Review: I Wish to Die Singing – Judi Herman is moved by this shocking and timely documentary

© Scott Rylander

The January issue of Jewish Renaissance highlighted the life and work of Czech writer Franz Werfel, who played a significant part in bringing the Armenian genocide to the notice of both Europe and America after he came across survivors living in desperate conditions in Damascus in the late 1920s. He also wrote a devastating novel, based on a defiant stand by Armenian survivors, The Forty Days of Musah Dagh. Nonetheless, a century later, the terrible massacres that began in 1915 are still not universally recognized as genocide, to stand alongside the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in the record of atrocities inflicted by humankind on their fellows.

If you walk through the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, you will find, as I did, the memorial to the Armenian genocide. If you read celebrity pages in newspapers, it’s hard to avoid the Kardashians, currently probably the most famous bearers of one of those distinctive Armenian surnames. They came together last week as the Jerusalem memorial became the focus of protests demanding the recognition of the Armenian genocide, 100 years after it began; and Kim, the most renowned Kardashian, visited the memorial in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, to pay her respects and play her part in raising world awareness of the genocide that inspired Hitler. And Kardashian and Hitler come together in Neil McPherson’s documentary drama which also plays its part in demanding recognition for the annihilation of 1.5 million men, women and children.

How do you tell the story of a genocide when the basic facts are unknown to most? How best to convey the attempt by the Ottoman Government to systematically exterminate all its Armenian subjects? Holocaust plays often work by letting the story of the one or the few stand for the story of the many, so that the wider picture emerges from the narrative. But, when no one knows the narrative and there is an ongoing story to tell, how can you convey the scale, the politics, the disputed facts and the personal stories?

Neil McPherson employs documentary drama, and to shocking effect, charting the history of wholesale killings, massacres, forced labour and death marches to the Syrian desert. Eye-witness testimonies give chilling evidence of what happened in 1915 and the cast take on the challenge of playing many roles. The convention of delivering verbatim texts proves extraordinarily powerful and just occasionally constraining.

Cleverly, MacPherson frames the events with an illustrated lecture, complete with slides, narrated with lucid authority by Jilly Bond who guides and links up the scenes. She first grabs attention with portraits of well-known personalities of Armenian heritage (Kim K for one) and Hitler’s chilling quote, “Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Bond points up other parallels with the Jews of Europe and their fate. The Armenian community was a Christian minority in a Muslim society. Many earned their living as bankers. They became “second-class citizens”.

Director Tommo Fowler steers his dedicated cast through a chilling 90 minutes on Phil Lindley’s appropriately minimalist set. Rob Mills brooding lighting and Max Pappenheim’s intricate soundscape add to the atmosphere of menace, after a brief moment of sunshine, light and laughter as the Armenian community celebrates Easter 1915 with song and dance.

Bruce Yadoo and Tom Mansfeld turn in strong performances playing the older men, from victims to perpetrators - and outside observers. One of these observers is Henry Morgenthau, the US’s Jewish ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who, like Werfel, saw all too clearly the fate of the Armenians. His writings are just one the many sources for McPherson’s thorough research.

Delivering child testimonies, Tamar Karabetyan, Siu-See Hung (pictured above) and Bevan Celestine movingly convey the child-like direct observation that represents so much sorrow. It’s all the more moving because the three also represent different cultural backgrounds, a reminder, along with programme notes on the eight stages of genocide  (from a briefing paper at the US State Dept), of how the celebration of cultural diversity and the dehumanization of the other might be different  sides of the same coin.

The wrap-up between surviving grandmother (Kate Binchey) and unschooled granddaughter alone would have provided a fine ending but the story does not finish there.

Poignantly, press night was Friday 24 April, the date the Turkish government placed under arrest over 200 Armenian community leaders in Constantinople, which is therefore regarded as the date of the start of the genocide. Today, most of the world’s governments, including Turkey, the USA, the UK and, surprisingly, Israel, still refuse to use the “g-word", preferring euphemistic terms like “tragedy” in the game of geo-political friendships.

