Shakespeare and Insomnia

Some time ago I had one of those ‘white nights’ that occasionally descend and prevent me from sleeping. I cannot say whether it was my night-cap cup of tea or thoughts about the dire political situation, but whatever the cause, sleep eluded me.

As I lay in bed passages from Macbeth kept popping into my head. ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep.’ ‘Sleep no more.’ And ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.’ And of course there was Lady Macbeth’s famous sleepwalking affair. Although I read the play at school a great many years ago I was intrigued to note that those phrases had remained in my mind.

That set me thinking. Was it possible that Shakespeare, the brilliant poet, dramatist and psychologist, himself suffered from insomnia? That could, of course, explain his immense output in a relatively short life (think about it; as well as writing thirty-nine plays and undertaking research into historical sources for some of them, he also acted in some of them, produced most of them, formed his own theatre company and wrote dozens of sonnets and sundry poetry). My volume of his complete works in minuscule print with two columns on each page runs to 1,080 pages. That’s a stupendous output that could put many other writers to shame.

So I decided to re-read Macbeth, and see if I could find any clues to my theory. I was surprised to find very early on in the play a reference to Aleppo, of all places, which is mentioned in passing by one of the three witches, a curiously topical reference in this day and age. My re-reading of ‘the Scottish play’ also reminded me that Macbeth and his wife were both as evil as each other, egging one another on to further acts of betrayal and murder in order to clear the path for Macbeth to become king. And both paid a heavy psychological (and eventually physical) price for their deeds.

In Act II, scene I, after Lady Macbeth tells her husband not to dwell on negative thoughts (essentially saying ‘snap out of it’), Macbeth replies saying that he thought he heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!’ At this point Shakespeare puts words in Macbeth’s mouth that describe the blissful state of sleep that ‘knits up the raveled sleeve of care,’ and constitutes ‘the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’ In other words, sleep is nature’s way of bringing comfort and consolation to our troubled minds, so that if we are deprived of it our psychological equilibrium is upset. This is something that is known to anyone who has been reading espionage novels and knows anything about interrogation techniques.

In Act III, scene II Macbeth talks of ‘terrible dreams that shake us nightly,’ and declares that it would be better to be dead than ‘on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.’ I understand what he means by ‘restless,’ but it’s not clear to me what he means here by ‘ecstasy,’ which seems to be a contradiction in terms, but the bit about ‘terrible dreams’ is pretty obvious.

Those ghosts and other apparitions that he keeps seeing also constitute some kind of psychological disturbance, though in this case not necessarily associated with sleep. But in the same scene he speaks almost enviously of Duncan, whom he has murdered, being ‘in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well… Nothing can touch him further.’ Now that’s a wonderful description of peaceful sleep if ever there was one, and that seems to be how he perceived death (‘the bourne from which no traveller returns,’ as he describes it in Hamlet).

I decided not to pursue my researches any further, as doubtless there are references to sleep in others of his plays, not to mention A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where it’s almost as if the whole play takes place in our sleeping minds as well as on stage, and Shakespeare even recommends us to regard it as such at the end of the play..

Then I had the bright idea of googling ‘Shakespeare and sleep,’ and sure enough, there I found that the sleep and dream images in Shakespeare’s plays (not to mention his sonnets) come thick and fast, with varying degrees of positive and negative associations. So it seems I’m not alone in seeing additional meanings into this particular aspect of the Bard’s work.

 

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The Pianist of Willesden Lane

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Kindertransport, Lisa Jura, Mona Golabek

Several years ago I read the book of that title written by Mona Golabek about the experiences of her mother, Lisa Jura, first in Vienna and then in London. She had been sent there at the age of fourteen in the framework of the Kindertransport, the undertaking that saved twenty thousand Jewish children from certain death in the Holocaust.

The book spoke to me on several levels. First of all, the pivotal role played by music in the life of the young girl who eventually became a concert pianist, and secondly, the location of the hostel for refugee children, Willesden Lane, not far from where I grew up, in Kilburn. Incidentally, Willesden Lane is no country lane, as its name implies, but rather a busy thoroughfare in a residential area of north-west London. Even Riffel Road, which is mentioned several times, featured in my childhood, as it was there that my mother’s cousin, our Auntie Fraenze, lived. But most importantly, the hostel itself was a concept that featured largely in my life. As a newly-married couple, my parents worked for several years as house-parents at a similar hostel, the Sunshine Hostel in Hampstead, and it was there, in fact, that I first saw the light of day.

