Inez Hedges, Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine: Three Plays and Essays on WWII and Its Aftermath (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 216 pages, $120.
In artistic practice, new methods can generate new knowledge. When they do, the resulting products can be stimulating and exciting.
“Shoah,” the word (meaning “catastrophe” in Hebrew), gained international recognition as the title of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film (1985) about the Holocaust. He invented a unique cinematographic form— testimonies from perpetrators, victims and bystanders, all in the present; no archival footage, no reliance on the past. Lanzmann takes us on a painful, powerful 9-hour train ride to portray the final stages of the Nazi state-sponsored industrialized slaughter of millions of (mostly) European Jews.
Likewise, Inez Hedges uses a new form to tell her story of the Shoah and its aftermath. She is a playwright who addresses defining moments of history where human society takes a dramatic turn. To do this she links theatre performance with textual studies in the humanities and, in the process, writes three strikingly original plays, each ensconced in a precisely documented segment of the Shoah and its reverberations. Hedges strengthens and magnifies the impact of her plays with carefully researched essays that preface each one.
The book is composed of four parts. Following an introduction to the evolution of western drama from social concerns to social change, Hedges stages the Shoah in “The Persecution of Jews in France Under German Occupation.” The collaborationist Vichy government was a nasty stain on the land of liberté, egalité and fraternité. It started in 1940 with Maréchal Pétain’s Nazi-inspired Statute on Jews and intensified in 1942 with the mass deportation of Jews to the Drancy internment camp in a suburb of Paris. For over 75,000 French residents this was a stopover on the way to extermination, principally in Auschwitz. Famously, over 11,000 of the deportees were children.
Hedges’ essay delineates the intensification of French anti-Semitism under German occupation, and introduces Charlotte Delbo, Armand Gatti, and Liliane Atlan--resisters, survivors and Holocaust playwrights. The essay sets the literary and historical scene for Hedges’ “Children of Drancy” --in her own words, “a montage of voices built up from the testimonials by survivors and compassionate witnesses of the Drancy camp…and from the hundreds of letters written by children who had been separated from their parents.” Callous French Vichy collaborators also speak.
The Narrator, a middle-aged Auschwitz survivor, manages the action. He (or she; gender is not relevant) takes us back to 1942 and we meet French society: some anti-Semites, some anti-Vichy, a plethora of Drancy internees, adults and children including luminaries such as René Blum, brother of Léon Blum, former Prime Minister in the Popular Front government, the poet Max Jacob and the infamous chief of police under Vichy, René Bousquet. The interned Jews are mostly French, of various ages and class backgrounds. Some are Polish Jews who migrated to France. All are stunned, confused, fearful, angry. Is this the France we love? The growing misery of daily life gradually suffocates the prisoners. As they lose their links with reality the pace of dialogue quickens, and the prisoners are suspended in a surreal emotional state. Someone barks out the list of persons to be deported: “women with a child less than 2 years old…” “French Jews over 70…” Few will survive; the tension peaks. The Narrator tells us he left Drancy on June 30, 1944, and, untypically, survived in Auschwitz until liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. It is over. The play concludes with “Cemetery,” a powerful poem by Max Jacob.
“Theatre of and About the German Occupation of France and the French Resistance” is next. Between 1940 and 1944 theatre continued to be staged in Paris but deformed by censorship and anti-Semitic restrictions: no Jewish actors, crews, authors, translators and so on. Hedges gives us the background: in 1943-4--after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad—Paris theatres staged two plays by Jean Paul Sartre, “Les Mouches” (The Flies) and “Huis Clos” (No Exit). Resistance theatre? Sort of, perhaps. Judgments vary, depending on the critic and the moment. “Fils de Personne” (Nobody’s Son) by Henry de Montherlant, great admirer of German “virility,” was successfully performed in 1943, and in post-war France Montherlant walked a political tightrope and managed to get himself elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Hedges analyzes theatre about the resistance by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Charlotte Delbo, a significant contribution as they are not widely known. But the highlight of this chapter is the author’s own contribution of art as resistance, “The Eagle and the Cactus.”