While there’s all too much information to communicate in limited time, McPherson and the Finborough, where he is artistic director, must be congratulated on playing their part in demanding long overdue recognition for the terrible fate of those 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

By Judi Herman

I Wish to Die Singing – Voices from the Armenian Genocide runs until Saturday 16 May. 7.30pm & 3pm. £18, £16 concs. Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Rd, SW10 9ED; 084 4847 1652. www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

JR OutLoud: Good shtick on Bad Jews from two of the stars of Joshua Harmon's hit comedy, Jenna Augen and Ilan Goodman

In New York in a bachelor pad high over the Hudson River, cousins Liam and Daphna go head-to-head over a treasured heirloom left by their beloved grandfather, Poppy. Emotions are raw as they mourn his recent death and feelings run high – sometimes shockingly so – for at stake is not just Poppy’s Chai (a neck chain with the Hebrew letter that symbolises life), but a whole set of issues about family and identity and faith. Liam’s brother Jonah and his fiançée Melody don’t just watch from the sidelines either, but enter the fray as it becomes more scabrous and the battle more physical. Thus unfurls the dangerous, yet funny debut play by Joshua Harmon, which is now enjoying its third successful run – the second in London – at the Arts Theatre. Judi Herman caught up with cast members Jenna Augen (Daphna) and Ilan Goodman (Liam) to talk about battling it out live on stage.

By Judi Herman

Bad Jews runs until Saturday 30 May. 7.30pm & 2.30pm (Thu/Sat ony). £20-£49.50. Arts Theatre, Great Newport St, WC2H 7JB; 020 7836 8463. www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk

Read our review of Bad Jews.

Review: Death of a Salesman – The RSC's production is a highlight of Arthur Miller's centenary year

Director Gregory Doran is in no doubt that Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is the greatest American play of the 20th Century, addressing not only the heartbreaking conflicts within a family, but also bigger issues of national values and uncritical acceptance of the American Dream.

After a life of honest toil, Willy wants to stop travelling, pay off the mortgage and bask in the success of his two sons. But he can’t come to terms with the fact that his life and the lives of his boys are so different from his dreams of wealth and triumph. Miller explores the tragedy of what happens to a man who does not have a grip on the forces of life, as he puts it, whose career is disintegrating and the toll this takes on relationships between family members.

Miller was the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants. His father worked his way up in New York's Lower East Side garment industry to become a wealthy man. The family lived in Manhattan until they lost it all in the depression and withdrew across the bridge to Brooklyn. As a teenager Miller worked to help supplement the family income with a bread delivery round before school. And he saw at first hand men like his salesman uncle Manny who sold not so much their product as their personality. Indeed, Miller is careful not to reveal what products Willy sells, leaving each audience member to furnish their own and make a closer connection to this everyman left battered and broken by capitalism.

Part of the challenge of the play comes from Miller’s extensive use of what he calls the continuous present – not quite flashbacks but simultaneous layers of memory. This means the actors have to shift almost instantaneously into playing a range of different ages and psychological states, and the production too must find ways of mirroring the layers.

Antony Sher is outstanding as the weary, manic-depressive Willy, from his iconic entrance – “tired to the death” – lugging his two heavy sample cases, through to the man who “realised that selling was the greatest career a man could want”, to the sad soul who opines that "After all the highways and the trains and the appointments and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.” Sher’s performance brings out the contradictions in Willy that make him an irritating noodge (insistent bore) and a man whom it is hard not to pity.

Harriet Walter’s Linda is extraordinary. She gives a wonderfully nuanced account of Willy's doting wife, a woman with complete and blinkered devotion to her husband, who simply refuses to see through Willy’s lies and resignedly accepts whatever the "American Dream" throws at her. In a finely restrained performance, Walter seamlessly transitions between younger and older Linda, her face apparently visibly ageing and then losing its lines again. She is heartbreaking as she pleads on his behalf: “I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

Father/son relationships are at the heart of the play. Alex Hassell as Bif, Willy’s older son (Hal to Sher’s Falstaff in Henry IV, so the bond between the two actors is palpable) creates a portrait of a flawed man, haunted by his signal failure to fulfil his early promise as a sportsman, unable to hold down a job, a thief who has stolen from his employers and even been to jail. Yet he still manages to be likeable, perhaps because he values simple pleasures over the rat race. Like his father, he is at once infuriating and touching. Sam Marks is equally convincing as womanising younger brother Happy, as a young version of Willy, reframing situations so they are more acceptable to him. Again, both actors display remarkable ability to switch convincingly between playing younger and older.

