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The Southern Israelite
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The Weakness of Jewish Drama
The Play as a Symbol of Jewish Life
By ARNOLD ZWEIG
Why is it that so few plays are written an Jews either by J €l(
themselves or by non-Jews which are worthy of occupying a high
place in the drama? In answering this question Arnold zweig h n <
analyzed the essential character of the Jewish people in that keen
concise manner for which he has become internationally famous
Arnold 'zweig tvill be remembered in this country far his best-sell
ing navel, “The Case of Sergeant Grischa” zweig has also dustin',
g id shed himself in other branches of literature, and has taken an
intense interest in every phase of Jewish culture.—The Editor.
Young, vigorous nations naively anti quished one flowed into him who w a .
blessed, modifying his fortunes and th*
tendencies of his will, changing hi> en
tire life.
haughtily represent the beginnings of
their history by heroes who boldly mir
ror the true essence of their nature.
We see in this tendency the relentless
honesty of a people toward itself. Thus
Homer’s Ulysses: Ever human, a de
ceiver, liar, slandered, beggar, thief,
yet with the sacred image of his home
inextinguishably in his heart—always
suspicious, never at a loss for a cun
ning trick, accepting every humiliation
yet never giving up his kingdom, fin
ally washing olT all affronts with blood.
To the Greeks he was the perfect hero,
an ideal of virility, the peer of the
valiant Achilles, beloved of the gods.
The Jews of the heroic period find
such a reflection of themselves in Ab
raham, the friend of God and Jacob,
the son of Isaac and Rebecca. In a
passage of Hosea where the character
of this Israel is defined we read: “In
the womb he took his brother by the
heel, and by his strength he strove with
a godlike being; so he strove with an
angel, and prevailed; he wept, and
made supplication unto him; at Beth
el he would find him, and there lie
would speak with us.”
A Titan whom fate has destined to
struggle with God even in his mother’s
womb; this is the cell from which that
figure is developed. The well-known
exact account of Genesis then accumu
lates these attributes and recounts the
methods of an artful negator of force
in his struggle with destiny: Imposi
tion and deceit, fervor and an ardent
desire for greatness and community
with God.
To the Jews of that great, stern age
—this we can set* clearly from the
biblical account—Jacob was beloved
and blessed of the Lord. It is symbolic
of the desperate grandeur of his voca
tion that he, destined to he horn after
his twin, held back the firstborn by the
heel; that later, his heart filled with
the eternal upward urge of a gigantic
character, he took away that birth
right from the robust and joyous hunt
er who was his brother— in exchange
tor food for which he, exhausted, was
greedily hungry; that he took advan
tage ot his blind old father, obtaining,
through a deceitful trick, the sacred
promise and blessing intended for the
eldest; that he was constantly opposed
to friends and kin, ever in a state of
tension; and that finally he bested his
uncle, Laban, in a contest of wits. But
this is the man who through an entire
night struggled bitterly against his God
in human form—and at dawn forced
Him, too, to give him His blessing, the
blessing which meant that all the magic
fate-compelling powers of the van-
This is the man who was deemed
worthy of seeing the hosts of the Lord
in the heaven-revealing dream of Beth
el, who was permitted to witness th.-
fulfilment of the blessing he had oh
tained through foree, trickery and suf.
fering; To know—at the end of a
long life full of joy and sorrow, the
life of now a fugutive and now a gue>t
of kings—that an entire nation sprung
from his loins would inhabit the fruit
ful Promised Land.
A people that can set up so earthly
and innerly discordant an image of it
self on the horizon of its history \-
aware of its intrinsic duality and ha"
the courage to confess it. Such a people
knows of the electric Ixdts that leap
violently between two distant pole>,
fights its own weakness and the resis
tanee of the world to gain assurance
of its divine mission. And it does not
solve—or even formulate—the question
of whether it was blessed because it
conquered or whether it was blessed by-
God; it feels content, regardless of
which may he the case. But at times of
defeat or greater moral consciousness
it feels as a reproach that which ear!
ier, before its moral doubts had arisen,
it was able to set up as its ideal. Then
it seeks to justify its progenitor before
its own more delicate sense of moral
values; hut although it censures hi"
character and the means he employed in
his rise it cannot deny entirely him who
was truly blessed. With psychological
analysis, therefore, it place- the blame
for many important traits of this no*
rejected ancestor upon his mother, who
had made him her favorite, and work?
untiringly at apologies that are to raw-
the Titan to sainthood.
Thus the force that impels Jewish
writers to use biblical material may he
defined as the wish to derive from the
great wealth of undistorted heroic fig
ures of ancient Jewry currents who
influence would augment the prestige
of modern Jews. And this brings us tt
the Jewish plays that represent the
Jew of today—unerahellished, i° *
his greatness and abjectness,
weakness of all these dramas
from the impossibility of an un ia ‘ 5 *\
presentation of the Jew on the ?
to-day—except, perhaps, in the
incidental figures of little important
At the present time only a Ja P an ,
or Eskimo dramatist would be e*Pf
of seeing and creating a Jewish <“ *.
aeter who would be the P 1 ^‘ '
(Continued on Page 66'