Over the course of recent years I read that the author, Mona Golabek, was appearing with great success in America, and later London, with a dramatized version of the story, and it intrigued me greatly. In fact, I went so far as to contact her by email to suggest that she bring the performance to Israel. I received a polite reply from her assistant saying that at present Miss Golabek had no plans to come to Israel, but that it was a possibility to be considered in the future.

And so I jumped as if bitten last week when I saw an ad in the newspaper stating that the play would be given at the Cameri Theatre in Tel-Aviv in a few days’ time. The tickets were quickly ordered (by then the main auditorium was already completely sold out, and the only seats left were on the balcony), and on the appointed evening we made our way to the metropolis.

Mona Golabek is the sole performer, and what a talented individual she is! She walks onto the empty, darkened stage alone, plays passages from Grieg’s piano concerto and other pieces from the classical repertoire and reenacts the story of her mother, first as a child in Vienna, and then as a teenager in London during the Blitz. Images illustrating the various incidents in her life are projected onto screens behind her, but the main focus of attention is on Mona at the piano.

Simply being able to play that demanding piano concerto would be quite a feat in itself, but Mona does much more than that. She sits at the piano, plays and talks (sometimes simultaneously) and seems to revive her mother’s life, to such an extent that we identify the two as one individual. She also has an actor’s talent for mimicking the voices of other characters – her gruff piano teacher in Vienna, the young French resistance fighter who courts her mother, and some of the other children in the hostel.

But for me the most moving moment came at the end. After tumultuous applause from the audience, Mona came to the front of the stage and spoke, visibly moved, about her lifelong ambition to present her story in Israel, “the best country in the world” (her words), and how much it meant to her to be here. She also mentioned having visited Yad Vashem with her father, and for a moment I thought ‘that’s impossible,’ but of course she was speaking as Mona, not as Lisa, the persona she had inhabited for the preceding hour and a half.

Sadly, only one or two performances were given in Israel, and it is to be hoped that Miss Golabek will find the time to come back in the future, to enable more people to benefit from her moving story and unbounded talent.

I Only Wanted to Live; the Struggle of a Boy to Survive the Holocaust by Arie Tamir (translated from the Hebrew by Batya Erenberg)

Some kind of morbid fascination, possibly even masochism, seems to impel me to download and read yet another Holocaust memoir, and this one is a faithful member of its genre – not always well-written but a genuine and authentic account of what it was like to live through that period and emerge more or less intact.

The author was a boy of seven, living  a comfortable life in Krakow, one of Poland’s major towns, when the Germans invaded and conquered that country. He and his parents and two sisters, as well as grandparents and various uncles, aunts and cousins, were part of a warm family, living in a cosmopolitan city with a rich social and cultural life. Arie’s parents met at university in Vienna in the 1920s and were perfectly at home in the German language and culture. His father was part owner of a wholesale textile business, supplying fabrics to many stores and factories in and around Krakow. The author points out that the Jews of Krakow did not speak Yiddish, as their co-religionists in the Polish villages did.

Initially the Jews of Krakow were not opressed by the German invaders, and not only was Arie’s father able to continue to manage his business, but even to supply the Germans with fabrics. With the introduction of anti-Semitic laws and restrictions the business was nominally in the hands of his non-Jewish partner, but the family did not suffer privation, even when obliged to leave their large apartment and move into housing designated for Jews. In fact, for some time their neighbours in the apartment block were German military personnel, and a German woman even rented a room in their apartment. The family’s ability to speak German doubtless helped to protect them from the worst excesses of Nazi brutality, at least initially. Arieh writes about his friendship with a German boy of his age, the son of a neighbour who was an officer in the Wehrmacht.

Eventually, however, all the Jews of Krakow were obliged to move to the crowded conditions of the ghetto. Arie’s family seems to have been able to live in relative comfort, and his description of the way the Jewish children went to improvised schools and played together makes it sound almost idyllic. But little by little the property and possessions of the Jews were appropriated by the Germans, food supplies were restricted, and the deportations to concentration camps began.

Arieh describes how he and other Jewish children would manage to sneak out of the ghetto in order to steal and scrounge food outside, then smuggle it into the ghetto to help their families and earn money. Because of the German occupation and the loss of many lives all over Poland, gangs of street urchins came to be a common sight on the streets of the cities, so that the Jewish children did not arouse undue suspicion. Arie’s father managed to stave off the family’s deportation for some considerable time, during which young Arie witnessed many ‘actions’ in which Jews were rounded up and deported, often accompanied by displays of sadistic brutality by the German soldiers and their henchmen from various eastern European countries.