Set designer Stephen Brimson Lewis makes clever use of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s thrust stage to deliver people and furniture for the scenes in Willy’s head against a backdrop of high-rise Brooklyn, all fire escapes and windows. Tim Mitchell cleverly lights the semi-transparent set to reflect the transitions between memory and reality.

Miller originally conceived the play to be happening entirely in Willy’s head and Gregory Doran’s production blends time and space so the audience finds itself at the same time both in the film directed by Willy’s mind and in the ‘real world’ of the play. Perhaps the message of Miller’s play is that the American Dream is as much an expression of the internal movie each of the characters runs as the external idea of a life of personal happiness and material comfort.

Unsurprisingly this production, another highlight of Miller’s centenary year, is to transfer to London’s West End as soon as it finishes its run in Stratford-on-Avon.

By Judi Herman

Death of a Salesman runs until May 2 in Stratford-on-Avon and May 9 - July 18 in London. 7.15pm & 1.15pm. £2.50-£70. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, CV37 6BB; 084 4800 1110. www.rsc.org.uk 7.30pm & 2pm. £12.25-£59.75. Noël Coward Theatre, St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4AU; 0844 4825140. www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk

JR OutLoud: As Hans Krása’s concentration camp opera, Brundibár, prepares to show on the Watford Palace stage, Judi Herman caught a rehearsal and spoke to the cast

Mahogany Opera Group’s critically-acclaimed production of Hans Krása’s Brundibár – the 1938 short children’s opera famously performed in the World War II concentration camp Terezin (German Theresienstadt) – heads to Watford Palace Theatre this weekend. So Judi Herman sat in on a rehearsal and met with the director Frederic Wake-Walker, conductor Alice Farnham and two of the 40-odd talented children recruited for these performances; nine-year-old Erin Daniels, who plays Aninku and 14-year-old Ethan George, who plays her brother Pepíček. Brundibár the evil organ grinder thwarts them in their attempt to raise money by busking to buy milk for their sick mother – until some clever animals come to their aid, enlisting the help of the town’s children. It’s a story of the triumph of the poor and powerless over the big, strong and ruthless that resonated throughout the camp – which is just as powerful today.

By Judi Herman

Brundibár runs Saturday 18 – Sunday 19 April in Watford and Sunday 28 June in Norwich. 7pm (Sat), 3pm (Sun). £10, £8 children. Watford Palace Theatre, 20 Clarendon Rd, WD17 1JZ; 019 2323 5455. www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk 2pm. £10, £6 concs. Norwich Playhouse, NR3 1AB; 016 0359 8598. www.norwichplayhouse.co.uk

For more on Brundibár, read Judi Herman's interview with Holocaust survivor Ela Weissberger, who created the role of the Cat in the original production in Terezin.

New issue out now! It's that time again, and this month we've got politics on the brain…

With the General Election now officially underway, we have politics on our minds – in all its forms – for our April issue. From the revolutionary Yiddish poets who fired up the streets of East London, to the current crop of social activists who are committed to making the world a better place today. As our pieces show, there is an irrevocable link between Jews and political activism.

We also have an essay on Jewish voting patterns by Geoffrey Alderman; a discussion on the ethics of the ‘right to offend’ by Brian Klug, and a personal reflection by associate Times editor Daniel Finkelstein on whether being Jewish really matters when it comes to casting your vote. There’s a piece from Paris three months after the terrorist attacks there by a former Le Monde senior editor, Sylvain Cypel, and a piece by Dan Carrier about his great uncle Nat – one of the first English speakers to fire a shot in the Spanish Civil War. But if you’ve had enough of politics (already!) don’t despair, there’s plenty to keep you reading.