Dense with intellectual references from Greek mythology, the Bible, and history, “The Eagle and the Cactus” makes the reader complicit in its wit, humor, sarcasm and feminist élan from beginning to end. The two-act play is based on a true story that takes place between July 1944 and May 1945 in a German prison on the Isle of Jersey. Claude Cahun, surrealist photographer and writer, and Marcel Moore, illustrator, step-sister to Claude, and her lifelong partner, are two middle-aged Jewish French women imprisoned for resistance activities on the British Island, temporarily under German control. Feisty and wickedly intelligent, the imprisoned Claude engages Baron von Aufsess, the German Officer charged with civilian administration of the island, in a heady conversation about Prometheus: “So we are all chained to the rock. And I—as well as my sister—am simply to be tortured in eternity by the German eagle?” Mrs. Isabella Wetherington, British subject native to the Island, brings Claude a birthday cake in jail. Hedges has fun creating dialogue for this aristocrat who swoops into the prison cell with haughty disdain for all Germans, particularly the decidedly inelegant Colonel Knackfuss, German Officer in charge of the island.
The Baron knows time is against him but maintains a Prussian dignity as he tries to justify himself to Claude, but she doesn’t buy it: “You expect me to admire you. But I admire only those who resist wholeheartedly… All my life people have tried to confine me, to cultivate me like a nice little flower… Instead I am the cucumber blossom that grows upon a heap of dung, or a bizarre and proud cactus.”
It is May 9, 1945. The war is over and Claude and Marcel return to their home on the Isle of Jersey where they live until Claude’s death in 1954.
In the final chapter, “Theatre of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” the introductory essay offers a panorama of Israeli theatre divided into seven chronological groupings, starting in the 1950s and culminating in the second decade of the 21st century. Drama produces an optic on the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Lebanon War (1982), the First Intifada (1987-1991) and the gnarled, seemingly eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The clear organization-- and focused study of playwrights that deserve more attention (such as Motti Lerner and Naomi Wallace)—contributes to its educational impact.
As we saw in “The Eagle and the Cactus,” Hedges is good at creating strong women. “Kafka in Palestine” introduces us to Ottla Kafka, Franz Kafka’s sister and close confidante. The play opens in a Viennese café; Franz is conversing with Zionist visionary Theodore Herzl. Brother and sister then dream of escaping the authoritarian confinement of their Prague home and fleeing to an idealized Palestine where people of all religions work peaceably together to create a refuge for Jews. Hedges is adept at magical erasure of reality to mold a dramatic goal. Of her three plays, this is the most technically complicated.
Ottla is sent to Theresienstadt (Nazi concentration camp near Prague) in 1943, defiant and confident. She will die in Auschwitz; Franz, of tuberculosis. We move through a century of historical time in a series of dreams and nightmares, including, at the end of the play, the siblings’ reappearance in the present as dybbuks where they see their utopian dream has not been fulfilled. In the final scene Franz and Ottla dress as Palestinians and, before an Israeli judge, argue their right to keep land confiscated from them in 1948. Hedges ends her Afterword thusly, “If we have sympathy for the siblings at the end of the play, it is because their earlier vision still has the power to inspire.” I hope so.
I know something about the Holocaust and I lived for several years in Israel. When I saw early productions of Hedges’ plays, I not only gained new knowledge but also experienced novel aesthetic pleasure in the form of intense emotional and intellectual connections. By now we know that Adorno was wrong when he stated that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, that Auschwitz irrefutably demonstrated the failure of culture. Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine is a smart book, elegantly conceived and beautifully written. Indeed, it is an eloquent confirmation of the positive force of art and cultural communication in helping us trudge through our complicated historical moment.
Roberta Salper
Women’s Studies Research Center
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
