Newspaper Page Text
Friday, Dec. 15, 1967
THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE
Pig* Three
t*
aVER LINING
Conversation With an Artist
By DR. SAMUEL SILVER
(A Seven Arts Feature)
It was Franklin Roosevelt who
spoke about Japanese infamy.
It was in the official family of
Roosevelt that another kind of
infamy occurred.
The evil thing
was the apathy
of our govern
ment in the face
of Hitler’s an
nounced inten
tion of destroy
ing the Jews.
For a long
time we did not
know whether Roosevelt & Co.
knew what Hitler planned.
The record was lost in obscur
ity.
The record has now been pried
open.
It was done by a one-time Ed
Murrow associate at CBS, Arthur
D. Morse.
Mr. Morse got access to doc
uments and records and papers
here and overseas.
He has come up with a revela
tion which out-deputies The Dep
uty.
The record shows that Cordell
Hull, the Secretary of State
(whose wife was Jewish), r.nd
Sumner Welles, his assistant, and
FDR all knew what Hitler intend
ed to do, but they did precious
little about it.
The excuse? The winning of
the war was more important than
the rescue of the Jews.
Secretary of the Treasury Hen
ry Morgenthau felt that many
Jews could have been saved
without jeopardizing v i c t ory.
Three of his aides, Protestants,
submitted a document to prove
that contention.
But still little was done. Bu
reaucrats, who can only be deem
ed anti-Semitic, still thought that
the lives of the Jews were not
important enough for American
efforts. Infamous among them
was Breckinridge Long, an assis
tant Secretary of State, and Rob
ert Borden Reams, a Foreign
Service officer.
The story is told with remark
able precision by Mr. Morse. His
book is published by Random
House and excerpts are appearing
in Look Magazine.
May the Morse revelation bring
about an age of “re-morse” in
our time!
By GABRIEL LEVENSON
(A Seven Arts Feature)
“The Yiddish theater must not
die in Poland: if I left it, I’d
know Hitler had won,” says Ida
Kaminska, head of the Jewish
State Theater of Warsaw which
is currently making its first ap
pearance in the United States.
Playing at the Billy Rose Theatre
in New York City, her group is
offering two major productions
from its repertoire. The first is
Mirele Efros, a Yiddish classic
written by Jacob Gordin in 1898
and performed in New York in
1911 by Madam Kaminska’s mo
ther, Esther Rachel Kaminska.
The second is Madam Kaminska’s
own adaptation of Bertholt
Brecht’s Mother Courage, with
which she has toured in Europe
and Israel.
As the manager, producer and
leading actress of the Esther
Rachel Kaminska Jewish State
Theatre, Ida Kaminska has been
carrying on a tradition of Yid
dish repertory theatre initiated
in Poland almost a century ago
by her mother Esther Kaminska,
after whom the present organi
zation was named.
The Jewish population of Po
land has dropped from 3.5 mil
lion to 30,000 at present: and the
audience in the 400-seat theatre
in the heart of Warsaw is 60
per cent non-Yiddish speaking.
“Why do we stay here?” Ma
dam Kaminska asked, “Because it
is important that the survivors
of “the final solution” can still
hear Yiddish spoken in Poland.
When we reopened the theatre
after the war—first in Lodz, then
in Wroclaw, and finally in War
saw — people came to see cur
plays who were stall wearing parts
of their concentration camp uni
form. They didn’t come so much
to see theatre, but to hear Yid
dish spoken again—in a public
place.
Madam Kaminska is fluent not
only in Yiddish, but in Polish,
Russian, German, French and
English as well: but she had to
learn a new language—Slovak—
for her role in the Academy
Award-winning film, “The Shop
on Main Street.”
The film’s directors had had no
difficulty in casting the secondary
parts for their adaptation of a
novel by the Czeah Jewish writer,
Ladislav Grossman; but they
were at a loss in filling the role
of Rosalie Lautman. a Jewish
widow who runs a tiny shop in a
Slovak village during the years
of Nazism.
They turned to Madam Kam-
mdnska because, they said,
“Czechoslovakia has no actress of
the older generation with the ex
perience of life to create such a
complex, exceptional character.”
In two months, Madam Kam
inska studied Slovak so intensive
ly, she said, that “everybody
thought it was my native tongue.
I was then able to concentrate
on the role—.because the widow
Lautman’s fate was within me,
and T could play it from actual
experience.
A professional actress since the
age of 5, Madam Kaminska had
gone through the years of anti-
Semitism in Poland before World
War II. She and her immediate
family were among the few Jew's
to survive the German occupa
tion of Poland. From Warsaw
they fled east in 1939 to the So
viet-occupied section of the coun
try. When the Nazis attacked the
Soviet Union in 1941, the Kam-
inskas, now separated, resumed
their flight, again to the East.
Thev finallv reunited in Frunze,
in Soviet Central Asia.
“We escaped.” she said, “but
all my relatives, my actors, the
whole public for which I worked
for so many years” . . . She left
the sentence unfinished.
Her theatre, she said, is the
center of what remains of Jew
ish cultural life in Poland. “It is
the only Yiddish repertory thea
tre in the world,” she said, “and
we still do many of the plays by
both Jewish and non-Jewish
authors which my mother first
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brought to the Yiddish stage 00
long ago.”
Audiences can see and hear
Yiddish versions of Shakespeare,
Shaw and Chekhov—in simultan
eous translation through ear
phones for the non-Yiddish
speaking—as well as such works
as Jacob Gordin’s Der Yidisher
Kening Lear (“The Jewish King
Lear”).
“My mother could only have
dreamed of what we can do
here,” Madam Kaminska said,
“but we’re short of repertory.
Very few new plays in Yiddish
are being written anywhere.
When we’ve shown a production
here three or four times, all our
Warsaw audiences will have
seen it.”
The company—which includes
Madam Kaminska’s husband, her
daughter and her son-in-law —
then takes to the road. Of their
150 performances annually, half
waHb- e given in Warsaw, half ir$
the Polish provinces. There are
occasional trips abroad. Last
year Madam Kaminska’s com
pany toured South America; end
it has also visited Britain, France
and Belgium. The troupe has
never been invited to the Soviet
Union, and it is appearing in New
York for the first time this sea
son.
“Contact wth these Jewish au
diences outside Boland is air for
our lungs,” she said. “People tell
us, ‘Don’t stop what you are
doing’ . . . they know.”
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