We’re celebrating two centenaries: one with the chair of the Ben Uri museum, David Glasser, who tells us how he rose from the mean streets of Glasgow to head one of the most exciting art venues in Europe; and on the eve of the Arthur Miller centenary, we’re asking why are there no Jews in the plays of one of the 20th-century's greatest Jewish playwrights? There’s also klezmer from Leeds boys Tantz, an interview with new Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and a report from the place to be on a Tuesday night in Manchester: the Menorah Film Club. Plus three month’s of cultural listings for the UK and abroad. With all that going on – don’t forget to vote!

By Rebecca Taylor

Review: Oppenheimer – A detailed bio-drama about the father of the atomic bomb chills and exhilarates in equal measure

To make a nuclear bomb, you assemble enriched uranium into a supercritical mass that starts an exponentially growing chain reaction. Tom Morton-Smith’s play assembles the team building the first nuclear bomb and shows the chain reaction that ensues amongst them. And just as a bomb needs a trigger, the “Manhattan Project” needed J Robert Oppenheimer.

The play questions whether the physicists were mad scientists who should have known better than to participate in such a project and how far they felt justified at the time, even if subsequently doubting the genie they had unleashed that cannot be put back in the bottle.

Morton-Smith sees the events through the lens of Oppenheimer, intertwining his intellectual struggle with the physics and his emotional struggle with the need to abandon his early and fervent embrace of communism, which Oppenheimer saw as the only remedy to Fascism, in order to appease the US authorities. He had after all been schooled at New York’s Ethical Culture School, where many of his fellow pupils were also secular Jews and where he discovered the ethical teachings of Judaism. And later he was engaged by other ethical texts and scriptures including the Bhagavad Gita (a 700-verse Hindu scripture in Sanskrit), which stayed with him all his life and Morton-Smith has him quote it at the end of the play.

J Robert Oppenheimer (the J stands for Julius) may have been born in Manhattan, but as the son of German-Jewish immigrants, he was acutely aware of the fate overtaking Europe’s Jews, especially as the US scientific community welcomed an influx of eminent Jewish physicists seeking refuge from the Nazis. The list of characters in the play is in part a roll call of these brilliant fugitives, most of whom would go on to win Nobel Prizes. In addition, the young prodigy had studied under (Jewish-born) Max Born in Göttingen in Germany in the 1920s, gaining his PhD at age 22. So he was much exercised by the rise of fascism in Europe.

After a brief lecture from Oppenheimer, with the audience cast as students, Morton-Smith starts the action with an upbeat party scene on the Berkeley Campus at a Communist fundraiser for International Brigade members off to fight fascism in Spain. It’s the sort of party at which anyone who’s anyone in the intellectual and academic community must be seen. Morton-Smith’s brilliance is to cut between the party and the students and academics in full creative flight as they learn and teach in the lab – using the stage floor as a chalkboard on which they feverishly scribble theorems and theories. Even the chronically unscientific members of the audience (among whose number I count myself) immediately get the feel of how engrossing and exhilarating the pursuit of scientific knowledge and discovery must be for members of the scientific community. This works especially well as a counterpoint to the party segments – all choreographed with huge panache by Scott Ambler.

Everyone in this community is aware of the work of German scientist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish-Jewish mentor Niels Bohr in Europe (as brilliantly imagined in Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen). Is Bohr making a stand against letting Hitler get anywhere near the bomb? Does Heisenberg dread the ‘fall-out’ from The USA getting there first? Well, clearly in the USA they see it as a necessity to get there first and scientists are under intense pressure to do so. But Morton-Smith imagines, with the feel of chilling authenticity, not only the pressure but also the febrile excitement of these extraordinarily focused (often one-track) minds as they realise they are nearing a breakthrough, albeit one that will prove deadly to millions.  The detachment with which the boffins discuss the bombs they call Little Boy and Fat Man and what they are capable of, with a matter-of-factness about the numbers of Japanese likely to be sacrificed, is frighteningly convincing.

