‘To Be An Actress’

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Cameri Theatre, Nava Shean, Prague, Tel Aviv, Theresienstadt, Verdi's Requiem

 

 

The life and times of actress Nava Shean, born Vlasta Schonova in Czechslovakia in 1919, embody many of the events experienced by the Jewish people during the course of the twentieth century. But above everything towers her dogged determination to succeed in her profession and maintain her artistic and personal integrity. Those qualities shine through on every page she writes.

Although her assimilated family was not wealthy, her parents lived in a grand manner that was far beyond their means, eventually losing everything. Even as a child in Prague Nava (the name she adopted on reaching Israel in 1948) had a passion for the theatre and was taken on as a child actress by a theatre there. From an early age she was able to contribute to the family’s finances and already in her teens was completely self-supporting.

Initially unaware of her Jewish identity, Nava was not prepared for the discrimination and persecution that the Germans imposed on the Jews when they invaded Czechoslovakia. This rude awakening was further intensified when, together with her family, she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There she continued to engage in her theatrical activities, preparing children’s plays and being intensely involved in all aspects of the cultural life there. Eventually she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, about which she does not write at great length except to say that she saw her parents sent to the gas chambers. She mentions in passing that it is known that one thousand Czech Jews went to the gas chambers singing the Czech national anthem. She also mentions the fact that she did not suffer as much as others from privation in the camps because she had been trained to survive in adverse circumstances while in the girl scouts. Her experiences in the camps led her to eventually produce and perform a one-woman play in Israel entitled ‘Requiem in Theresienstadt,’ about the performance of Verdi’s Requiem in the camp.

After being liberated, Nava returned to Prague and was able to resume her acting career, this time under the Communist regime. When it became possible for Czech Jews to leave the country in 1948 a chance meeting led to her sudden departure by boat for Israel, landing in Tel Aviv just as Ben-Gurion was declaring the establishment of the State of Israel. She found herself wandering the streets of the city as the population was celebrating this event, and entered the basement of the building that housed the Cameri theatre. One thing led to another, and by dint of hard work (she had to learn Hebrew from scratch), luck and her innate acting talent, Nava was given a contract with that company and performed in various plays.

As a result of a brief affair with an army officer her daughter, Ora, was born. After spending some time in kibbutz Neot Mordechai in Galilee, Nava resumed her acting career. Nava invested extensively in her relationship with her daughter, and although obliged to leave Ora with various kibbutz families while pursuing her acting career, she made a tremendous effort to see her daughter every day, no matter how far she had to travel.

Nava’s acting career had its ups and downs. Although she received very good reviews for her various performances (even from that renowned castigator of theatrical performances, Haim Gamzu), she was never actually given the leading roles she had been promised by various producers, always being let down at the last minute. Nevertheless, she persevered, accepting minor roles and eventually also taking one-woman plays on the road and performing in kibbutzim and other venues all over Israel.

Towards the end of the book we read that Hubert, one of her former boyfriends in Prague, has never forgotten her. A non-Jew, he had helped Jews during the German occupation, and when he and Nava meet up again in Czechoslovakia in 1968 their love was rekindled. Just then, however, Russian tanks rolled through the streets of Prague once more, and Nava escaped across the border into Germany and then back to Israel. The two corresponded daily until, after interminable delays and difficulties, Hubert was able to leave Czechoslovakia. The two were reunited in Haifa in 1980, got married and had a happy life together until Nava’s death in 2001.

The book, translated by Michelle Fram Cohen, makes gripping reading, full of the twists and turns that constituted this woman’s life, and imbued with the energy and liveliness that made her a force to be reckoned with on both the personal and the theatrical level.

 

The Ninth of November

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Kristallnacht. Professor Israel Rosensohn, Professor Meir Schwarz, Rabbi Benjamin Kalmanson

  

On 9^th November 2014, on the very same day that Berliners and others were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the wall that had divided their city in two, Jews were marking the seventy-sixth anniversary of the night on which Nazis all over Germany destroyed and vandalized over one thousand synagogues and prayer-rooms, invaded Jewish homes, arrested thousands of Jewish men, and demolished Jewish-owned shops and businesses.