Eventually, Arie managed to escape from the ghetto and was taken in by a non-Jewish Polish family, who treated him well. His father had provided him with money and this enabled him to remain with the family for some time. Eventually, however, he was either discovered or betrayed and was sent to the Plaszow forced labour camp, where he was reunited with his parents and older sister. His three-year-old younger sister had previously been handed over to relatives who had documents enabling them to leave for South America, but instead they were deported to an extermination camp and murdered.

It is amazing to read the details of Arie’s experiences in the camp, the way he was able, though little more than nine or ten years old, to evade execution and even to find work for which he was paid in extra food rations and sometimes even in money. Luck was obviously part of the explanation, but it seems that he was an intelligent child who developed a heightened awareness of danger as well as the ability to arouse the interest, even affection, of the people around him, also including the occasional German soldier. In this way he managed to survive Plaszow as well as several concentration camps, including Gozen and Mauthausen. His accounts of the way the camps were run and how life was lived there is both harrowing and instructive, and the descriptions he gives constitute important evidence for the record.

Arie was the only member of his family to survive the camps, despite doing his utmost to enable his father, with whom he endured the camps, to survive. He gives an entertaining account of what happened when he was liberated by American troops and the way he and other Jewish youngsters roamed the Austrian countryside, demanding compensation from the local population, who readily gave them money and valuables. When Arie was recuperating in an American-run hospital he encountered emissaries from pre-state Israel and was convinced to go there. He landed at Haifa, aged sixteen, just in time to participate in Israel’s War of Independence. He subsequently joined a kibbutz, married and established a family of his own in Israel. It was the trip with his wife, children and granchildren to Krakow, and the interest they displayed in his family’s history there that moved him to write this memoir.

The book concludes with a chapter of factual notes about the Jews of Krakow, aspects of Jewish community life under Nazi rule and various historic events concerning deportations, ‘actions,’ and resistance. All in all, it constitutes another important plank in the structure that is the history of the Holocaust as experienced by someone who was there in person and whose eye-witness testimony is invaluable for dismissing the lies of those who seek to deny what happened.

 

Jerusalem, Mon Amour

It came as a bit of a shock to realize that I’ve been living in or near Jerusalem for over fifty years – the best part of my life, in fact. I still love London, my birthplace, but there’s no escaping the fact that I don’t really know it any more. The residents of the suburb where I grew up have changed radically, as have its physical surroundings – the field at the back of the house, the shops in the high street and the exteriors of the houses.

Change is, I suppose, an inescapable feature of the urban experience wherever one happens to live. These days most people undertake the large part of their purchases in the shopping malls that protect them from the elements and offer every possible facility under one pleasant roof.

So it’s a rare occurrence that brings me to downtown Jerusalem nowadays. This was not the case when I first came to live in Jerusalem, even though at the time it was little more than a provincial backwater with only a few dusty shops, hardly any traffic-lights and not a single pedestrian mall. ‘Going to town’ was what young people did on a Saturday night, and that was where the few night-clubs, cinemas, cafés and eateries were situated.

Over the years, though, the place has undergone a radical transformation occasioned by both technical progress and the results of the Six Day War. The Old City now serves as a magnet for tourists and some segments of the population. Part of the famous ‘triangle’ formed by the town’s three principal thoroughfares has been pedestrianized, the Light Rail that runs down Jaffa Road has brought an eerie silence to what was once a noisy, congested route replete with polluted air and crumbling shop facades.

Because I had to leave my car in the garage for a few hours I decided to use the opportunity and visit downtown Jerusalem. Very few of the shops I remembered still existed, most of them having been tarted up and converted into fashionable cafés with lavish outdoor seating. The unkindest blow of all was to find that Shai Kong, the one shop that sold cotton garments imported from India and the Far East had disappeared. I walked up Jaffa Road looking for it and failed to find it. Only when I walked back down on the other side did I realize that the interior had been completely gutted and workmen were busy tearing it to pieces. The words ‘closing-down sale’ were still scrawled on the glass facade. Only the name of the store on the awning that had not yet been removed served to prove that it had once existed. My first thought was: where am I going to buy the cotton blouses and trousers that have served me as perfect summer pyjamas for so many years?

But trivial matters aside, whither downtown Jerusalem? None of the cinemas that were local landmarks in my younger days are left, and anyone who wants to see a film must go to one of the emporia of the cinematic industry located elsewhere in Jerusalem. Some of the market-style stores selling cheap clothes and trinkets have been replaced by more respectable chains selling garments that are neatly arranged on counters and artistically displayed in shop-fronts. But the overriding impression is that the area has become the mecca of eating and drinking, and possibly of making merry, too, for all I know. But that is something I must leave to the younger generation.

Who knows? Perhaps in another fifty years one of those individuals will find him- or herself in downtown Jerusalem and be amazed by the changes that have occurred.