John Heffernan brilliantly inhabits the persona of Oppenheimer, mesmerisingly charismatic from the moment he engages with the audience at curtain up. He embodies the struggles and contradictions in the man – a womaniser with “a core of cold iron” – with a wife and mistress; scared that he has the scientific ability “to murder every last soul on the planet, yet at the same time a leader who expects to be followed. And indeed he is the magnet that attracts a huge number of scientists to join him at Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project.

Morton-Smith creates wonderfully authentic communities and he plays up the friction between the unruly scientists and the military with their, ahem, 'military' precision at Los Alamos to terrific and rather comedic effect.

Morton-Smith’s portraits of Oppenheimer’s women are especially complex. There’s Catherine Steadman’s mercurial manic depressive Jean Tatlock, the mistress who checks in and out of his life, in her element rallying the intellectuals for the communist cause. And Thomasin Rand’s wonderfully vivid Kitty, another bright and frustrated female intellect, who leaves her previous husband to marry Oppenheimer, only to find herself reluctantly kicking her heels though not her alcohol habit through pregnancies before and during her stay at Los Alamos.

Angus Jackson directs with panache a large cast in a production that sweeps effortlessly from those cocktail parties in Berkeley to the then empty plain of Los Alamos, thanks to designer Robert Innes Hopkins, whose costumes – especially for the women – are both authentic and stunning, and the action is heightened by Grant Oldman’s exhilarating score played live by a superb six-piece band directed by Jonathan Williams, and that organic choreography by Scott Ambler.

By Judi Herman

Oppenheimer runs until Saturday 23 May. 7.30pm, 2pm (Wed/Sun only). £25-£49.50. Vaudeville Theatre, 404 Strand, WC2R 0NH. www.vaudeville-theatre.co.uk

Review: The Jew of Malta – Bracingly amoral violence on the island of Malta (circa 1565)

The different faiths are rubbing along together until politics and money get in the way and then all sides justify their actions as religious duty and malicious antisemitism provides a rationale for action. Not the Middle East today but Malta circa 1565 in Marlowe’s play, The Jew of Malta.

Here Malta is ruled by the Knights of St John (Knights Hospitaller) under Governor Ferneze, ostensibly as an outpost against the Ottoman Turks, although Ferneze is happy to pay the Turks protection money not to be invaded by them. Barabas is the richest merchant in the region but Ferneze plunders his fortune to pay off the threatening Ottomans. The Christian Knights justify taking his money – as a Jew, Barabas is cursed and sinful. He is understandably indignant: “What, bring you Scripture to confirm your wrongs? Preach me not out of my possessions.”

This is evidently a revenge tragedy – the dominant motive is revenge, here for a series of very real injuries. But Marlowe’s play goes beyond revenge, satirising religious hypocrisy, statesmanship and the human condition. We know where Marlowe stands when the Prologue, in the person of Machievel(li) says, “I, Machievel, count religion but a childish toy. 
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” No one individual or community’s stupidity or vices are spared Marlowe’s ridicule and criticism in what might be the earliest film noir script.

Because this injustice is the trigger for Barabas to embark on a road to hell paved with anything but good intentions. Nobody – Christian, Turk, or even Jew – is safe from his increasingly bloody revenge, especially once he finds a kindred spirit in a newly-purchased slave Ithamore, and together they revel in ever more ingenious methods of murder and even mass slaughter.

At first sight, Marlowe’s play, with its eponymous anti-hero Barabas (whose namesake is the criminal released by Pilate instead of Jesus, at the behest of a Jewish mob according to the Christian Gospels), looks even more uncomfortable viewing for a Jewish audience than The Merchant of Venice. And it seems like a worryingly timely revival in the light of recent antisemitism. But 16th-century Malta is a bear pit where Turks and Christians fight indiscriminately and Marlowe allows Barabas to have the stage to himself to confide in his audience before they get to meet any of the island’s other amoral schemers (including a brace of villainous friars) who are, after all, after his money – or his fair daughter Abigail. And even before Barabas appears, his gleeful Machiavellian plotting comes with the endorsement of Machiavelli himself in that prologue.