This year, in addition to the customary ceremonies, attended by a dwindling number of survivors of what is known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, or Pogrom Night, the occasion was marked by an evening of lectures about that event and the history of the destruction of Jewish communities in Germany. It also marked the official launch of the two volumes entitled ‘Pogrom Night, 1930,’ commemorating all the synagogues and communities of Germany that were destroyed on that date.

The first speaker of the evening, Professor Israel Rosensohn, focused on the attacks on the Jewish communities of Worms (Wormaiser) and other towns in the Rhineland in 1096, as the masses who had rallied for the First Crusade in order to set out for the Holy Land and rid it of the Muslims and Jews there, decided to start off by massacring the Jewish population that was closer at hand. Stories and legends abound of the atrocities committed at that time, including the suicide of Jews who had first killed the members of their family rather than fall into the hands of the Christian mob. Then, as on other occasions, the wider non-Jewish population stood by and did not intervene.

The Nazis regarded the Pogrom Night of November 1938 as a test case to see how the general populace would react. They got their answer, which was tantamount to tacit assent to continue with their path of the destruction of property and eventual annihilation of the indigenous Jewish population.

Rabbi Benjamin Kalmanson gave a spirited account of the many secularized Jewish intellectuals who had a lasting impact on West European intellectual life in the period between the two world wars. In some cases these Jews came under the influence of Eastern European and Chassidic Jewry (‘Ostjuden’) and underwent a spiritual and religious transformation. He cited such luminaries as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Gershon Scholem and Nobel laureate Shai Agnon, among others. In giving this account the lecturer sought to point to the trend towards a more traditional form of Judaism that was beginning to take hold of the Jewish communities of Germany, but this all came to a sudden end with the rise of Nazism.

 The last speaker was 92-year-old Professor Meir Schwarz, the man whose single-minded determination to commemorate the destroyed communities of Germany has culminated in the publication of the impressive account, after many years of concentrated work by a considerable number of researchers. Professor Schwarz described his own recollection of Pogrom Night as a twelve-year-old boy in his home town of Nuremberg, Without faltering, he told the packed audience how the Nazis broke into the family apartment and made him and his older brother watch as they destroyed every single item in the place with cudgels and iron bars.

 Professor Schwarz related that he is now preparing his next project – a collection of personal accounts of the events of that night. He had better hurry, as the number of eye-witnesses is inevitably shrinking rapidly.

Yes I Can… Exercise!

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Uri Michaeli

 

 

 

Small children are active by nature. They run and jump, skip and play as naturally as adults walk and sit. In fact, small children tend to find it difficult to sit for very long.

I remember racing around our back garden with my little friend from next door, as well as climbing the tree that stood there (and tearing my clothes, to my mother’s chagrin). In primary school I was considered one of the best sprinters, and even came first in several races, both within the school and in inter-school competitions.

When I got to high school things changed. Like me, most of the girls in my class were small to begin with, but unlike the other girls, I did not grow to be tall and well-built, and have remained short and slight to this very day. I remember my father consoling me by saying that my ‘growth spurt’ would come later. But it never did.

When it was time to pick teams for the games of netball and hockey that we girls played in the summer, I was always one of the last to be chosen. We did not compete against one another on an individual basis, the emphasis always being on the team and ‘team spirit.’ That was something that did not appeal to me in particular, and the humiliation of being left to be among the last to be picked, left its mark on my psyche.

That was when I developed an antipathy towards sports, gym and exercise of any kind. The negative attitude towards me of our battleaxe-type gym teacher didn’t help, and after some years of suffering, my best friend and I found a simple technique for evading the hated activity. “Please, miss, I’ve forgotten my gym things,” was enough to excuse us from entering the hallowed parquet floor of the gym, and from running after a ball on the netball court or hockey field. This was our salvation, as we were instructed (as if this were punishment!) to walk around the playing field while the other girls played. This enabled us to engage in discussions about anything and everything under the sun, and has become one of my most treasured memories.

At university in England I steered a wide berth of all sporting groups, clubs and activities, most of which involved heavy post-game drinking in the pub. Upon arriving in Israel I was horrified to learn that undergraduates at the university were obliged to undertake some kind of sporting activity, and was immensely relieved to find that this did not apply to graduate students, of which I was one.

