minimalist) form.

Paradoxically, it reached perfection in Christian Europe. I am not talking here about burning witches, Jews, heretics, and others, but about the crusades, but about a form of balancing between what was seen as a norm and what was seen as different – the other. This otherness had to be cursed so that those who are the norm could say that their society looks like how they want it to look because they got rid of what did not match it ideologically. Modern Europe in this regard is the same.

In that case whose scapegoat is your main protagonist, Hersh? Is he the scapegoat of the European culture?

Not only. He also suffered during the McCarthy era. Had he stayed in Poland, he would have experienced the tragic fate of those Jews who were expelled from our country by the communist authorities in 1968. In the play we learn about this from the telephone conversation Hersh had with his sister.

Let me add here for those who still will be reading it yet. The telephone conversations between Hersh in Sacramento and his friend, a communist activist in Poland, that did not seem possible back then, became justified as the play rolls out. Especially when reality starts to play tricks. At the same time, I have to say that Libkin’s speedy career in Hollywood seems more surprising.

His transformation from an immigrant to a film actor is indeed a certain biographical shortcut. But at that time such stories were not entirely impossible. A waitress could get hired as an actress because a producer thought that her face fit his script. The whole Hollywood dream was built around such stories. My first idea was to build a model Jewish biography. I wanted to combine all kinds of small stories, which could look stereotypical at first glance, and build something non-stereotypical out of them. In my research I found connecting points between hundreds of testimonies of people who had survived the Shoah. That is why I wanted to somehow recreate that human experience and at the same time overcome it.

Let me stress that this is not a historical play. It takes place in the post-war period indeed, but the message is actually very contemporary.

I mentioned the idea of the scapegoat, which is dominating but also hidden in this play. I don’t want to sound too pompous but this play is a political and social reflection. For example, the scene with Hersh and his daughters makes reference to our times, which in the Polish context, means homophobia. This applies not only to the society, which like the Polish case is divided and diverse, but also the practices of the state, namely the official anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and institutional homophobia.

In your play, apart from some background actors, there are in fact no heterosexual men.  Would you say it is some kind of Tarantino-like flip of reality to administer symbolic justice?

It is not that simple. In their majority, people from the post-war generation had families and children and did not talk much about their sexual orientation. They were doomed to be shut in the closet. Many lived the way society wanted them to. This, of course, is nothing new. There are many analyses that compare antisemitism and homophobia, which both can lead people to hide that they are Jewish or non-heteronormative. That is why the topic of being an actor who is pretending to be somebody else, also in real life and not only on the stage, is repeated in the play and is important.

The protagonist hides on many levels. He is a man who wants to be seen, who wants to perform on the stage, but at the same time he is forced to hide his roots and sexual orientation to the point that his desires are subject to substitution.   Thus the scene at the furniture store where he plays a salesman…

This was actually the most difficult scene for me to construct and I struggled a lot with it. It is meant to say that societies are artificially tailored to one pattern; yet when you look at individuals you will see that there are no people who fit that pattern entirety. We always break out of this pattern and somehow stand out. To some degree we are all non-heteronormative. You do not need to be gay or Jewish or have any other minority identity. My intention was to create a protagonist who would be different but at the same time generate positive emotions. I wanted the readers of my drama, also those who are not Jewish or non-heteronormative, to have, for at least a moment, a sort of “Je suis Hersh” feeling. In other words, I wanted them to identify, for at least a short moment, with some aspects of the protagonist’s life.

I believe you succeeded in this regard, which is the big value of your play, which also in a way presents some stories that here, in Central Europe, we know from our family history or books. And now thanks to your play somebody who lives in Sacramento, which is in the title of the play, can also identify with the protagonist. Was this a deliberate attempt on your part?

I come from the territory of former East Prussia. Now it is called Warmia and Mazury and belongs to Poland, but some parts of the former East Prussia are now outside Poland. I do not want to sound like a revisionist, though. My family relocated here. On my mother’s side, my ancestors were peasants from central Poland and they got their education in post-war communist Poland. My father’s family comes from the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands. They have a very mixed background and were very poor actually. I say we are a mixed breed. I lived with my parents until I turned 19 and to be honest at that time I did not realise what impact this mixed family background had on me. That is why I also do not believe in any borders. I think this concept is very fluid. There were some locals in the region I grew up, of course, and they lived mostly in small localities. Overall, I don’t like this term: native residents. It is used to describe these people but to me it generates these…

Ethnic associations?

Ethnic yes, but it is also used to replace terms such as “German” or “Mazurian”. But when you think about it, there is no good term to describe the people who lived in Eastern Prussia. When you think of who were they, you see that they were a bit German, a bit Polish, a bit Lithuanian. It was one big melting pot, which I like and identify with. Thus, for me any calls for “pure Polishness” or pure anything, as a matter of fact, are plain absurd. Since 1945 my ancestors from Lithuania lived next door to Kashubians and people who were relocated from central and southern Poland. As a result, many of our family stories are mixed, as we all lived in formerly German or Jewish cities.

On many levels your drama is a reflection on this identity. So what is your identity as an author of this play?

The truth is that it also took me many years to start seeing myself as a person from the borderlands. This may sound a bit strange as I live in Kraków, which I consider to be a very Polish city. And I have learnt to love it, although with some difficulty. I still do not consider myself a local here and I will not call myself a Cracovian. However, I do consider myself to be a person of the borderlands, as I was born in a place where different worlds, cultures and religions met and intermingled. This was my life which included celebrating different traditions, even when they referred to the same holidays. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, but also the earlier refugee crisis, not only in Poland but in Europe as well, I can see that the Polish state has not only disappointed us but also impedes help, which I also touch upon in my play. I can thus say that while at the state level Poland did not stand up to the task, we cannot forget about the deplorable words uttered by Jarosław Kaczyński, who said that refugees from the Middle East spread parasites and bring diseases; at the individual level Poland has shown empathy in its response.

You have finished working on your next text. This time it is not a theatre drama. Can you tell me what it is about?

At a certain moment I started to become fascinated with the history of East Prussia, but also this part of it which is now Russian and belongs to the Kaliningrad Oblast. Thus, in my literary work I now go back to my native land, my Heimat so to speak. I still cover some of the same topics, but not Jewish ones. I am now focusing on the period of the Red Army offensive in 1945 and what took place there after the war. What I have in mind is the almost complete population exchange. I also look into the time of the Polish People’s Republic and today’s times. This will be a novel about three generations. But make no mistake about it: I am not writing a new version of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. For my personal use I coined the term of an “anti-family anti-saga”. And it has to be like that as the plot takes place in East Prussia where everything is inside out. The book is to be published this year, but I am still waiting for the collective process of editing and proofreading.

Ishbel Szatrawska is a Polish writer, born in Olsztyn, and now residing in Kraków. She debuted with Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear which was published in an e-anthology titled “Our Voice” by the Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków. In 2022 her The Life and Death of Mr. Hersh Libkin from Sacramento, CA was published by Wydawnictwo Cyranka and was nominated to the prestigious Polish award “Paszporty Polityki” in the category “literature”.

Łukasz Dąbrowiecki is a Polish journalist, columnist and writer.

Jewish identity, Poland, screenplay