Director Justin Audibert’s exhilarating revival points up Marlowe’s vicious humour and intelligence with Jasper Britton’s ruthless Jew as its poster boy. It has all the colour and sweep of a Renaissance painting, thanks to designer Lily Arnold’s glorious vision. Her staging is simple – marble-like steps sweep down from an upper level to the lower thrust stage which has as its focus a trough of water that proves wonderfully useful. And she fills the space with an entrancing palette of colour on costumes that swirl around the place, enhancing Lucy Cullingford’s choreography and in their turn enhanced by Oliver Fenwick’s lighting.

Audibert’s cast clearly enjoy creating equally colourful characters, led by Britton’s frighteningly practical and fearsomely intelligent Barabas, and Lanre Malaolu’s gleeful Ithamore, revelling in his promotion to partner in crime. Geoffrey Freshwater and Matthew Kelly, as those two wicked friars, make as gleeful a pair of plotters as any on the Renaissance stage. There’s attractively seductive work from Beth Cordingley’s avaricious courtesan, and Catrin Stewart makes a feisty Abigail, hand in glove with her father until… Well, that would telling, you’ll have to go and see it to find out!

The terrifc ad hoc klezmer band has added value for those in the know. The pre-show music is traditional wedding fare, ‘Chosen Kallah Mazel Tov’ ('Good Luck to Groom and Bride') and the show opens with another Jewish wedding staple – Barabas leads the cast singing ‘Erev Shel Shoshanim’ ('Evening of Roses') from the Song of Songs, in the popular setting by Yosef Harar and Moshe Dor (timed well for the production’s early April opening as it is part of the Passover Service too). And throughout the show Gareth Ellis’s musicians bring their own colour to the action, thanks also to Jonathan Girling’s original music.

Does it all leave a bad taste in the mouth though, as the action reaches its apocalyptic climax? By that time, everyone has behaved badly and Barabas is not the only one to face retribution. So however Marlowe’s contemporaries reacted, modern audiences are no more likely to burst into gleeful laughter than they would at the climax of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

By Judi Herman

The Jew of Malta runs until Tuesday 8 September. 7.30pm & 1.30pm. £5-£45. Swan Theatre, Straford-On-Avon CV37 7LS; 084 4800 1110. www.rsc.org.uk

Man of the Moment: JR reader Paul B Cohen writes about receiving the prestigious Moment Magazine short story award

It is Erev Rosh Hashana, and within an hour we will have 15 people at dinner. My wife, Deborah, is assured and organised, so there’s no frenzy in our household. Until, that is, just before logging off for the evening I received an email any writer would love.

It had been nine months of gestation for the results of Moment Magazine’s Jewish short story competition to emerge, and I’d been impatient to hear how I’d done. I didn't think my tale, Lecha Dodi, was going to win the competition. Though my great friend Rabbi Lewis Warshauer, who lives in New York, said that my story was “perfect” for Moment, which is a long-established journal of Jewish culture, politics and lifestyle.

Lewis had been right: my story had fitted and I was the first place winner of the 2014 Short Story Contest.

One of the books I cherish is James A Michener’s The Source, with a favourite chapter being 'The Saintly Men of Safed'. Michener brilliantly evokes the Kabbalists in that northern, hilltop city who went out in the fields to greet the Sabbath Queen. One of their number was Alkabetz, who penned the transcendent Lecha Dodi Friday night song. I had always wanted to do something with the notion of worshippers walking into the fields, and began writing my contest entry in the middle of December 2013 with this in mind. The deadline was the last day of the year.

I had been to Safed as a teenager. I remember its ancient streets; I can still picture the duck egg blue of synagogue walls – that colour being one to ward off evil.

As I wrote, I also researched the city online, looking at mikvahs (ritual baths), and came up with a central character, Rabbi Mordechai David, who used one particular mikvah before Shabbat, as some pious men do.