The years passed. I was busy with home and work and didn’t give a thought to physical activity beyond walking in and around Jerusalem’s picturesque neighbourhoods. About thirty years ago, however, the physician who was treating me suggested that I enroll in an exercise studio to help overcome a certain internal problem.

With great trepidation I did as he had suggested, though I insisted that I could only do very gentle exercises. As time passed I found that I became quite enamoured of my weekly exercise regime, and even went to the gym twice a week. The encouragement and psychological insight of the teacher, Uri Michaeli, helped me to become a real exercise enthusiast.

I moved to a different studio, Uri passed away many years ago, and today, as a retired person living outside Jerusalem I no longer exercise with a group. In my basement I have installed a treadmill, an exercise mat, and weights for legs and arms. I spend an hour every morning (except Saturdays) walking on the treadmill and performing the various other exercise routines I have acquired over the years. It gives me a chance to catch up on the daily TV news programmes and get my day started in what seems to be a positive way.. It makes me feel good, and in my opinion, without my exercise routine my body would have given up on me long ago.

 And sometimes I think, if my high-school teachers could only see me now!

 

 

 

Watching the Barriers

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Checkpoint 300, District Coordinator Liaison, Machsom Watch

 

 

The organization known as Machsom Watch has been in existence for over ten years. Since its first tentative steps as a small group of humanitarian feminists who wanted to protect the human and civil rights of Palestinians it has grown in numbers, is less radically feminist, but is still confined to women. Curious to see what they did, I joined a group of five early one morning. The women were all of a certain age and belonged to a specific (middle-class, Ashkenazi, secular) segment of the population. Since that is the category into which I fall, too, I felt quite at home in with them.

Our first stop that chilly morning was Checkpoint 300, also known as Rachel’s Checkpoint due to its proximity to the site of Rachel’s Tomb. We stood and watched as hundreds of Palestinian men filed through electronic barriers where their documents were checked. Soldiers, some of them still in their teens, checked the papers and made sure that everything went without a hitch.

Every Palestinian worker must have a green ID card, issued by the Palestinian Authority, as well as an electronic card and a work permit, issued at the behest of his employer. I did not sense any tension or antagonism in the process, and everything appeared to be going smoothly. Once through the barrier the men boarded buses provided by the employers or began walking towards Jerusalem.

If you are a Palestinian man and want a permit to work in Israel you must be married and have at least one child. If you are the close relative of someone who has been arrested on suspicion of terrorist activity, nationalist sympathies, or stone-throwing, your work permit can be taken away from you, in which case you are ‘blacklisted.’ I was told of an instance in which three brothers who had been working in Israel for several years were blacklisted after their teenage brother was arrested for throwing stones.

This is an area in which the women of Machsom Watch have become proficient, as there is a process of appeal against being blacklisted. The various procedures, including filling in forms and even appearing before a special administrative court at which the military authority is required to justify the blacklisting, are difficult if not impossible for the average Palestinian manual labourer to master. Some of the women I met can speak some Arabic and it was very touching to see the burly labourers come over to one of the women to ask for her help in solving some administrative problem or other. In many cases they know them by name, and speak to her as a friend. Some 70 percent of those blacklisted get their work permits back after Machsom Watch’s intervention.

After spending an hour at Checkpoint 300, we drove through the Etzion tunnel and the hilly countryside to the Etzion Bloc, to the office of the District Coordinator Liaison. This is the administrative centre where youngsters wishing to start working come to get their initial permit. In order to work in one of the settlements the requirements for obtaining a permit are less rigid, and this is where many youngsters find employment. This is also where special permits are issued to Palestinians who need to enter Israel in order to attend hospital.

The building where the men wait is equipped with seating and even air-conditioning. Specific days are allocated to specific villages, and while the system seems to be working it is laborious and time-consuming.

However, when I look back to my early days in Israel I recall what seemed to me at the time to be complex and mistrustful bureaucratic procedures that often left me frustrated and tearful. If you are a foreigner, it’s not easy to get a work permit in any European country or the USA. All over the world bureaucracy is rampant, but in Israel it is augmented by the need to maintain security and protect the civilian population.

But at least I didn’t have to go through the experience every day.

 (This article first appeared in the AJR Journal)