Unbidden, the image of a young woman, running across the male worshippers’ line of vision, inserted itself into my creative consciousness. My story coalesced: it would be about the vision of Miriam Levi, running heedlessly, ecstatically, in the fields. The men would wonder: "is that truly Miriam, and if so, why is she disturbing men at prayer?" Rabbi Davide tries to find out.

I arrived to a snowy New York and headed out with Lewis. New York’s 5th Avenue was ablaze with festive lights, throngs of shoppers, and ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center.

I was invigorated by the prospect of meeting the novelists scheduled for the awards ceremony the following evening. Sadly, Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic and The Museum of Extraordinary Things, who had been the contest judge and had written thrilling words of praise for my story, was forced to cancel her appearance. Anita Diamant, of The Red Tent fame, would be appearing alongside novelist and academic Dara Horn.

At a dinner before the ceremony I was pleased to meet Danielle Leshaw, a rabbi and writer who had been placed second in the contest, and Courtney Sender, the third place winner. The conversation was all books and being Jewish.

At the ceremony, held at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side I read an extract from Lecha Dodi. The stage was then given over to a conversation between Anita and Dara. Their discourse was engaging and humorous.

I left New York on Saturday night, following a Shabbat morning at Habonim, a welcoming Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side. During my final New York hours, we enjoyed a bracing stroll in Central Park.

Back in England, my life has resumed, but I continue to write and submit short stories. I hope that in a future issue of Jewish Renaissance, you’ll be able to read about Tales of Freedom, my novel of storytelling and resistance, set in Prague and Poland in World War II, and ending up in the land of Israel.

By Paul B Cohen

Paul’s story Lecha Dodi can be read online at Moment Magazine. 

Magical Jewish Morocco: A report from Eveleen Habib, one of JR’s Purim tour members

JR Tour - Morocco - Cemetery - Joan 2

Twenty-six tired yet exhilarated travellers sat down together for supper in a Riad in Marrakech – it was the last night of a wonderful trip and they all wanted to spend that evening together, despite the opportunity to sample the night life in this north African town. How well our group, mainly strangers, had grown to like one another and enjoy the times we spent discussing the day’s activities.

The trip focussed on the Jewish Morocco that still remains – the majority of the community having left in 1948 and 1967. Our guide, Rafi El Maleh, was an important part of this well-organised trip. We learned so much about the history, politics and current situation of both the Jewish and Arab population. There seemed to be nothing he did not know. We laughed at the number of palaces owned by the king (whom Rafi had met more than once in the course of his work on Jewish heritage) and we were moved by so many of his stories about individuals he knew and helped. We admired the research, hard work and passion he had devoted to collecting and conserving Jewish artefacts and whole synagogues, throughout the country of his birth.

There was never a dull moment and we drank in every bit of information that he gave us, it might have been about the extraordinary cemetery we visited in the Fes Mellah (pictured above), or one of the many synagogues that we visited. There were once 11 in the Mellah of Meknes and we met one of the last Jews who still prays in this Imperial City. We visited the royal stables and granary, once home to 15,000 Arabian horses, built by Moulay Ismail, who lived in magnificence but subjected his city to terror. We walked, climbed, and sometimes struggled with, the cobbled narrow streets and the traffic, especially in Marrakech where Rafi literally stopped the traffic for us to cross the roads. In Volubilis the hardier individuals climbed in the sun up a steep road to see the remarkably well-preserved Roman city whilst the others enjoyed mint tea in the small café below.

JR Tour - Morocco - Volubilis arch JL

Volubilis arch

The first two evenings we ate in the attractive Jewish Maimonide club in Fes and enjoyed couscous with meat, vegetables, chicken and an array of the popular and delicious cooked salads in small dishes set out in front of us.  The food in general was lavish and good; when not eating kosher food, we were always able to eat fish and vegetarian food so everyone’s needs were met.

JR Tour - Morocco - KT.Dinner Fez, March 1st

One special experience was meeting four young Moroccan Muslims, founders  of the Mimouna Association, set up to tell their contemporaries about the Jewish heritage of their country that few knew anything about. We ate together at a restaurant on the coast in Rabat and had the opportunity of conversing with them individually. They spoke about their initiatives; organising Hebrew lessons and days of Jewish culture; running the first Holocaust Conference in the Arab world and paying a group visit to Israel. We were impressed by their enthusiasm and eloquence. It seemed as if they are set to be among their country’s elite. It will be a great boost to interfaith relations if they achieve this.

JR Tour - Morocco - Laziza table

With Laziza Dalil of The Mimouna Society

We visited so many places, each one a treat – the lavish mausoleum built to honour King Mohammed V in Rabat; its Kasbah where we had Moroccan tea and almond cookies;  Casablanca’s Jewish Museum with its rich display of Moroccan Jewish artefacts, and its Jewish quarter with kosher bakers, the street of seven shuls and the beautiful Beth el Synagogue.

JR Tour - Morocco - Rafi and Haman's eye - Malcolm

 Rafi with Haman's eye bread

And Purim: celebrated differently but enjoyably. Not as noisy in synagogue as I am used to, but the same notes and words read out to remind us of the near-destruction of the Jewish people – appropriate in an Arab country, albeit one currently well-disposed to its small Jewish population. The group joined the local community in unending dinner and entertainment. We threw ourselves into the atmosphere of the occasion – fascinated by the bread with hard boiled eggs, representing Haman’s eyes, baked inside (pictured above).

JR Tour - Morocco - Purim table - Joan

Purim party

And then the final days in Marrakech where we stayed in the Ksar Anika Riad in the aptly named Rue des Juifs, an oasis of quiet and beauty with a pool in the courtyard and hanging plants. We walked to see the Bahai Palace and in the medina visited a herbalist with his potions, spices and cures for everything. Then to prepare for Shabbat and a wonderful long table set out as if for a wedding with delicious food cooked by Madame Ohayon, wife of Isaac Ohayon who had restored, and was cantor for, the Mellah synagogue some of us visited the next morning.  After a Moroccan cholent lunch we visited the Majorelle Gardens, once owned by Yves St Laurent and then gifted to the town for the benefit of those who love quiet, gardens and water – truly lovely.

JR Tour - Morocco - Last lunch at Ksar Anika - JL

Last lunch at Ksar Anika

And there was much else in this wonderful trip, well-planned, delightful company, all our needs considered. I cannot wait to book another tour with Jewish Renaissance.

By Eveleen Habib

Visit the JR website to see the Magical Jewish Morocco 2016 tour itinerary.

Violinist Irmina Trynkos dazzles at the second JR salon

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

A packed crowd of around 60 people attended the second JR salon event this week at Lauderdale House in Highgate. They were there to hear the virtuoso talents of violinist Irmina Trynkos, as well as the sparkling sounds of pianist Marco Fatichenti. And they weren’t disappointed.

Dressed in a jewelled, emerald green evening gown, Irmina treated the audience to a programme full of energy and passion. Irmina opened proceedings with the sweeping Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Minor No.3 Op.108, by Johannes Brahms, followed by a piece by the relatively unknown Polish-German Jewish composer Ignatz Waghalter – his Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Minor Op.5.

Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem Nigun and George Gershwin’s sprightly Prelude No.1 followed, as well as the theme by John Williams from Shindler’s List, which Irmina played in melancholy and moving style. The concert ended with the quirky gypsy sounds of Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane, played with terrific speed and verve by both violinist and pianist.

The music was interspersed with some background to the composers provided by the warm and engaging broadcaster Rodney Greenberg, who was the presenter for the evening. He and Irmina took time to discuss Waghalter's farewell – and return – to Germany, his fall from the public consciousness and how he made the wrong move of staying in New York rather than LA, as he might have better developed his career in Hollywood. She has taken on the task of reviving his little known works, along with other ‘forgotten’ composers.

The music was followed by drinks and canapés. The elegant, yet intimate, surrounds of Lauderdale House provided the perfect backdrop for the event and we hope to continue our salon series soon.

To find out more about Irmina Trynkos, read our article about her.

By Rebecca Taylor

Photos © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

JR Salon, 10/03/14 © Charlotte Mayhew

Visit facebook.com/JewishRenaissance for more photos.